The Wrong Measure of Suffering
Many years ago, I knew a woman who had a simple explanation for almost every human problem.
Whenever somebody was hurt, disappointed, anxious, depressed, heartbroken, exhausted, or simply struggling with life, she would shrug her shoulders and say something along the lines of:
"Life is hard. Nature is cruel. If you can't handle it, that's your problem."
Sometimes she expressed it even more bluntly.
I remember sitting there listening to her and wondering whether she actually believed what she was saying or whether it was simply a habit she had developed over the years.
At the time I didn't argue with her. There was little point. People rarely abandon opinions that have accompanied them for decades. Still, her words stayed with me long after the conversation ended.
Not because I agreed with them. Because I wasn't entirely sure why they bothered me so much. Years later I think I understand.
The problem wasn't that she believed life was hard. Life is hard. Sooner or later everybody discovers that. The problem was the conclusion she drew from it. If somebody broke under pressure, became depressed, burned out, developed an addiction, or simply stopped functioning, she automatically assumed weakness. As if suffering itself were evidence of poor character. As if strong people remained untouched while weak people collapsed.
The older I get, the less convinced I am that life works that way.
Different Roads, Different Wounds
Over the years I have met people with remarkably different stories.
One person grew up in a stable family, surrounded by support, encouragement, and opportunities. Another spent childhood navigating constant conflict, criticism, and unpredictability. One lost a parent early in life. Another survived a bitter divorce that tore the family apart. Somebody else spent years battling a serious illness. Another carried memories of violence, humiliation, or neglect.
If life were fair and predictable, it should be easy to determine who ends up damaged and who doesn't. But it isn't. That is what makes human beings so difficult to understand.
I have known people who survived experiences that would probably have crushed me. Somehow they emerged with their humor intact, their optimism untouched, and enough resilience to make the rest of us look slightly lazy.
I have also known people whose lives seemed, from the outside, almost comfortable. They had supportive families, decent jobs, loving partners, and relatively ordinary problems. Yet somewhere along the way depression appeared. Or anxiety. Or burnout. Or addiction. Sometimes all of them together.
Life does not always distribute suffering according to logic.
The Competition Nobody Wins
One thing I noticed, especially when talking to people about mental health, is that many conversations quietly turn into a competition.
Someone describes a difficult childhood. Another responds with a worse one. Somebody talks about losing a parent. Another mentions surviving cancer. A third person describes years of emotional abuse.
Sooner or later it becomes a strange contest where everybody is measuring scars. As if the person with the largest wound automatically earns the right to suffer. The problem is that pain doesn't work like that.
Imagine two people breaking a leg. One falls from a bicycle. The other falls from a third-floor balcony. The second accident is objectively worse. The broken bone, however, hurts both people.
Psychological suffering seems to follow similar rules. People often compare events. The nervous system responds to experience.
Those are not always the same thing.
The Illusion of Toughness
I suspect that many of the harsh judgments people make about depression, addiction, or burnout come from a misunderstanding of toughness.
Most of us admire people who endure hardship. The person who keeps going. The person who never complains. The person who survives. Those stories are inspiring.
The problem appears when we start believing that toughness is simply a matter of choice. As if resilience were a moral virtue that some people possess and others refuse to develop. Reality seems far more complicated.
Years ago I believed that certain people were simply stronger than others. Now I am less certain.
The longer I observe people, the more I notice how much depends on timing, circumstances, biology, personality, luck, and a hundred invisible factors that nobody sees.
Sometimes a person survives ten storms and then collapses during a drizzle. Another survives the drizzle but never recovers from the storm.
Human beings are not machines. We do not all break at the same point.
The Day Everything Changes
What interests me most is not what happened before illness appears. It is what happens after.
The moment depression arrives, the quality of your childhood no longer helps much. The moment anxiety takes over your life, comparing yourself to somebody else's suffering becomes pointless. The moment addiction wraps itself around your thinking, philosophical debates about strength and weakness lose much of their value.
At that point the question is no longer: "Was my life difficult enough to justify this?"
The question becomes: "What do I do now?"
This is something many people misunderstand. When somebody develops depression or addiction, observers often start searching for causes. Sometimes they find them, sometimes they invent them. But once the illness exists, it becomes its own reality.
A person who is drowning is rarely interested in a lecture about how they ended up in the water.
They are usually more interested in reaching the shore.
Looking at People More Carefully
Perhaps that is why I have become increasingly cautious about judging other people's struggles.
The older I get, the less confidence I have in simple explanations. I have met people who should have fallen apart and didn't. I have met people who should have been fine and weren't.
I have watched strong people collapse. I have watched fragile people survive astonishing things.
Human beings refuse to fit neatly into categories. Fortunately. Otherwise life would be much easier to predict and considerably less interesting.
When I think back to that woman and her comments, I no longer feel annoyed. Mostly I feel curious.
Perhaps her view of the world helped her survive her own hardships. Perhaps she genuinely believed that toughness could solve everything. Perhaps it worked for her.
But whenever I hear somebody dismiss depression, addiction, burnout, or emotional suffering as weakness, I find myself remembering all the people I have known over the years.
The strong ones. The broken ones. The lucky ones. The unlucky ones. And the many who were all of those things at different points in their lives.
If life has taught me anything, it is that suffering does not follow rules nearly as neatly as we would like. And because of that, judging other people's pain is probably one of the easiest mistakes a person can make.
Understanding it is much harder. But also much more useful.
Comments
Post a Comment