Whoever wrote this apparently has never actually SUFFERED. They’ve never been in chronic pain, or watched a family member die of disease. If they had, they couldn’t possibly think that suffering is just a matter of attention. The examples given of “suffering” are so trivial as to be outright insulting: Really? You think having to decide which event to go to is a good example of suffering?
(You might have a better argument if you were saying that meditation techniques, which are often at least partly attention-based, can be used to raise your hedonic set point so that even things like starvation don’t feel like pain anymore. But that’s not because starvation is an attentional conflict; in fact it’s really a bug in human nature that we’d expect to get selected out. A being that can meditate itself to ecstasy is a being that never does anything useful and may as well just die.)
Something like “frustration” or “dilemma” might have to do with attention. But no, the agony of a full-blown migraine, or of weeks without food, or of feeling cancer eat you alive; no, that simply has nothing whatsoever to do with attention. You can focus on the pain all you want, and it will still hurt. You can try to focus on something else instead; it won’t work, because your brain will keep pulling you back to the pain. That feeling of hopelessness isn’t a result of what you’re focusing on; it’s a result of the fact that you’ve searched for solutions to this overwhelming problem and none of your attempts have worked. The pain isn’t going to go away until the problem itself is fixed.
And maybe it can’t be fixed: Sometimes suffering is the last thing you experience before the evolutionary “game over” of death.
The evolutionary causes of suffering are actually fairly transparent: Suffering is the constant threat your body holds over you for failing to meet crucial fitness objectives. The threat wouldn’t be credible unless it were sometimes actually carried out. It’s an interesting question as to why evolution spends more time motivating us through pain avoidance than through pleasure seeking—the pain of starvation is about a thousand times more intense than the joy of a good meal—but that doesn’t change the basic principle that suffering is what our evolution uses to motivate us.
It sounds like you’re using the word “suffering” to mean something like “really extreme pain/discomfort”. This is especially apparent where you seem to equate pain and suffering in the last sentence.
That isn’t what suffering means. Suffering does not need to be linked to extremes of pain and discomfort. If the word is used in that sense sometimes, just be aware that it is not being used that way in this post, or in most academic discourse about suffering.
Whoever wrote this apparently has never actually SUFFERED. They’ve never been in chronic pain, or watched a family member die of disease. If they had, they couldn’t possibly think that suffering is just a matter of attention. The examples given of “suffering” are so trivial as to be outright insulting: Really? You think having to decide which event to go to is a good example of suffering?
(You might have a better argument if you were saying that meditation techniques, which are often at least partly attention-based, can be used to raise your hedonic set point so that even things like starvation don’t feel like pain anymore. But that’s not because starvation is an attentional conflict; in fact it’s really a bug in human nature that we’d expect to get selected out. A being that can meditate itself to ecstasy is a being that never does anything useful and may as well just die.)
Something like “frustration” or “dilemma” might have to do with attention. But no, the agony of a full-blown migraine, or of weeks without food, or of feeling cancer eat you alive; no, that simply has nothing whatsoever to do with attention. You can focus on the pain all you want, and it will still hurt. You can try to focus on something else instead; it won’t work, because your brain will keep pulling you back to the pain. That feeling of hopelessness isn’t a result of what you’re focusing on; it’s a result of the fact that you’ve searched for solutions to this overwhelming problem and none of your attempts have worked. The pain isn’t going to go away until the problem itself is fixed.
And maybe it can’t be fixed: Sometimes suffering is the last thing you experience before the evolutionary “game over” of death.
The evolutionary causes of suffering are actually fairly transparent: Suffering is the constant threat your body holds over you for failing to meet crucial fitness objectives. The threat wouldn’t be credible unless it were sometimes actually carried out. It’s an interesting question as to why evolution spends more time motivating us through pain avoidance than through pleasure seeking—the pain of starvation is about a thousand times more intense than the joy of a good meal—but that doesn’t change the basic principle that suffering is what our evolution uses to motivate us.
It sounds like you’re using the word “suffering” to mean something like “really extreme pain/discomfort”. This is especially apparent where you seem to equate pain and suffering in the last sentence.
That isn’t what suffering means. Suffering does not need to be linked to extremes of pain and discomfort. If the word is used in that sense sometimes, just be aware that it is not being used that way in this post, or in most academic discourse about suffering.