Why Do People Choose to Suffer?

Suffering is often looked at as an inevitable part of life, we all expect to a certain degree to suffer at some point in our lives. While there are circumstances where this is inevitable, there are other circumstances where people seem to consciously or unconsciously choose to suffer. In this day an age where information has never been so prevalent, where it takes just a click to get to a YouTube video which will teach you how to become a millionaire or learn anything you could possibly want. It begs the question of why people are still suffering. I understand that a person who doesn’t have much education would go through a lot of troubles because of their limited knowledge and ability to learn. But it's something different when you have grown men and women who’ve been through university having the same struggles. In this article, I’ll explore some reasons why.

Ignorance

As it is often said,

if you don’t know better, you can’t do better,

When you know better, you do better.

When a person decides to suffer, it might simply be because they don’t know any better. They were never taught to do better than what they are currently doing, so they view their suffering as the only way to go. Lack of education plays a significant role in holding back people from thriving. If you don’t teach a person to use a spoon, they’ll keep using their hands thinking its the best way, but it really is just the only way they know. Believe it or not, there are many people who can’t even dream of what their lives would be without suffering. They just assume it is a part of their lives and live with it without complaining to a point where it has become religion for them. One thing education does is to show us the possibilities which lie ahead of us and to open our potential to reach them. Without education a person might not even know what a life without suffering is, let alone get there.

A person with a limited education can only think of very simple things to do and can only do them as much as it does not push his intellect too far. But since we live in a competitive and complex world, such a limited mindset can only take you so far.

Culture & Environment

Many cultures romanticize suffering, enduring hardship is seen as a rite of passage, to build character and demonstrate resilience. You just have to take a look at some genres of music like rap, you’ll see millionaires singing melodically about their past sufferings and a bunch of others making it sound cool. Also, the environment you find yourself in can trap you in this mindset where you think suffering is the norm, and you can’t do better.

Sometimes just by changing your neighborhood can change your outlook on the world totally. You can imagine a family where nobody even believes they can be a millionaire one day. If you can’t even imagine yourself being something, how can you make that happen? When you are stuck in such a culture, you never seek to do more than everybody else, because they will be quick to chastise you. So your main focus is to do just well enough to fit in, and you might even self sabotage just to stay at the same level. This is also the main reason why when you start doing well financially, you have to change your circle, because you can no longer relate to those people.

Access to resources

Not all the reasons are of a person’s choosing, in every society suffering often comes as a result of a lack of access to education, healthcare and financial resources. Without these tools, it's harder to not suffer, so I won’t sit here and make it sound like everybody just decides to suffer willfully. There exist also systemic barriers which hold back people such as; discrimination, tribalism, corruption, or inadequate social safety nets which make it even harder to escape from suffering. That little kid in that remote village who doesn’t even have a school to go to, he didn’t choose to suffer, but you at the center of a metropolitan city surrounded by schools and libraries, you are certainly making that choice.

Conclusion

The reason people choose to suffer are varied, while some decisions come from the environment and social ties a person has, others are a result of systemic barriers that restrict access to opportunities. I just listed a few of those reasons but there are definitely many more and from my experience, it isn’t the fault of a person their way of thinking, they are much more a product of their environment and the education their parents gave them.

Thanks for reading ☺️

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