What is the Purpose of Life?

It is to Find Meaning in Suffering

“To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering”

(Friedrich Nietzsche )

The axiom that death and taxes are the only certainties of life is incomplete as it has left out another unavoidable facet of life which is suffering. To live is to suffer. Nobody, whether emperor or pauper, can escape suffering.

“Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you’ll know you’re dead.” (Tennessee Williams)

It is natural that we avoid talking about life’s unpleasant things like death and suffering. There is a huge self-help literature that offers theories and formulas about how to be happy and how to succeed in life.

Very few writers talk about suffering. Nobody can make a bestseller out of a book titled, “How to suffer?”. It is as if we can sweep suffering under the carpet once we learn how to succeed and how to be happy.

Unfortunately, this is not how life unfolds for most of us. If success and failure are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and suffering. Nobody can be happy all the time. Nobody will suffer all the time.

“Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.” (Thomas Hardy )

If we want to learn about how to achieve happiness, we must also learn how to experience suffering.

To suffer humbly and patiently is the very essence of life. When terrible things happen to us we call them adversity. Suffering is our response to adversity.

“Pain is the feeling. Suffering is the effect the pain inflicts. If one can endure pain, one can live without suffering. If one can withstand pain, one can withstand anything. If one can learn to control pain, one can learn to control oneself. ” (James Frey )

Learning how to be happy doesn’t help us cope with suffering. But learning how to suffer will equip us with the ability to extract joy and happiness from everyday events of life.

When we are happy, we want to immerse ourselves in the experience. We don’t like to pause and ask why we are happy. Suffering slows us down. We are always complaining about how joyous occasions get over quickly before we have enjoyed happiness. When we suffer, we complain that time has come to a still.

Suffering is Not Accidental.

For many scientists and atheists, life has no larger design than what we attribute to it.

“In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” (Richard Dawkins )

I believe that nothing, including suffering, is accidental in life. I believe in karma. Even those who don’t believe in God or karma may sometimes wonder whether we are actors in a drama whose script has been written by a higher force.

“I don’t know what’s going on, and I am probably not smart enough to understand if somebody was to explain it to me. All I know is we are being tested somehow, by somebody, or something a whole lot smarter than us, and all I can do is to be friendly and keep calm and try to have a nice time till it is over”.

(Kurt Vonnegut, American author)

Suffering Has a Purpose

Nobody can teach us life’s lessons better than suffering.

“Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be. I have been bent and broken, but — I hope — into a better shape.” (Charles Dickens )

Suffering helps to know the true colour of other people. It teaches us that appearances are deceptive. People are not what they seem to be. We view life through a wider lens. Viktor Frankl wrote the book “Man’s Search for Meaning” after suffering in the Nazi concentration camps.

Suffering exposes our true nature to ourselves. We have two selves. One we show to others. The other hiding beneath the false self.

The pain inflicted by suffering bares our souls to ourselves. We realize we have been acting to satisfy society's norms and others' expectations.

Suffering helps us to realize our potential and recognize our talents. Franklin Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down. Yet he became one of America’s most respected presidents.

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.” (Kahlil Gibran )

Benjamin Franklin dropped out of school as his parents could not afford to pay the fees. He taught himself by reading voraciously. He became a master inventor who took risks to prove his scientific theories and inventions like the lightning rod. He became one of America’s Founding Fathers.

Suffering teaches us humility, the hardest character trait to learn.

“If pain doesn’t lead to humility, you have wasted your suffering.” (Katerina Stoykova Klemer )

It is not happiness but the suffering that lends meaning to our lives. The COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted much suffering on millions of people across the world.

It may appear as platitudinous and insensitive to pontificate on the virtues of suffering to those who have lost their dear ones and to those who have lost their livelihoods.

I commiserate with the suffering souls and pray that the world vanquishes the pandemic without further delay.

But remember that this too shall pass. Suffering is not permanent. We can transcend suffering by enduring the pain with equanimity.

“The world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming it.”

(Helen Keller )

While people learn their individual lessons, humanity’s collective suffering must lead to a shift in our consciousness.

We will conquer the pandemic medically when we discover a cure and a vaccine for it. But it will be a Pyrrhic victory unless we radically alter our wasteful and inequitable economic models and learn to live in harmony with nature.

Nature is a stern taskmaster. If we refuse to learn the lessons, we will invite another Nemesis to humble us.

“The law is simple. Every experience is repeated or suffered till you experience it properly and fully the first time.” (Ben Okri )

The inevitability of suffering need not make us despondent or nihilistic. Once we learn the truth about suffering, we have learned the ultimate lesson.

The root cause of suffering is the mismatch between our expectations and reality.

“Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a reaction generated by my own mind. Learning this is the first step towards ceasing to generate more suffering.”( Yuval Noah Harari )

That we cause our own suffering through our thought patterns appears as counterintuitive. But this realization will help us avoid bitterness and resentment towards ourselves, others, and life itself. The best antidote to the pain of suffering is to direct our attention to fellow-sufferers in the world and try to ease their misery as much as possible.

Suffering no longer appears as a needless tragedy as it helps to open our eyes to the meaning of life.

Thanks for reading.