The Lost Art Of Suffering
This is part 3 of a 3 part series on the truth about happiness.
When did our hearts become so busy they forgot how to rest? We live in a world more ordered than ever, yet something ancient in us still yearns for wildness, for chaos, for the untamed spaces where life flows freely. Our inner compass, shaped by millennia of evolution, finds itself spinning in this digital age—detecting disorder even in our most carefully constructed order. Our survival instinct is still alive but it is now being used identify achievement with survival. Where technology was supposed to make our lives better, it is making our instincts malfunction.
Like children who’ve outgrown their oldest instincts but haven’t quite grown into their newest tools, we find ourselves caught between ages. Our technological advancement races ahead while our consciousness pants to catch up. There is a level of responsibility and awareness attached to how technologically advanced we get. With limitless power and no sense of responsibility we will destroy ourselves. Yet, this is escaping our awareness because running technology the way it is running seems to be good for business but bad for humanity. But for how long can we stay pacified?
So, what are we losing? Maybe, we don’t know because we never really knew we had it. This strange feeling of living in a hyper-connected society is precisely what makes us feel like something is missing and we’re just noticing now. In this rush to smooth out life’s rough edges we’ve begun to lose something precious—the art of sitting with ourselves in the quiet spaces between doing.
The inability to contemplate
To suffer is to scrape the sandpaper on our material existence, revealing the underlying soul in all things. In our digital age, where every discomfort can be immediately medicated with distraction, we have lost what Han calls “the contemplative life” – the ability to stay with our pain long enough to learn from it. He writes: “Pain is a fundamental experience of negativity that cannot be removed from life. A life consisting purely of positivity would be unbearable.”
While we shield ourselves from every negative experience, we rush to transform every moment of discomfort into an “opportunity for growth.” In this way, we lose something essential to human experience. We discussed the violence of positivity in the last essay as well as our modern transparency society. Everything must be visible, measurable, and positive. “Transparency society eliminates all forms of otherness,” Han writes. “Everything must be smoothed out and levelled, made transparent. No resistance is permitted.” This transparency becomes its own form of violence, an obligation that’s always demanding we constantly perform our happiness, our success, our optimization. There is no room for shadow, for depth, for the sacred darkness that gives life its dimension. Actually, nothing is sacred anymore for all moments of life can be milked for some kind of gain.
He continues, “The society of transparency is an inferno of the same.” Yet genuine human experience requires shadow, requires mystery, requires what Han calls “the negativity of withdrawal”—the ability to remain hidden, to maintain mystery, to preserve depth.
This brings us to a crucial understanding: the very mechanisms we’ve created to connect and express ourselves—our digital platforms, our culture of constant sharing and visibility—may be the very things preventing genuine human experience.
Martin Buber illuminates this modern disconnection through his concept of I-It versus I-Thou relationships. Where we once met life as a ‘Thou’ - a living presence to be encountered in its fullness - we now treat everything, including ourselves, as an ‘It’ - objects to be analysed, optimized, and used. Yet authentic living requires us to restore that I-Thou relationship with our own experience, to meet each moment as a living presence rather than a problem to be solved.
Han says that our phones and screens slowly reshape how we think and feel, without us even noticing the change. It is a subtle form of power, programming and controlling us without any defence from our side. This is a crisis of contemplation, “The loss of the ability to contemplate is connected to the absolutization of visible, active life. The increase in the active-hyperactive (no space for the passive) darkens contemplation’s space of possibility.”
Han proposes this way of being as an alternative to this regime of enforced positivity and transparency. He continues: “Contemplation is a form of resistance against the totalizing tendency of the active life. It opens up spaces of breath and spirit.” This meditative stance requires what he calls “the gift of listening,” the ability to dwell in silence and negativity without running away from it and without rushing to transform it into something productive or positive. Without trying to make it some kind of spiritual business practice.
The following poem illustrates the kind of attention - unhurried, unmarked, unmeasured - our souls are starving for.
‘I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention,
how to fall down into the grass,
how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed…’
– Mary Oliver ‘The Summer Day’
Many indigenous communities still practice collective silence and ritualized contemplation. The Australian Aboriginal concept of ‘dadirri’ - inner deep listening and quiet still awareness - offers a powerful counterpoint to our culture of constant noise and performance. These traditions remind us that contemplation isn’t some luxury we’ve evolved beyond, but an essential human capacity we’re in danger of losing.
That’s part of the journey forward we need to undertake. In an era of progress, modernity and technology, if we forget ourselves it is not a cost we can afford. If we decide to become thinking, conceptual machines then no matter how advanced we are technologically, we’ll barely be more alive than the machines that guide us.
“The contemplative life is not passive, but rather a highly active engagement with negativity. It requires the courage to face the darkness.” – Byung-Chul Han
In life, caution can be advised more generally than recklessness. But what if we have erred on the side of too much caution? Then the only antidote to be prescribed is recklessness, wildness. What is wild is untameable, uncontrollable and is, for all intents and purposes, free.
Do we fear what’s real?
In this final terrain beyond our assumptions, we must confront a fundamental truth: authenticity cannot be optimized, measured, or performed. The contemplative life that Han advocates and the deep understanding of loss and transformation that Kübler-Ross discovered through her work with the dying both point to the same revelation – that our most authentic experiences often arise from what society tells us to avoid.
Kübler-Ross observed that “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of those depths…[but] We run away from the beautiful mystery of death. We hide it behind walls and flowers.” Similarly, we hide our genuine presence behind walls of positivity and flowers of refinement.
Han articulates this as a form of resistance. We’ve forgotten how to simply be. Like children who’ve never learned to sit still, we fidget through our lives - always reaching for the next task, the next goal, the next achievement. The simple art of doing nothing has become as foreign to us as a language we’ve forgotten how to speak. Yet it is precisely in this ‘doing nothing’, in this ability to stay with our experience without trying to make something of it, that we find our authentic being. For our true self is always hiding behind acceptability, distraction and over-thinking. It is always calling out for our attention but we refuse to sit with it—with ourselves.
Kübler-Ross’s groundbreaking work with dying patients revealed that authentic living often emerges from our closest encounters with loss and mortality. She noted that “Those who learned to know death, rather than to fear and fight it, become our teachers about life.” This parallels Han’s observation that “A life that is completely untouched by death is not life but rather mere survival.”
Reclaiming authentic experience
If our senses are thinking and feeling our way through life, should it not stand to reason that they’re telling us what we need to see and feel? The constant push for improvement and positivity creates projections based on our desires. We feel compelled to chase these desires and avoid those demons but it’s all in our heads. We become trapped in a world of our mind’s images either running towards or running away from. A state of being that never allows us to simply be. Real life, is just beyond that boundary—all we have to do is let our senses show us what we need to see, to let our feelings bathe us in what we need to feel.
Both Han and Kübler-Ross, from their distinct vantage points, recognize that our attempts to sanitize life of its darker aspects ultimately diminish our capacity for real living. Kübler-Ross noted that “Learning to live well and to die well are one and the same thing,” while Han observes that “The society of positivity gives rise to artificial forms of living that alienate us from the fundamental experience of life, which also includes negativity, pain and death.”
As we move toward a conclusion, we must recognize that the path forward isn’t through more improvement, more positivity, or more performance. The contemplative dimension allows us to experience life in its fullness—both its light and shadow, its peaks and valleys. It requires bravery to resist the constant pressure optimize experience and to chase positivity. It requires us to stand firm in our authentic experience especially when that experience includes pain, doubt, or darkness.
And so, the challenge becomes not how to optimize our experience, but how to remain authentic in a world that demands performance.
The truth about positivity isn’t that it’s wrong—it’s that it’s incomplete. Like a painting that uses only bright colours, it lacks the depth and dimension that shadow provides. As we navigate this achievement society with its demands for constant enhancement and performance, perhaps our most radical act can be simply this: to honour our full spectrum of experience, to resist the violence of enforced positivity not through more violence, but through what Han calls “the contemplative ‘no’” —a quiet but firm refusal to reduce our human experience to what can be optimized, measured, or performed.
This no is a refusal to engage in falseness, a refusal to diminish our experience to the superficial. It is the real protest to stand up to our right to live full human lives. No one said it wasn’t meant to be scary, no one said that sadness wasn’t involved—but it was meant to be real. The more we engage in these forms of violence we’ve discussed, we’re robbing ourselves of that joy.
For true fulfilment lies not in the desperate chase for happiness or the anxious avoidance of pain, but in the courage to remain present with whatever arises, trusting that our hearts—in their infinite wisdom—know exactly what we need to feel, even when society tells us otherwise.
Simone Weil understood this when she wrote that ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’ She saw that true attention - the kind that doesn’t seek to change or fix or optimize - is a form of love. ‘The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing,’ she noted, ‘it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.’ Perhaps this miracle is exactly what our achievement-obsessed culture needs most.
For, in the end, our hearts beat with both contraction and expansion. Each beat contains both silence and sound, both pause and movement. Perhaps this rhythm—not our achievements or our optimizations—is our truest teacher about how to live: embracing both light and shadow, both joy and sorrow, both doing and being. For it is in this complete embrace that we find not just happiness, but something far more precious: our authentic selves.