Life Is Suffering: A Better Question Than How to Escape

"Why is life so hard?"

Most of us have asked it at some point, and the thought usually continues the same way. Once this problem is solved, once this season is over, once this person finally understands me, then I'll be happy.

I lived like that for a long time. Before meditation came into my life, I was always asking two questions. How can I get a little further away from this unhappiness? How can I be loved a little more? Other people's eyes were my measuring stick, and my attention was always pointed outward.

Last month, while closing out the day, I wrote down one sentence: suffering and happiness are not connected. This piece starts from that sentence.

An illustration made for this post: a small wildflower growing from a crack in an old stone wall

The idea that happiness waits on the other side of the hard part

We tend to put happiness at the far end of suffering, as if the two sat on a single line. Take away one hard thing and you move one step closer to being happy. So we spend a great deal of our lives escaping: from the discomfort we're in now, from the relationship we're in now, from whatever feels lacking now.

But when one hard thing ends, the next one arrives. Work finally settles down and your body gives out. Your body recovers and someone hurts you. If you hang your happiness on getting out, it always sits one square ahead. It feels like you're almost there, and you never arrive.

That was how it went for me in the years when I was trying to escape unhappiness and trying to be loved. I worked hard, but my attention lived outside me, and I assumed happiness was something the outside world had to hand me.

So when I say suffering and happiness aren't connected, this is what I mean. Removing suffering doesn't automatically fill that space with happiness, and being happy doesn't erase suffering. They are not weights on opposite sides of one scale. And while we pour everything into making the suffering side lighter, we never get around to asking the question that actually matters.

What "life is suffering" originally means

In Korea there's an old saying that life is a sea of suffering. In English, "life is suffering" can sound just as bleak, as if the message were: it's miserable, so give up.

In the Buddhist teaching the phrase comes from, the word usually translated as suffering is closer to a plain list of what every life contains. Being born, growing old, getting sick, dying. Having to be near what you dislike. Having to part from what you love. Not getting what you want. Nobody gets to skip these. They are not a punishment for living badly; they are the conditions every living being passes through.

What I find striking is that in this teaching, the task assigned to suffering is not to get rid of it. It is to understand it fully. Seeing suffering clearly is the first step. It's the same thing we say in meditation all the time: before you can let something go, you have to see what it actually is.

Once you understand that, one thing gets lighter when hard times come: the feeling of "why me?" The pain itself may be no smaller. But knowing that it isn't some strange misfortune aimed at you alone, that it's simply part of what life holds, changes where you aim your effort.

The question that is left when you accept it

When you truly accept that life involves suffering, the question "how do I get out of this?" starts to lose its grip. You've realized you can't get out of all of it. A different question moves into that space.

What was I born for? How should I live?

And it keeps going deeper. Why did I want this demanding life so badly that I was born into it? Why do I exist at all? What is life, and why is it so precious?

I believe that this chain of questions, each one leading to the next, is what the path to awakening looks like. Suffering is not the end of the road. It's the door into those questions.

The difference between the two kinds of questions shows up on hard days. "How do I escape?" ends when you find an answer, and then the next difficulty arrives and you start again from zero. "What was I born for?" behaves differently. The hard day doesn't erase the question; if anything, it makes it sharper. Pain can't take your direction away.

There is another way into the same question: picture the final scene of your life first and work backward. I wrote about that practice in Picture the Last Scene of Your Life.

Feeling calm is where meditation starts, not where it ends

There's something I find myself saying often when I teach. Many people treat calm as the goal of meditation. Their thoughts quiet down, their emotions settle, their body relaxes, and at that point they stop and get up.

That moment is genuinely good. But what happens when you walk back into your life? Everything is the same. The practice ended at producing a calm state. If meditation only ever relieves suffering for a while, it becomes one more way of escaping.

So I ask people to treat that calm as a starting point. Some things only become visible once you're quiet. Most of the time we're wrapped in thoughts, emotions and long-held beliefs, and we live without ever meeting the self inside all of that.

Your thoughts are not who you really are. If someone asks you what time you woke up this morning, an answer pops up. Thoughts work like that: information stored in your brain, coming back out as output. Emotions are similar. If someone suddenly shoves you as they walk past, anger rises. It's a reaction to what happened. These things surround you; they aren't you.

Before meditation, I took all of that surrounding layer to be me. What meditation showed me was that I didn't need to work so hard to be loved, because complete love was already inside me. That's also when I understood that happiness isn't the absence of suffering. I once heard someone say that true happiness is simply being at ease, and I've found that to be true. When you are at ease, you trust that whatever problem comes up, you have the strength to deal with it. You're not happy because suffering has disappeared. You're happy because you've found a place inside that suffering can't knock over.

A 10-minute practice for sitting with the question

This is a way to set one question on top of that calm. If it's your first time, follow it in this order.

Loosen your body first (2 minutes). Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and gently shake out your neck, your shoulders, your whole body. If you sit perfectly still right away, stray thoughts tend to rush in first and it's hard to go beyond simple rest. Moving lets you drop tension you didn't know you were holding, and the mind follows the body down.

Sit and watch your breath (2 minutes). Sit comfortably and simply watch the breath come in and go out. Look for places where you're holding effort and release them one by one. Shoulders, jaw and the space between the eyebrows are the usual suspects.

Let thoughts and feelings pass (2 minutes). When something comes up, notice it: "Ah, this thought is arising." Don't hold on to it and don't push it away. Remind yourself that it's stored information passing through, not who you are.

Place one question in the deepest place (3 minutes). Ask silently, "What was I born for?" Don't try to manufacture an answer; just leave the question where it is. An image can help. Imagine that in the deepest part of your heart there is a clear, shining light of love, and that thoughts and emotions cover it like dark clouds. With each breath the clouds thin a little, and you watch the light that slips through the gaps.

Close slowly (1 minute). Take one full breath and open your eyes. If a word or an image came to you, you might write it down. If nothing came, that's fine too.

The answer won't arrive in one sitting. Like building muscle, it deepens through repetition. Today, simply setting the question down is enough. But each time you meditate, try to look a little further than calm. Even if you can't get there in one go, having a direction means you keep moving toward it.

What to remember on hard days

Suffering doesn't go away. Hard things will keep coming, and on those days you'll probably think "why is life so hard?" again.

When you do, try not to stop at "how do I get out of this?" Take one more step. Why am I living this hard life? What am I here for? In front of that question, pain looks a little different. Not an enemy to run from, but a door that makes you ask why life is precious.

In the hardest stretch of my own life, what I held on to was a very simple kind of gratitude. I wrote about that in Lack Is a Compass.

If the hard days run so long that you can't see a reason to keep going, please don't carry it alone. In Korea you can call 109, the suicide prevention line, 24 hours a day and free of charge; wherever you live, your local crisis line is there for exactly this. Meditation is something you can use alongside that help, not in place of it.

And if you'd like a voice to guide you through short practices like this one, you can find guided meditations on WECOSMO.