According to AI agents this is a surprisingly high-volume search query. It’s the same AI agent that tells me “people don’t actively Google ‘Buddhist framework for procrastination’”. So do people have interest in this or not? Make up your mind, AI agent!
Jokes aside, I know this is a crucial question that everybody wrestles with at least once in their lifetime. I spent a long time in my own life trying to solve this piece of the puzzle, and I know what I’m about to tell you is a fairly radical idea: so brace yourself and read on.
Suffering Is Solved
What you have to understand first is, suffering is a solved problem. Suffering has always been a solved problem because in reality outside of our perceived experience of the world, there is no tangible, truthful reason to suffer.
Many people in the past have realized this truth, and we call these people who have liberated themselves from the idea of suffering many things. A prophet, an enlightened one, and importantly to me: a Buddha.
People commonly understand the Buddha as the name of the demi-god entity who was born as Gauthama Siddhartha, but actually the term Buddha is the Sanskrit term for “enlightened person”. Gauthama Siddhartha realized the absence of reasons to suffer and he spent his entire life teaching other people to awaken to this truth.
I am not telling you this so I can convert you to a religion that promises you a good afterlife. Happiness is available to you right now without changing anything about your life. This needs to be the fundamental backbone of all of our conversations going forward. Otherwise we keep falling into pessimism and more importantly value absolutism, which we’ll talk about next.
Value Absolutism
With the belief (or assumption) that life itself is inherently free of reasons to suffer, we can’t help but ask: then why DO we suffer? The answer has to do with how we perceive good and bad.
Everybody wants to live a good life. Everybody wants to experience good things. Everybody wants to be a good person.
In our pursuit of good, we have 2 implicit assumptions that governs all of our actions:
1. There exists an absolute definition of what is “good”
2. We know what is “good” for us
It rarely crosses our minds, the idea that we might be wrong about what good is and what it means for us. When I have a double fudge brownie every single meal as a dessert it feels GREAT to my tongue, but is it good for my health?
When I become extremely rich after burning 2 years of all-nighters at my work, is that good? I drive my kids to motivation and success so they can have a future that I couldn’t even dream of, is it good for them?
The Cyclical Nature of Suffering
This makes one wonder: even a broken clock is right twice a day. So wouldn’t we occasionally have moments where we're living right, living well? We definitely do, and that’s where the next cycle of suffering ironically begins.
When we chase good, we can’t really be satisfied and happy; how can we, when we don’t have our desired good yet? The good/bad binary dictates that as long as I’m not in the good state, I’m in the bad state.
Et voila! We arrive at the good state, and things feel great for a bit. But what inevitably happens? Two things happen:
1. The satisfactory state becomes the new baseline state, so what’s initially good feels like the usual bad state.
2. Even though we are unsatisfied again with the current state, we fear losing what we gained so far.
These two psychological phenomena have amazing chemistry with each other and it keeps on spinning the Wheel of Suffering.
Why is life hard? Because we have such rigid ideas about what good is, and we define our lives by the pursuit of what good is. Buddhist happiness is not excitement or stimulation. Buddhist happiness is simply not suffering.
Complete freedom from suffering is not an ideal that you need to work towards for your next incarnation. It is possible in this lifetime and must be believed and practiced as such. You can start with baby steps of Buddhist happiness. Maybe you won’t be fully, 100% free from all of your suffering by the end of today. But given your current suffering, what is the “good” ideal you are striving for right now? And how can you find your desired end result of “good”, right here and right now, without changing anything?