Life is mostly pain, most of our basic pleasure-seeking behaviours such as eating and distracting ourselves with media consumption are simply trying to alleviate the pain of existence. The older you get the more life becomes about duties, responsibilities, compromises and learning to subjugate your instinctual urges. Does being spoiled as a child and never learning that getting what you want requires effort and suffering correlate with being less happy and healthy as adult? In the past, men particularly became adults by being forced into war or at least doing military training where learn that they cannot always get what they want and need to endure suffering to reach a higher goal. Is the lack of these kinds of experiences making modern people soft and sensitive and more prone to becoming stressed and miserable from trivial things?
From my observations, people from developing nations who have experienced tremendous hardship and suffering by western standards seem to more easily find joy in life, and healthy people more willingly subject themselves to stressors such as exercise, spicy/complex foods or seeking out challenging experiences, whereas unhealthy/unhappy people seem to mostly seek out quick gratification such as junk food, media consumption and avoidance of any kind of effort. Is the trick to happiness to learn to enjoy pain, to become joyful by overcoming suffering, rather than by trying to avoid it?
I'm wondering about this as someone who has frequently been called spoiled and sensitive by people close to me and is often not in the best of spirits. Just the other night I had a terrible take-away meal for dinner that gave me an upset stomach and put me in an outright depressed mood for the next 24hrs, whereas my friend, who grew up in a poor family and had the same meal also noted the low food quality but was still in usual good spirits the next day. Is the difference between us just our attitude in how we deal with adverse experiences?
From my observations, people from developing nations who have experienced tremendous hardship and suffering by western standards seem to more easily find joy in life, and healthy people more willingly subject themselves to stressors such as exercise, spicy/complex foods or seeking out challenging experiences, whereas unhealthy/unhappy people seem to mostly seek out quick gratification such as junk food, media consumption and avoidance of any kind of effort. Is the trick to happiness to learn to enjoy pain, to become joyful by overcoming suffering, rather than by trying to avoid it?
I'm wondering about this as someone who has frequently been called spoiled and sensitive by people close to me and is often not in the best of spirits. Just the other night I had a terrible take-away meal for dinner that gave me an upset stomach and put me in an outright depressed mood for the next 24hrs, whereas my friend, who grew up in a poor family and had the same meal also noted the low food quality but was still in usual good spirits the next day. Is the difference between us just our attitude in how we deal with adverse experiences?
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