Q: "the need for pain, angst and suffering in every humans lives and the benefits resulting from these influences"
A: I’m not sure if it’s possible to fully explain the need for pain in the human existence. As a person we can live, we can love, we can cry and be sad and feel emotions, but true existential pain is a wonder. I say this because of personal experience, it’s not possible to feel this pain unless you undergo true torment. You can live through years and years of it, feeling the pain, and hiding it, and also hiding who you truly are. There are many scripts in Eastern Philosophy (Zen, Taoism, Buddhism) about the benefits of understanding your feelings, but in true sense, it’s not easy to process or comprehend these feelings of utter despair. It takes time, and understanding to do this. I believe that many people never understand who they truly are, living through a process of metaphorical clouds in front of their minds.
How do you get to this understanding? You step back, release yourself from the delusions of the human mind, and it that sense society, commercialism and capitalism as a process. I say this because i believe that capitalism, especially, adds to our feeling of despair. How many female children have watched a Disney film, and subconsciously expected that to be the synopsis to real life. Falling in love with a ‘handsome prince’ (often a misogynistic, controlling man) and living happily ever after. Real life is our worlds children dying in wars that our capitalist society has subjected us to with no opinion, or say. In the bigger sense, the Western world has no idea about true suffering, even writing about it is truly ridiculous. I am sitting here on my laptop whilst children are living in poverty, and nobody remembers this. We throw it out of our minds like we would an empty crisp packet. The children in Syria, Afghanistan, parts of Africa are truly suffering, I don’t believe I can write about it fully. Nobody strives to help the war stricken countries. If we were in a perfect society we would be a world community, who would be taking in the forgotten children of these countries..but no.. We forget, because it’s convenient. In Britain, we have UKIP, the BNP to try and inform us as a society, through propaganda and media that these children are irrelevant. It’s BULLSHIT. How can anybody place value on a human life? (However, that may be another topic) The Western world suffers in such a different way to the third world, we mainly emotionally suffer, but will rarely actually ‘suffer’, in a third world respect. How can any of us believe that we suffer truly, when we put into perspective the children, the women, the men, that are getting coerced into being a war criminal; being beaten or raped purely for being a vulnerable person: used as a war tool all around the world. So suffering is out.. We can only truly know true suffering when we take ourselves out of the mind frame of Capitalism, and place our souls truly into the third world.
So angst is different, every teenager in the world has experienced angst. A hearty mix of emotional whirlwinds, hatred and loathing at the world. Who hasn’t been there? My emotional angst contributed in a crazy time of weed smoking, drinking, climbing up lampposts in rollerblades, messing about in fields and walking around aimlessly.(Great times) Angst, is a series of emotions that every body should experience. As a former ‘emo’ kid, i know well enough about it. Let’s summarise the teenage ‘angsty’ feelings… ‘Everybody hates me’, ‘I’m not good enough’ ‘My friends don’t like me’ ‘The opposite sex hates me’ ‘I’m so ugly’ ‘I’m so geeky’ amongst other things. The thing is, as an adult, it’s not expected for you to feel these feelings, but i do at least, on a regular occasion. We’re expected to be more grown up than that and not long for things to be as easy, as when you were able to be ‘angsty’ for a reason. I’m so ANGSTY now, GOD, I feel like i’m 15 again, and you know what, that’s fucking OK. Because every time I am, I learn from it, I learn how to feel, and how to deal with my emotions, every single time I go through those thoughts. There’s times in every bodies lives where we can regress to the angst ridden teenager, and to regress to that time allows us to deal with where we’re at and take stock of our lives.
Suffering then, suffering makes us who we are. A human can never truly appreciate their happiness unless they have suffered. How can you feel the highs if you haven’t experienced the lows? Suffering is the entire basis of humanity, to be human is to suffer. Suffer living, suffer being alive every day. There is no meaning to life, we just have to strive to find the happiness that it gives to us. There is a reason why there are such cringe quotes such as ‘Live every day as if it’s your last’, because really it is, or it very well could be. You never know what will happen. Tomorrow you could suffer, so every day that you don’t, try to count as a blessing. It’s so hard to be ‘happy’ in the human mentality but to look into yourself and find some perspective is a start. I don’t believe that you can live a truly happy life unless you’ve suffered before to appreciate it. Suffering can come in many ways, and only the individual can count on the experience to change them, and they should try to learn from it if it’s possible.
In conclusion (to your posited question JB)..there is a need for pain, angst and suffering in every individuals life, and no matter how we experience it, whether we are from an upper class family in England or a poverty stricken child in a third world country, we can try to learn from these things and improve ourselves. If a person never feels pain or suffering then they won’t ever progress in life. This is progressing onto the meaning of life…but that’s a different story. X
