Love Your Suffering

Lately, conversations with friends have increasingly turned to changing jobs. It's a part of life that feels deeply human, and these talks feel very familiar to me. As we go about our work and our lives each day, worries arise from all sorts of questions. How should we deal with them? Honestly, I'd like some kind of manual. Is there a silver bullet that solves our worries in one shot?

First, a basic premise: this is not, as the title might suggest, a call to live by harsh, drill-style discipline. I also know, of course, that there are people born into different circumstances from mine. I only know what lies within the range of the life I have lived, so please forgive me if I am careless in that regard. And forgive me, too, knowing that there is endless room to improve these thoughts.

Having lived a quarter of a century, there is something I have come to feel recently: "In most respects, I and others are the same." In a world that increasingly values diversity, the existence of the "self (the individual)" inevitably gets emphasized, and I feel that this, in a sense, amplifies our suffering.

Because it means we have to work hard to put ourselves forward.

It is no exaggeration to say we have entered an age in which we must find ourselves. In other words, an age in which individuality is demanded of us by force.

In Michael Ende's book Momo, he writes:

And so the children forgot something else. Something else, namely, finding things fun, getting absorbed, and dreaming. Little by little, the children began to look like small time-savers. They did what they were ordered to do, reluctantly, without any sign of enjoyment, sulking. And when they were told they could do whatever they liked, they had no idea at all what to do.

There are many cases in which being forced makes us unable to perceive things correctly.

I myself have felt something off about the phrase "live true to yourself" ever since university. So let me ask the opposite: to what extent are I and others actually different beings?

My cohort is in its second or third year of working life, and apparently this is the time people start thinking about changing jobs. Talking with various friends, I found that although our industries and social circles differ, it seems we are all worrying about the same thing.

It's not a worry tied to one particular point in time, "because it's about changing jobs," but a linear worry that has been there all along. It's just that, at times that look like major turning points, it becomes clearly visible and appears before us as reality.

These worries arise from questions like these: "What do I want to do?" "Am I okay as I am?" "What is it that I really want to do?" "How can I be happy?" "What is it that I'm looking for?"

They are eternal questions that everyone chases, heavy questions that hurt every time you recall them. Self-help books seem to contain the answers, and reading them brings relief. When advising someone else, the answers come easily.

But when it comes to yourself, you suddenly know nothing.

I can't tell you how much easier it would be if we could answer right away. Some people go on what is called a "journey to find themselves," but the self is always right here.

I think most people carry the same suffering. That is why I feel that "in most respects, I and others are the same." Strictly speaking, we differ in appearance, thinking, values, work, talents and so on. Looked at concretely, that is, from a micro perspective versus a macro perspective, things look different. But when I think that our suffering is the same, I feel a strange sense of kinship.

When thought through to the end, this suffering may come down to a single question: "Why was I born into this world?"

There is one way of thinking that I believe comes close to the truth. It is a passage from Man's Search for Meaning, the account of life in the Nazi concentration camps published in 1946.

Its author, Viktor Emil Frankl, says:

What is needed here is to turn the question of the meaning of life around by a hundred and eighty degrees. We must learn, and teach those in despair, that what matters is not what we expect from life, but rather, solely, what life expects from us. To use philosophical terms, a Copernican revolution is needed: it is high time we stopped asking about the meaning of life and realized that it is we ourselves who stand before the question. Life questions us every day, every hour. We are pressed to answer its question. The right answer is given not by brooding or by playing with words, but solely by action, by the proper attitude. To live, then, is nothing other than to take on the duty of answering rightly the questions life asks, the duty of fulfilling the tasks life sets each of us, the duty of meeting the demands of each hour.

The paradigm shift, "I am not the one who asks; I am the one being questioned by life," gives rise to metacognition. Since we are beings questioned by life, all we can do is give answers in each situation as it comes; we are not the ones who ask, "What is life?"

To begin with, these questions have no absolute answer (solution). For example, to the question "What do I really want to do?" there is no absolute answer like the solution to a math problem.

That is exactly why we call this "worry" (nayami), which shares its root with suffering (kunō). No matter how much you think about it, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. There is no answer. I have no intention of denying the journey to find oneself, but if you seek an answer from it, you will end up facing a sad reality.

I once traveled alone in search of an answer, but the one who came home was the same self as before. If that was how it would be, I would have been better off not thinking about anything while traveling and just enjoying each place and moment; at least that would have stayed in my memory. (And so, for me, the journey to find myself became a dull trip that I barely remember.) Yes, what matters is the moment.

Kazuto Ataka, at the very beginning of Issue kara Hajimeyo (Start with the Issue), pinpoints the difference between "thinking" and "worrying."

"What is the difference between 'thinking' and 'worrying'?" I often ask young people this. How would you answer? The difference between the two, as I see it, is this:
"Worrying" = "pretending to think" on the premise that "no answer will come out"
"Thinking" = constructively building up your thoughts on the premise that "an answer will come out"
These two look alike, but they are actually completely different things.

Note that worrying is by no means a bad thing. But it would be better to stop convincing yourself that you are "thinking" when the question is one you are "worrying" over.

If you blindly believe that an absolute solution exists and force one out, a gap will begin to open up within you hours, days, months or years later. Thought is a flow, and we ourselves are also in that flow.

However hard you think, it is a worry, and so there is no absolute solution. The one choice we can make is to worry while knowing that a worry is a worry. And the other choice is, when questioned, to put forward with everything we have a momentary answer (the answer we feel in that moment).

Of course, I suspect there will be few answers you are satisfied with. Because they are momentary answers, even the same question may get a different answer today than tomorrow. You may also feel the contradictions within yourself. But that, too, is part of worrying.

Yes, in the end, all we can do is respond moment by moment. Perhaps that is what it means to "live."

The question "What is it that I'm looking for?" is one I will probably have to face for decades to come, and I will probably never be able to answer it perfectly. If I find words that ring true, that's good in its own way, but there may also be times when I don't.

But we must not forget that we are, to begin with, beings to whom such questions are always being posed, one-sidedly.

So it is easy to imagine that unless we respond to the questions, we will sink deeper into the mire. Suffering itself is not something we can ever eliminate.

To answer the questions is, in other words, to accept suffering. If we do not answer, all we can do is worry. Then what should we do? This world is impermanent, and it is suffering. In that case, why not just love our suffering? That is the conclusion I came to.