Pointlessness

A grim picture
Since the 90s, and especially in recent years, there has been a sharp rise in the prevalence of terms such as “mental health”, “wellbeing”, “lifestyle disorders” etc. A positive reason for this is the growing awareness that the health of a person does not involve only the body, but also his/her mind.

On the other hand, the reason why there is a need to acknowledge these aspects is that there indeed seems to be a sharp rise in not just the clinical cases of mental health, but also the pre-clinical conditions such as stress, anxiety, emotional imbalance etc., which manifest, in practice, as extreme negative emotions such as anger or guilt or despair, suppression and unhappy isolation, health issues etc.

Most of such pre-clinical conditions often aren’t even reported or disclosed as the experiencer is himself/herself not aware of the condition, at least clearly. We may feel other proxies such as lack of interest in stuff, lack of focus, giving into temporary distractions, overthinking, binging etc., but most of the times, we are usually not aware or do not acknowledge the disturbances, anxiety, or the consistent unease that we experience for prolonged periods in such conditions.

Many of these can then result in the clinical cases of mental health issues, lifestyle diseases, addiction etc., if such pre-clinical situations do not get resolved either via some internal realizations, some conscious efforts rooted awareness and introspection, some positive changes in the lifestyle, and/or external genuine support system.

Having painted such a grim picture, let’s try to think about some basic root cause of these seemingly contemporary issues, which are probably not so contemporary.

'Suffering' - a trending topic in all ages
If you look closely, the face behind the masks of mental illness, depression, stress, anxiety, emotional upheavals etc. is Suffering. The root of the tree, for which all of these are fruits, is Suffering. And in suffering, none of us are alone. We all suffer, and have been suffering since historical times.

In fact, we can confidently claim that much of the efforts that we have put in, across the ages, for the so-called progress of our civilization, have been to understand and get rid of suffering. Be it the paths of medicine, engineering, agriculture, governance, economics, sociology, psychology, spirituality etc., the idealistic aim and arguably a ‘practical application’ of all of these was and is to mitigate suffering.

And indeed, we have achieved remarkable things in all of these paths. On an average, our materialistic comfort level has gone up significantly since the dark ages, life-spans and life-expectancy have grown, we can now treat our senses with a far more diverse experiences than what we could a thousand years ago, we can grow any sort of food anywhere, we can go anywhere we wish with relative ease, we have a lot of knowledge about the world and the universe at our fingertips, and so on…

Surely, with such access to knowledge, so many materialistic comforts, tools to take care of our health, ways to entertain and indulge our senses, relative ease to experience the world, intermingling of cultures, and such and such, there really should be no place for suffering, and this world really should be an utopia.

And yet, here we are !

So are we missing something?

Are we meant to suffer?
As indicated above, suffering is not at all a new concept. And we find evidence of this in ancient knowledge systems, be it the idea in Bhagavad Gita of materialistic attachment and ignorance; or the notion in Yoga of entrapment in disturbances of the world; or the first noble truth of the Buddha “There is suffering”; or the forbidden fruit mentioned in the very beginning of the Old Testament; or Epimethues opening the Pandora’s box etc.

So the fact that this experience of suffering, which takes many forms, has existed across the complete length of civilization (not to mention the rest of the evolution across many species - if you consider the five major extinctions), indicates that there is something very fundamental about this notion of suffering. It seems that suffering is a characteristic of a living being (especially humans). It’s as if we like to suffer, and we take it with us wherever we go, not just across space but also across time.

Enter Pleasure

Interestingly, we do call ourselves intelligent! The term ‘homo sapiens’ literally means ‘wise man’! As indicated above, thanks to our kind of intelligence (yes, there are other kinds - but that’s for some other time), our lives have become comfortable, we have remedies for many diseases, and we are always connected with the rest of the world in many ways, our knowledge is expanding manifold each day, and so on.

And, importantly, thanks to our intelligence, while we have noticed that we suffer and have been suffering, all of the above (and more) promises to be a cure for suffering. It’s just that such cures seem to be rather temporary. They really do not seem to be the solution for suffering, but rather they tap into another characteristic of a living being (and in this context, a human), that of deriving pleasure.

Just like we suffer, we also feel good about some things or in some situations. This is as fundamental as suffering, and indeed it must be, because at the biological or psychological level it is just the opposite of suffering. So effectively and fundamentally, the materialistic tools such as those indicated above, due to which human civilization has ‘progressed’, are supposed to give us pleasure, or to replace suffering with what we define as pleasure, or to sometimes just stop what we define as suffering.

Questions

The thing is that, the pleasurable effect of such devices lasts only for sometime. We go back to the states of suffering then back to the states of pleasure and so on. But now that we know how not to suffer, albeit for a while, why not just keep juggling between pleasure and suffering, until we die? This seems to be a common practice, which our civilization has been following, a game which we have been playing since millennia.

So if our progress is just leading this game ad infinitum (just with some changes in the details every few decades),
- What is the point of it all?

- What are we seeking?

- Do we want to reduce suffering further, but how, when suffering and pleasure seems to be two sides of the same proverbial coin?

- How do we even envision the state of lasting happiness?

- What does it mean in terms of living our day to day lives?

- What does it mean in terms of the typical components of our lives involving career, relationships, lifestyle etc.

…

Let’s continue this journey together!