Suffering and the Pursuit of Virtue
How the hardships of life provide the building blocks for a virtuous character
Each month, we tackle a different theme on how to live what the ancient philosophers called the “good life”—a life in the pursuit of becoming the best version of oneself.
For the month of March, we’ve been focusing on the theme of suffering and its role in everyday existence. You can find links to the series at the bottom of this article.
Quick Update:
Hi all, based on your feedback, for the next month I am going to perform a trial by sending just our Monday Meditations and Friday Sweet Bites emails.
For those who enjoyed Wednesday Wisdoms, you can still expect at least one weekly post via Substack Notes.
Stay tuned as I will have a follow-up poll after this trial to determine our email frequency and what works best for our growing community!
This Week at a Glance:
This week we closeout our exploration of suffering by diving into the nature of suffering and the power of choosing the pursuit of virtue during such times.
By the time you finish this meditation, you’ll learn:
🍭 How suffering is both an individual and universal burden that connects us to others;
🍬 How we can choose the meaning of the suffering we must experience;
🍫 What we can do during suffering to still build a strong moral character.
“For most of us, there is nothing intrinsically noble about suffering. Just as failure is sometimes just failure (and not your path to becoming the next Steve Jobs), suffering is sometimes just destructive, to be exited or medicated as quickly as possible… But some people can connect their suffering to some greater design. They place their suffering in solidarity with all the others who have suffered. These people are clearly ennobled by it. It is not the suffering itself that makes all the difference, but the way it is experienced.”
David Brooks
The Road to Character
We wish to avoid suffering whenever possible. But no matter how hard we try, suffering does and will find us.
We lose loved ones. We lose jobs. We go hungry some nights. We struggle to find a place to live. We pursue a dream only to have it end in an instant.
Life itself is filled with suffering around every corner.
But within that suffering we have a choice. We can choose to sit in the suffering, allow the world to keep us on the ground, to push us against our will, or we can harness our will and fight back by leaning into virtue.
Suffering in and of itself holds no meaning. It is just the pain of being alive. But we have the power to apply meaning to the suffering, to dictate what our struggle is about.
And it is through this ability that we control the narrative of our lives.
“Suffering is not always all bad for all people,” writes the psychologist Jonathan Haidt in his book The Happiness Hypothesis. “There is usually some good mixed in with the bad, and those who find it have found something precious: a key to moral and spiritual development.”
Suffering is not a new concept to human existence. The scenario of the day may be updated, the direct day-to-day existence may look different, but the pain from suffering is the same as it has always been for humans. To lose a loved one, to suffer within the existence of survival, these hark back to the beginning of time.
So on one hand, suffering seems unique to ourselves in the present, but pull back from ourselves and we can easily see and come to understand that the pain that comes from suffering, any type of suffering really, has been with humans for a long time.
An organism does not exist within this world without having experienced some form of suffering, and it is through this bond, through our shared communion of suffering, that we are embraced and understood.
David Brooks writes in The Road to Character that suffering opens us up to the hidden pain of the world, of being alive.
“It exposes frightening experiences that had been repressed, shameful wrongs that had been committed. It spurs some people to painfully and carefully examine the basement of their own soul. But it also presents the pleasurable sensation that one is getting closer to the truth.”
During suffering’s hold, we do not think about “getting closer to truth.” We do not care about the examination of our soul. We simply sit with a gaping hole within us.
But this does not have to be. As Brooks continues:
“The pleasure in suffering is that you feel you are getting beneath the superficial and approaching the fundamental. It creates what modern psychologists call "depressive realism," an ability to see things exactly the way they are. It shatters the comforting rationalizations and pat narratives we tell about ourselves as part of our way of simplifying ourselves for the world.”
One does not just see the world around them and understand it. And you cannot experience the world from behind a screen.
Today, we’ve come to hold a false sense of the world, one in which we believe we can easily understand life because we’ve seen videos of others’ experiences on Facebook or TikTok.
We’ve come to believe we can be keyboard warriors, typing away ferociously to a video of someone in a given situation, writing how they responded wrong—how if we were in that situation, it would have been handled so much better.
We would have acted differently. We would have been better than that person. We would have fought harder. Yelled more. Done more damage. We’re superior to these small people on the screen.
Only we forget one crucial aspect of life—that life is built by living, by experience. And without experience, without going out and encountering situations and being forced into conflict, being forced to work a job we don’t like, being forced to deal with road rage, or an obnoxious customer, or a line of 20 people at the super market because only one teller is ringing people up, without actually having to go into the world and experience these things, we cannot truly begin to understand the world.
And like it or not, we cannot understand the world, the truths of the world, without experiencing the suffering within it.
Life is filled with suffering. No amount of hiding behind a keyboard and grandstanding is going to truly protect you from it. Like it or not, eventually you will have to experience the real world. You will have to experience the pain it holds.
But again, when we’re in the suffering, we hold a choice—we can sit with it or we can use it and turn toward virtue while dealing with the situation. This here is where we learn to embrace the suffering as Seneca or Nietzsche might say, the amor fati of our lives. It is here where we come to the virtues of our lives and learn to embrace them during the tough times.
By leaning into virtue, we better allow ourselves not only to live a better life, but to live a life of meaning that builds a more moral character who can take on the world.
Courage to turn toward the trials that stand before us, the hills we must climb, the suffering within ourselves we must endure. To embrace the challenge and not back down from it, regardless of how scared we may be.
To spread kindness, even in the most painful of times because we have the knowledge of what it is to not just be on the other end of kindness, but because we know what it is like to be on the side of suffering.
To take control of our senses, to know what and where to put our attention and focus, to blockout the pleasures calling to us in an effort of avoiding the suffering, the inner voice telling us to quit and give up, to admit defeat.
Wisdom to know what needs to be done to overcome the suffering, to know what resources or support may be needed, to analyze and understand what led to the moment and therefore what is needed to overcome it.
Temperance to resist the pull of pleasure and the deceit of quitting.
Perseverance to keep going when times get tough, to know what our inner strength really holds, to be able to see deeper within ourselves than others can, and therefore bring forth what we hold within.
Accountability to take ownership of our situation and therefore build a belief of control that we can and will overcome the moment and be better for it.
The acceptance to know and understand what is and is not within our control. The acceptance of what led to the suffering and the acknowledgment to turn our attention to a solution rather than do nothing.
We’re provided a very unique opportunity with the life we have—we’re alive, a miracle in and of itself. As playwright and writer Samuel Beckett once stated:
"One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second... Birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.”
Between our birth and death there is a space—in the grand scheme of the universe, a microcosm of a second. And yet in that space, in that second, our lives reside.
Within that space we’re provided the opportunity to lean into the things that make humans great, we’re able to lean into virtues that build a moral character.
That space seems small at times, and at others, extremely large, but regardless, that space is our lives, and a lot happens during that time.
We are formed in the suffering we encounter. We decide how we will respond. And it is in this response that we form not only who we are, but who we want to be.
So we’ve got one life to live and every moment provides us an ability to decide which type of life we want to live. We cannot control whether or not we will suffer in life, but we can decide what we will do when the suffering arrives, and how we will overcome it.
3-Bullet Summary:
While we all must suffer in the world, it is up to us to decide what that suffering will mean to the grand scheme of our lives;
By leaning into virtue during times of suffering, we better strengthen are character and infuse control and choice into the suffering;
Life must be lived and experienced and no amount of hiding behind a screen can protect us from the world, only living through it can we learn to overcome it.
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For the month of March, we’ve been focusing on the theme of suffering through our Monday Meditations (MM), Wednesday Wisdoms (WW), and Friday Sweet Bites (SB).
Here are the topics covered so far if you wish to catch up:
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Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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