You Can’t Avoid Suffering, You Just Pick What You’re Willing To Suffer For

You can’t avoid suffering. You can’t avoid pain. It’s a given and life becomes so much easier when we accept that reality.

The more you care about someone, the more you’ll hurt when they let you down. The more you’re passionate about something, the more heartbroken you will be when you lose it.

Ironically, the things that bring us joy are also the things that bring us pain. The people we love are also the people who break our hearts and that’s the essence of life.

You won’t find something you love given to you freely without an ounce of pain or suffering. The journey to happiness and love is full of suffering and pain. You won’t fall in love with someone until you’ve seen them at their worst, learned how to forgive them and accept their difficulties.

Ultimately, we’re only fooling ourselves when we say that the things we love shouldn’t make us suffer but they do. I love my job but I lose sleep at night when I mess up and I can’t forgive myself for the smallest errors because I actually care about my performance. I’m more sensitive when I have feelings for someone and more likely to take their actions personally. I love my friends but it hurts when we don’t talk as much or lose touch because of our responsibilities.

While the level of suffering is not the same for each, it’s still suffering but to me, it’s better than suffering at a job I hate or suffering because I’m with someone I don’t adore or suffering because I have no friends. In this case, I’m picking the things and the people I want to suffer for. I’m picking who’s worth my pain. I’m choosing the lesser of two evils.

But to sit there and say you can avoid suffering is one big lie and to expect that the things you love or live for will not make you suffer is also delusional because it’s always the things we love that have the power to hurt us, whether our careers, our friends, our families or our relationships and there’s nothing you could do that would change that.

Essentially, what you should be asking yourself is who’s worth suffering for and what’s worth the pain? Essentially, life is more about picking your battles rather than avoiding them.

Because you can play it safe instead of trying and taking risks and you can try to avoid pain or heartbreak by stopping people from getting too close to hurting you but you also miss out on living your best life when you shelter yourself from the tough experiences that could change your life. You sit on the sidelines watching life pass you by, which is the worst kind of suffering in my opinion.

You suffer more when you choose not to participate in life. You suffer more when you refuse to let the pain make you grow. You suffer more when you shut people out. You suffer more when you lead a lonely and banal life.