Dark Horse Arts and Sciences

“Pain is certain. Suffering is optional.”

                                       – Siddhartha Gautama

Life is fundamentally suffering; there’s nothing but misery and agony everywhere you go; everything you see and in everyday you wake up. There’s nothing but absolute hollowness and lamentation and loathing in each and every human being residing in this absurd and abstract creation. It may all sound really pessimistic, gloomy and bleak, but it’s the absolute truth; a truth that we have to shallow like a tasteless medicine tablet; a truth that we have to fit in our minds despite its bleak nature. 

Buddhism acts on the same principle. But it doesn’t try to compel any philosophical or religious belief or faith on any one’s minds by saying all this; instead it lets you decide how you want to take all these ideas and create your own comprehension of the jarring reality that the world is. 

Buddha or “The Enlightened One” through sheer meditation and concentration acquired the fundamental truth of reality; that life is fundamentally suffering. There is pain and agony everywhere because of human beings’ internal desires to achieve more and more in their lives. Desire or Ichha is the predominant reason behind all the despair and desolation. The fact that a man doesn’t get satisfied with what he has and keeps marching on towards his or her next goal, creates that restless and endless loop of the same process of grief and despondency over and over again. Even if he attains his long held desire, he’ll soon begin chasing after something new that will give him more. That exact feeling of achieving more and more only leads to all the internal suffering and suffocation.

Pain is certain and suffering is optional. It means the pain will always be there; within you, around you and with you; but how we deal with that pain will measure the amount of suffering we will have. Everyone is stuck in their own prisons of absolute sorrow and dejection, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any way out of this. 

The fact that life is meaningless and absurd gives us that freedom to choose whatever we want to do without doing too much overthinking. If there’s no purpose or meaning to anything at all, then why wasting time overthinking about all the unnecessary and stupid stuff? But again, this is very easy to say to oneself that there’s no point overthinking as it’s not that easy to practise in real life scenarios. This kind of philosophy is called optimistic nihilism. To find meaning amidst the meaninglessness; to find some ray of hope in the hopelessness of it all is something that we should strive for. We shouldn’t be completely optimistic that we start ignoring the grinding and tyrannical reality; nor should we be too pessimistic in our approach to our lives that we completely forget that there is a life to live and enjoy for; instead we should be something in between. Neither optimistic, nor pessimistic. We should be aware of whatever’s going around us, and also be stoic and non-reactive to those circumstances so that they don’t affect us internally. We should realize that there is pain and suffering everywhere; but not overthink about it too much as it would eventually encounter us some day in the future; there’s no doubt that. 

We should find our own purpose and meaning in the absurdity and abstraction of it all; but also not get depressed and all for not having one. We should be what we want to be instead of overthinking what we can be. We shouldn’t get trapped in the toxic world of motivational speeches or hustle culture which always motivates us to do something all the time, creating a sense of depression and loneliness more and more within us. We shouldn’t worry about death either as it’s inevitable and always present there in front of us; lurking around us as if on any given chance, it will snatch away everything we ever had.