Life Is Suffering

The Buddha sat under a tree for 49 days and came back with bad news: life is suffering. Birth is suffering. Illness is suffering. Death is suffering. Getting what you want is suffering. Not getting what you want is suffering. Even the pleasant things contain suffering because they end.

This wasn't pessimism. It was diagnosis. The prescription that followed was more interesting: you could end suffering by changing your relationship to it. Not by eliminating pain, but by ceasing to resist it.

Two and a half millennia later, we've somehow forgotten the second part whilst obsessing over the first. Suffering is treated like a disease to be cured rather than a condition to be navigated. Entire industries promise that if you optimise hard enough, meditate correctly, achieve the right goals, life will stop hurting.

But the Buddha never said life would stop hurting. He said you could stop making it worse.