Transcending the Human Dependency on Suffering: Keepin’ it 100 with Death

When asked about the true essence to life, many of us immediately think about our families, friends, and doing the things that make us who we are and who we strive to become.

So you can imagine, then, the indignation that might erupt when told that none of that really exists.

In yesterday’s discussion, we as a class entertained the idea that the things we consider to be fundamental truths of life are nothing more than myths we use to cope with the randomness and explainable nature of suffering and death. These supposed myths, which included everything from love to religion, are very clearly bonded to our human emotions, and dismissing them as illusions used to compensate for anguish resulted in an understandable amount of disagreement.

But before dismissing this theory, allow us to take a step back and consider it in a different light. Lives are finite. Whether or not we choose to accept our own mortality and our guaranteed suffering as a fundamental truth of life is a different situation. Once we accept these things as truths, we can better analyze these things that we consider to be the “true” essences of life and see them for what they really are.

To say that the things we hold dear are simply distractions from the pain we all inevitably encounter is not necessarily a bad thing. It does not imply that the things that make us who we are do not matter at all; the fact that pleasure exists in a world where natural tragedy goes unexplained is a testament to this. We as humans can choose to make light of negative situations, just like we can choose to accept our own mortality and suffering.

Think of a funeral; some cultures view it as a time of mourning while other cultures use it as a time to celebrate the full life of a loved one. This is an apt analogy for this exercise. The sooner we choose to wholeheartedly accept what we consider meaning to be a distraction from pain, the sooner we can aptly appreciate what makes us who we are.