Why Is Life So Painful? Let’s Find the Real Cause

There’s no doubt in saying that everybody adores happiness more than suffering. For them, life is like a colourful painting filled with many calm and happy colours, just like a bloomed red flower. But for some, life is painful.

Even if there are some good moments in their life, they feel the fear of pain that it would not last longer.

Every moment of their life is suffering, which they want to end but can’t.

For them, life is pointless, and soon it becomes hollow, which further leads them to make wrong decisions such as drugs, alcohol, and even suicide.

But why?

Why is life so painful? Why do only a fraction of people reach riches? Or happiness is only a myth, then?

In this article, we’ll try to discover why life is painful, why some people always remain unhappy, and why some, no matter what, always have smiling faces.

Life is painful. Why?

Does a stone feel pain?

No, it doesn’t. Because there’s no life in it. Does the river feel pain? No, it doesn’t.

Neither stone nor river feel the pain because they have no life in them. The same is the case for glaciers, deserts, oceans, wind, clouds, and space. They all possess no life.

But suppose they had life, just like us, walking, talking, eating and more, then what kind of world we will be living in today?

I guess it would be pretty chaotic.

We would have no roads to walk on, no homes for shelter, no ships to import or export, no planes, or even quad bikes to show off friction sand.

Now, imagine you are on a cliff, and I ask you to drop a stone from the high ground to the lower. Would you do it? Would you feel any hesitation?

I can surely say that you’d be excited to do that.

Even you’d drop a large stone. But if I ask you to lose a cat, or a rabbit, or someone dear to you. Would you do that? I believe you won’t; this time, you’d be hesitant and afraid.

Why?

Because now we’re talking about dropping a life, and a stone doesn’t have that.

A life without pain has no meaning because it helps us understand ourselves as well as others.

If there would be no more pain, we’d feel no emotion. Meaning that we don’t feel any hesitation or fear if someone asks us to hurt someone else.

We would happily do it, even if the person we’re hurting is our family member.

Why would someone do that? Because that person wouldn’t have an understanding of emotional and physical pain and how they work.

Emotional and Physical Pain: Why Do We Have Those In Our Lives?

A world of complete happiness is a true illusion about which everybody is fascinated.

But a world of pain is a reality, to live is to suffer, and suffering comes in two ways: emotional and physical.

The question that arises here is that if pain or suffering only hurts us, then why it has a type. Why not only one?

To answer this, we have to look closer upon happiness and ask, is there only a single type of happiness?

The answer to this question is straightforward: a simple No!

Just like happiness, there are many types of pain, but mainly there are two pains in life, which I’ve faced many times in my 23 years. If you know more, then please share them in the comments. I might find something useful.

1st, Physical Pain

I am not going to make this complex, I’d tell you about why we feel physical pain in much simpler and planer terms.

We feel physical pain because it gives us the understanding to care about our bodies. So, we don’t treat its parts as objects.

You, I, and everybody know what we do with objects.

We use them and put them aside. We use them until they work fine, and once they’re out of service, we throw them in the garbage. And replace them with another, a new one.

But it’s not the same with our body and its parts.

If some of our body parts start to show some trouble, we can’t simply replace it with another, it’s very complex and hard. Though today’s technology is more advanced than the last couple of decades, humans are still incapable of replacing their body parts.

But imagine if somehow we got the technology, and now we’re capable of changing our body parts, each single one of them.

What would happen now? Whenever we get a bruise on whichever part of our body, we simply replace it.

By doing so, we’d escape feeling pain. And when we don’t endure the pain, we set a foundation of weak mental strength.

How? Let me tell you about my childhood.

How Does Not Feel Pain Cause Feeble Mental Strength?

All my childhood, I was sick of many diseases. They were not severe, but they felt severe for a child of 5 years to 14 years old.

Someday I had a headache, so another day, I had stomach pain.

Fever, diarrhea, cold, and weakness were my best friends. And I cried many times, “why it’s happening to me. Why are children of my age good at health, and I’m weak and skinny?”

Yes, that was me.

On the other hand, my sister and brother were always in good health. They never felt sick, even if they did, they got healthy, way much faster.

But I think those days of my childhood, my ill health of mine, somewhere gave me stronger mental health. Because today, whenever we face a tough situation, my brother and sister are the ones who get affected by it very much.

Here, I’m not saying that I’ve a stronger mental strength, but I can say I have less weak mental strength than them.

And it’s all because I felt pain in my childhood, which they didn’t.

So, if we don’t feel physical pain, we’ll not build better mental strength. Moreover, we replace objects because we don’t care about them; first, we do, but as time passes, we don’t. Because the first time it was money that made us care about the object.

And if we start to replace our body every time it gets hurt, we start not to care about it either.

Because we have the option to replace it.

Once we start to not care about the body, we don’t care about another person’s body as well.

A person who don’t care about his/her body might do things like rape, murder, and organ trafficking because he doesn’t care about his own body, then why the hell he’ll care about others.

Therefore, it’s vital to feel physical pain because it makes us mentally strong, helps us care about ourselves, and others as well.

2nd, Emotional Pain

Anxiety, depression, sadness, stress, and whatever you want to call it, emotional pain is something that can kill a person in sleep. Or makes him/her walking dead.

And it’s more dangerous than physical pain.

However, it’s more easy to treat than physical pain. Only if you look in the right corner with a torch in hand.

Life is painful, and we have got the answer to one of its parts. Now, it’s time to understand another one:- Emotional Pain.

The reason we feel emotional pain is because we don’t accept the situation. We want something else out of our current situation.

We overthink the decisions we made in the past. And keep ourselves in anxiety and depression, asking, “Why I did that? If I haven’t done it, then I might not have to face this.”

And the worst question of all, “why it’s happening to me.”

We all ask this silly question many times, and it’s all because we always want something else. Even if we got the thing we wanted, we do not get satisfied. We keep expecting more and more.

But here, the question is not why we feel emotional pain. Instead, the question is, why keep feeling emotional pain?

Because, after all, we are here not just to suffer.

Have patience, it won’t take long, I’ll tell you why we should feel the suffering of emotional pain.

Why Should We Feel Emotional Pain?

I know it hurts to live with emotional pain, but we have to. Why? Because it helps us to understand the pain of another person.

How?

Think of this, we all feel emotions. We all are connected with emotion, whether it’s good or bad.

If someone cracks a joke in a group, then all would laugh. Because that joke triggered the same emotion in each. And we can feel how everyone present is feeling because we are also going through the same emotion.

Therefore, if a person is going through some kind of suffering, and in our lives, we had that same kind of suffering once, then we can connect with that person.

We can put ourselves in his/her place. In doing so, we’d be able to help him/her better by sharing our experiences and how we got out of that kind of suffering.

So, it’s essential to feel pain, not because suffering leads to happiness, but to understand life as a less wicked thing. To understand who remains standing with us in our darkest time.

And if you’re in an emotional pain this time. For whatever reason, there are many—parents, relationships, jobs, businesses, health, and dreams.

However, keep one thing in mind, you’re not alone in this. Everyone feels it. Even, I am writing this article, feeling it.

But it doesn’t mean we should stop breathing or doing what we are capable of doing.

Perhaps, we are knocking on the wrong door. Or maybe, we don’t want to knock on the right door.

It’s us and our decisions that always want so much from life, creating chaos in every place.

Whether you believe it or not, pain is life because a world without suffering and pain doesn’t exist.

A Request at the End

I hope this article has given you a new perspective about pain, perhaps 10% or maybe 1. If you think it can help people, then please share it with your friends or someone who needs it more. Doing so, I guess will fulfill this article’s purpose.

Moreover, if you have extra time, please visit our show courtesy page, to know why we’re doing this. Also, if you want to read more articles like this to get self-help tips, you can subscribe to our spam-free newsletter.

Thank you

Nathawat Brothers

Putting thoughts for everyone