I go with the buddhist thing. suffering is when we don’t get what we desire. It a bit tricky because things that are common or normal we don’t think about desiring until we don’t have them. People want to be safe and healthy and free and we can’t have this is various ways and when we can’t even have the slightest bit its way worse.

The description of suffering that I identify with is a desire for things to be other than they are. I may experience physical pain and want it to end; that’s a type of suffering. I may desire for my annoying co-worker to stop bragging about his vacation and get to the point of the meeting; that’s another kind of suffering. I know that there are people in concentration camps in the US, right now, suffering who knows what all torments and indignities of their own that I wish to end; that gives me some suffering even though I am not there with them, nor do I know their situation exactly.

All of these things, and millions more, are things about my experience of the world that I desire to be different. The fact that they aren’t as I would like is upsetting, and I must either change them or, if I can’t, I must suffer them.

I can’t think about them all the time. It used to be that I thought my only options were to think about them all the time, which is exhausting, or not think about them at all, which feels callous to the point of psychopathy. A large part of my mental health journey has been tuning how I identify, deal with, and compartmentalize the suffering I do, on my own behalf and on the behalf of others.

I don’t think suffering is bad, or to be avoided. It is a thing to become familiar with, like anger (itself usually a response to suffering), that needs to be identified for what it is and channeled. Suffering is very like an emotion in that it is an indicator in the brain that you want something different. Sometimes, identifying the suffering makes it easier to identify and remedy the cause. Other times, the cause is so huge and overwhelming (the whole US situation right now), that I just have to deal with suffering the whole thing while I do what small things I can to make things a little bit better.

I highly recommend you look into Buddhism. This concept is explored in depth.

Life. Life itself is suffering. Life is the worst thing to have happened to anyone.

Regarding purpose, no one has any purpose. Purpose is assigned to tools; not to sentient beings with consciousness. Life is utterly meaningless, and it is due to this lack of meaning, that we search for superfluous things like purpose.

The true nature of life is suffering. The default state of life is pain. Everything you do from there is just to temporarily alleviate that pain. You keep doing that until you die.

We have friends and lovers because loneliness is painful. We eat because hunger is painful. We sleep because deprivation from it is painful. We laugh so that we can escape from crying.

People say suffering is a hurdle, and see it as something essential for character development, and whilst I acknowledge the essentiality of some types of pain, I also see it as something contingent on life. We suffer becauae you are alive. All sentient and conscious beings suffer. It just comes with life.

Note that I am not however, promoting termination of life. By terminating your life early, you would be depriving yourself of all the potential pleasures you could have had (regardless of the pain around them). Once you are here, your optimization problem should be maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain. So, whilst the asymmetry still exists, the potentiality for pleasure might (/should?) be enough of an reason to continue living. I do acknowledge that exceptions do exist where the asymmetry is so skewed for some, to the extent that there is little to no potential pleasure for them, in which case, it might be preferable for them to terminate their own life (think extremely painful chronic/terminal illnesses). I’m sorry if this feels a bit loosey-goosey.

With all that said, I believe we are all sufferers from the incurable disease of life. And the only thing to do from here is to vehemently struggle and rebel against suffering. To help our fellow sufferers and maximize the pleasurable moments. To do everything we can to cope with life whilst still being aware of the true suffering it stands for.

I think your line of reasoning falls somewhere between the “No True Scotsman” and “Persuasive Definition” logical fallacies.

While one can be aware of their own threshold for what they consider “suffering”, one cannot set that threshold for anyone else. To some, a papercut may be suffering, while others may enjoy physical pain and suffer when their dog dies.

The point I’m trying to make is there is no true suffering. Suffering is whatever the sufferer says it is and it’s a subjective experience, so that would apply only to them. We can, of course, generalize the idea of suffering, as Wikipedia has done in the definition you provided but again, this can really only explain the fact that suffering exists or maybe even the fact that many people consider many of the same things to be forms of suffering.

You may enjoy the teachings of Buddha, as his beginning premise is basically “all life is suffering” and his teachings largely revolve around the nature of suffering and how to accept it / overcome it.

I define suffering the same way I define art:

• I know it when I see it
• I can look at someone’s suffering, call it suffering, while some pretentious jagoff next to me goes, “Pff, that’s not suffering. You clearly don’t know what real suffering is.”
• Some suffering I like, some suffering I don’t.
• I had to go to school to learn about other people’s suffering.
• Some of us hide our suffering and some display it
• Some people use their suffering to make money
• I tried to show other people my suffering and they laughed at it. So I don’t show people my suffering anymore.

I tend to agree with Wikipedia. Pain is tricky, some can be enjoyable in certain contexts, so you are right that it’s a response to the stimulus more than the physical sensation.

But combined with “unpleasantness” it’s spot on. When I get a migraine I am suffering even if I try to adjust my mind to accept it differently, it’s unpleasant no matter how I slice it. It’s one of the feelings humans seem wired for.

Suffering is an emotion, a mood, a state of mind.
The stimulus is almost irrelevant.

I like the fact that “to suffer” can be a transitive verb, taking a direct object, of which “I don’t suffer fools” is an example, albeit not one relevant to this theme, in which case it partially carries the meaning “to endure”.

Firstly, I don’t think that there is a predetermined or universal purpose of suffering. I think that the Wikipedia abstraction is in fact good, because it moves away from trying to generalize.

Secondly, your examples conflict with the question in the title, because your examples, while helpful for starting discussions, make it sound like you are trying to hear what people think are the worst ways to suffer, simply. The question in the title of your post, on the other hand, is to me much more intriguing, since it enables me to say:

To me, suffering can be sweet, although this interpretation perhaps deviates from its most common connotations, as in, the result of torture, agony, anger, fear, grief and so on. Whenever my self hatred reaches levels that drive me to start imaging hurting people around me in order to release, I instead turn all that destructive energy inwards, and when I do, I want to vomit, scream, bleed, explode, implode and die, but the total result of that, which is one example of what I call suffering, can give me such a kick of adrenaline that I experience some sort of euphoria.

Suffering in itself is nothing more than a Wikipedia abstraction. Only in a context with an active subject/actor does it have purpose or function. For animals, including humans, self aware or not, for instance, it can serve as an indicator that a certain behavior, place or adversary needs to be avoided and that this knowledge has to be passed on to their descendants.

The true nature of suffering is the repetion of mistakes and the observence of the patterns that lead to those mistakes and being concious of the caused sufferung but being powerless and unable to stop it.

It’s a word made by humans.