The Anthropology of Suffering — What Your Difficulties Are Actually Asking of You

Well, hey there, my friend.

Jonathan Doyle with you once again.

Welcome aboard to the Daily Podcast.

I'm pleased you are listening.

Wherever you are in this great big world, it is an honor to serve you today.

I wanna bring you something useful.

Today we're gonna do something a little unusual.

This podcast is designed for daily encouragement, inspiration, motivation,

and guidance to you on your journey of personal growth and development.

But today, I wanna actually talk about suffering.

I wanna talk about this massive issue that is central to the human

condition that you will notice is very, very rarely discussed.

I'm beginning to work on a new book project at the moment, and one of the

things I wanna focus on is how we address difficulty, setbacks, and suffering.

Because I don't know if you agree with this, but our culture is

kind of structured to ignore the great reality of human suffering.

We, we mention it occasionally.

We, we're a very therapeutic culture, so we do talk about trauma, and

we talk about, you know, some sort of childhood stuff because I think

Freud had a massive influence on how that sort of seeped into culture.

Not saying it's all not in- unimportant, but I wanna suggest that the much

deeper conversation about suffering is kind of missing in our culture.

So what do we do when we have really difficult seasons of life?

What do we do when our life is, you know, ra- racked with problems?

No matter what you do, nothing seems to work, or things outside your control.

Illnesses, sicknesses, unexpected death that can happen.

You know, just tragedies that happen so quickly.

Something that we don't talk about.

So today I wanna talk about that with you and offer you some ideas about how

you can journey through and frame some of the difficulties in your own life.

Now, I don't know who I'm talking to here in the studio.

It, it could be that, you know, you've got mild inconvenience in your life, or

you've got absolutely seismic suffering that most humans couldn't understand.

So somewhere all of us are on that spectrum.

I can honestly say that I've had… I don't know what the

definition of fair share is, but definitely no stranger to suffering.

Let's just leave it at that.

You can, uh, you can buy me a coffee one day and ask me more,

and maybe I'll tell you more.

But I can speak to this topic with a great deal of personal experience

And so what I want to suggest to you is, let me set up this dynamic.

We've built a culture that is highly calibrated to the avoidance of

unpleasant emotions and suffering.

So we've built a culture that you got the victim mentality thing first.

So if something has gone wrong in life, it must be somebody's problem.

Somebody else has caused this problem, must be held to account.

And of course, there's a need for justice, right?

Often people do things that are genuinely wrong, and there needs to be some

form of accountability and justice.

But often our default is, "Well, this can't just be happening. It

must be somebody's fault." And we start either looking for someone to

blame, and that's the victim piece.

I want to do this sensitively because I don't know what people

have been through, but you-- I think you can get my broad point.

And we do avoidance, right?

I, I've said in so many episodes that our culture is structured

for consumption and distraction.

Consru- consumption, distraction, addiction, and avoidance.

So if I've got unpleasant feelings, I feed that with something, whether it's

food, alcohol, internet, something to distract me from these difficult feelings

that I don't want to think or feel about.

Now, I get it.

We don't want to set up our entire day every day to just be sitting there

going, "You know, I want to be miserable all the time." Of course we don't.

But here is the essential principle that I want to share with you in this message.

I want to offer you the idea that rather than avoiding the difficulties

and suffering in our life, what if those difficulties and suffering were

simultaneously an invitation to a higher level of experience and existence

and could be quite transformative?

Let's just say that.

What if you become more human and more fully human, not by avoiding suffering,

but by accepting it and journeying through it to become someone else?

I really think that the… Like, what I've noticed recently as I

begin to work on this book project is, like, the avoidance piece.

Like, when suffering, a crisis comes, so many people are like,

"Why is this happening to me?"

And regular listeners know that I'm big on questions, right?

If you ask your brain a dumb question, it will always and

everywhere give you a dumb answer.

So if you ever ask your brain the question, "Why is this happening to me?"

Your brain is gonna say something like, "Because your, your mother was right

about you," or, "Because you always do this," or, "Because you're a dumbass."

Like, it was gonna… Sorry, but it's gonna say something unhelpful.

Like, your brain is rarely likely to say to you, "Well, because this is the nature

of the existential human experience, and we all…" It's not gonna say that.

But if you structure a different question, like, "Who am I going

to be on the other side of this?"

That's a totally different question, and it's quite transformative.

Who am I gonna be on the other side of this?

How can I use this lesson to care for and serve other people?

Now, this may sound very… I don't know, what's that word?

Pollyannaish?

That word where it's like, oh, yeah, this is a mystical kingdom that

Jonathan lives in of fairies and rainbows, where we go through a cancer

diagnosis or lose a family member or get a bankruptcy, and he just wants

us to go, "What's great about this?"

No, I'm, I am serious that the first step is grief.

Like, you do the grief work.

So the first step of this process of drawing rich meaning from suffering is

to not deny that you feel something.

It's to actually go, "Right, this is soul-wrenching. This is terrible." But

grief is a place that you pass through.

It's not a place where you build a house.

Like, if you set up camp in despair or grief, and you camp out there or,

or, or start building a house, you could be stuck there a very long time.

So grief is a process.

It's a stage.

But on the other side of the sufferings in our lives, there's bigger questions.

Who am I becoming?

What can I learn from this?

And one of the beautiful things about suffering is the peaceful

realization that sometimes we don't know, and we're not God.

Often, when I've been through some incredibly difficult things, you know, for

a couple of seconds, I'm like, "Why does this happen?" And then my brain goes, "I

don't get to know the answer to that."

Some of you would know that family in Sydney who lost four children to a drunk

driver, and Karen and I have had the privilege of knowing them personally.

And when that terrible thing happened, uh, if you're not familiar with the story, a,

a drunk driver, um, just lost control of the car and, and hit four young children.

They… and they lost their lives.

I mean, if you ask a question, you know, "Why is this happening?"

Sometimes there's just this blanket silence in the cosmos, right?

There's this, we don't know.

And believe it or not, sometimes in our most dark suffering, there can be

a certain peace from come, that comes from knowing, from, from I don't know.

And I have to trust and accept that I'm not God, and I have to just accept that.

That's very, very hard for this culture.

Very hard.

If you look at the Book of Job in the Old Testament, whether you're Christian

or not, it's one of the most important pieces of literature in human history,

because you're looking at someone in that story who's lost everything

and is trying to understand why.

And if you've never read it, it kind of resolves with, with God basically

saying to Job, "Look, you're not God.

You don't sometimes get to know the answer to this.

But you do get to know that there is a love and a will and a mind that controls

everything and carries everything and sustains everything, and that there

will be a time when everything makes sense, and it may not be in this life."

I know this might be hard to hear for some people, but it,

but it does bring a certain peace

So,

I guess what I really want you to take away from this short discussion is that

what if instead of avoiding suffering

We ask different questions.

Do the work of grief

But don't always wish it away.

Sometimes people just get stuck for so long thinking that it shouldn't have

happened or it mu- You know, I get it.

You know, we, as humans, we look at so many things that happen to us

and we're like, "But I could have written a much better story than

what happened to me." I get it.

But sometimes we don't get to write the full story.

What we have to do is respond to the story that unfolds in our lives

in the best possible way, in a way that makes something magnificent out

of the life that we have been given

And I have honestly lived long enough to believe that no matter what happens to

us, God somehow can still bring good out of very, very difficult circumstances.

So this is my question for you today.

Instead of avoiding suffering, what's the invitation in the

difficult things in your life?

What are your difficulties and sufferings asking of you?

What are they-- Who are they asking you to become?

Who do you need to become in the face of your difficulties

and sufferings and challenges?

We'll finish with a quote from Victor Frankl, in many ways kind of a master

on this topic of suffering, who said, "To live is to suffer. To survive is

to find meaning in the suffering."

Can I give you a final thought?

And this is from lived experience.

The most difficult sufferings in my life, particularly one that I can think

of, was also the absolute making of me.

It was something that forced me to grow and change in a way

that I didn't believe possible.

And some of you listening to me can resonate in your own life, that you

look back and you go, "Gosh, I still wish it hadn't happened. I'm not

gonna pretend that I'm grateful for it because I'm really not. But I am

grateful for the grace I was given to respond in a particular way."

So summary, what if sufferings are an invitation to real growth?

What would that tell you about a culture that wants to ignore and

deny and obfuscate and reject an essential part of the human condition?

As long as we live, there's going to be suffering.

We're all gonna experience the suffering and separation of loss and death,

but most of us, I think, listening to this know that that's not the end.

It's the end of a chapter.

So live well, right?

Like stop resisting.

Ask yourself better questions, and who can you become in the process?

Wow, regular listeners will know this is a heavier lesson, uh, heavier lesson,

heavier episode, edition than normal, but I hope it's been a blessing to you.

Let me know what you think.

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Share this with people.

Come and find me on Instagram, JDoyleSpeaks.

Uh, everything else is on the website, jonathandoyle.co.

God bless you, my friend.

This has been the daily podcast.

You and I are gonna talk again tomorrow.