The Differences Between Pain and Suffering

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The most intense experience of this I've had is in meditation, where you're in some really cold environment and then you try to pay such close attention to the experience that the pain and suffering start to separate. You can actually be very acutely aware of this intense cold feeling and have glimmering moments of not actually suffering during it. Personally, I'm not super advanced and I'm able to get that experience for like fleeting seconds. Sometimes I'll have fleeting seconds where I'm like, oh yeah, I'm actually not suffering right now,. which is really cool experience, but I can't do anything like sustain it for a long time.

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To increase our chances of success (in whatever domain and using definition of success), should we focus on boosting our strengths or shoring up our weaknesses? Are we harsher in our critiques of ourselves than in our critiques of others? What should an ideal inner monologue be like? What are some useful taxonomies of pain? Are there times when irrational, magical, emotionally-driven, and/or delusional types of thinking are useful?

Anna Paley is insatiably curious about how best to live our lives. She is a behavioral scientist and marketing professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. She received her PhD from New York University, Stern School of Business in 2017. You can reach her at a.paley@tilburguniversity.edu.

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