Not the mention the fact that you would be shooting yourself in the foot, since you’ll be reincarnated in this world, on some other world, or on another plane of existance with some SERIOUSLY bad karma to work off.
Also pertinent to the OP: as I understand it, suffering now in this life can also help you work off the bad karma you’ve accumulated in previous lives.
Interesting that so far, no one has tried to define “character.”
Damn few who talk about character-building ever define it, either. I think it’s because they believe in it as some absolute obvious thing that all decent people agree on - or maybe because they define it mostly in terms of obedience to authority or respect for the status quo. If you give people enough shit for disobeying, most eventually will obey, which may be all the “character” you care about developing.
I’m also puzzled why the OP didn’t link to the blog s/he referred to. Did s/he just forget where the quote came from?
Enough hardship breaks a person.
Depends what one means by character.
Suffering shapes personality. It changes identity. It may impart some wisdom that can’t otherwise be acquired. It may age prematurely. Some people call that “Character”. A certain toughness, a better understanding of the reality of life, a lack of innocense, and maybe even a touch of cynicism to go with it, if you will.
So in that sense, sure, suffering builds “character”.
Toughness doesn’t always make you more understanding. Maybe of yourself, but not of others. It can make you feel contempt for anyone less tough than you.
My answer to the OP is yes. In my experience I have found that those who have never faced adversity lack character, tend to be superficial, and are unable to properly prioritize their lives.
Once you have beaten childhood cancer, lost a parent/child/sibling, recovered from a serious accident or illness, or survived abuse or neglect, you gain the ability to arrange your concerns in a productive manner, and appreciate the gifts and triumphs that life brings. If you have survived some significant setback, rainy days, flat tires, and frizzy hair become irrelevent. The experience of suffering helps a man learn to pick his battles.
I agree, and I am guilty of lacking some empathy (probably unfairly) for those who claim to suffer from unbearable pain due to certain injuries. But I don’t give voice to it, so my prejudice hasn’t cost me much other than the occasional quiet disdain for the stranger in the doctor’s office begging for narcotics for a hangnail. My bias exists thanks to my own experience with severe injury, and I am here to admit that you are right on this point.
I think you’re too hard on yourself on this point. I don’t agree that having a better understanding of someone means necessitates sympathizing with them. Maybe your own experience allows you to understand that these people do indeed have their priorities out of whack. As long as you’re polite about it, I don’t think your disdain is unjustified.
Of course, some might argue that we are simply not allowed to make our own evaluations of another person’s character in any way, shape, or form. Or that there’s no such thing as one person having better character than another. If that’s one’s standpoint, then of course one wouldn’t ever see any merit in suffering for the betterment of one’s character.
Not an expert, but the best counterpoint to suffering is compassion. Suffering is just part of the human condition, a given, really: being faced with a lot of crappy confusing circumstances; illness, Death, Confrontation, at worst resulting in a War state. On and On, resulting in tremendous depression, and horrendous suffering.
You can sink into that depression, heartily, with good reason, or take some advantage of a better mind, and view all the chaos with compassion. Compassion is cultivating what is the better part of human endeavor, and trying to still put that forth in the scope of daily recourse; actively seeking to not sink into negativity, but resolving to keep a positive frame of mind, and respect others, thinking the best of them, even when others piss you off. That’s the Idiot’s version; better folks see the best in everyone, regardless.
Um, I’m trying. I have a coworker who has tremendous physical pain issues, and
I was sadly impatient with her last week. In thinking about it, I could have been
kinder with her. I did think a great deal about it. As suffering builds character,
compassion certainly does as well.
I was going to directly quote Peter McWilliams, but I don’t believe I own the particular book these thoughts were in, so this is approximate:
He saw a film in school once, about an amoeba. Three amoebas, actually. The first amoeba lived in an environment with no stress or challenges at all. The second amoeba lived in an environment where there were some stresses and some challenges. The third amoeba lived in an environment where it was all stress all the time. The first amoeba grew and grew until it simply dissolved under the weight of itself and drifted apart. The third amoeba died in short order. But the second amoeba thrived.
The point? There is no such thing as a life without suffering. If you are alive, you experience pain. However, it can be taken to one extreme or the other.
I think of some of the students I’ve worked with, who come from extremely wealthy households. They literally do not have to work for anything. It’s simply handed to them. Their parents have no expectations of them. If they flunked a class, it was because the teacher hated them, not because they did not work. Everything in their world was designed to be as soft and painless as possible.
I fear for those children. First, they have no idea what really matters to them. They have never gone without and experienced what it’s like to be without something. Second, they have no idea how to work to obtain what they want. None. They don’t understand how to follow instructions, because it has never been required of them before. They’re like Eloi, and as soon as they leave their paradisical childhood, they will be eaten alive.
But then there are the students who have nothing. Their lives have been filled with grinding poverty - not just financially, but emotionally and spiritually as well. There has been no love shown to them. They have gone without nearly everything. Nothing matters, because they have no hope of ever obtaining anything.
I think what suffering does exist in a healthy environment serves a purpose. It sharpens our awareness of what’s really important. It helps us prioritize objectively. It creates empathy, as we now understand what others have endured before us. With an awareness of what we will face, we can practice traits that are commonly seen as part of a good character - patience, honesty, charity, courage, loyalty, industriousness - because these are the traits that make suffering survivable.
Strangely, I find myself thinking more and more about these traits, and how as a society we don’t discuss them anymore. It’s almost as though, if we don’t talk about them, we won’t need them. As though, if we don’t have these tools, we won’t need them. The suffering won’t happen to us. I think that’s a very foolish attitude to take.
Even my own life, which by all reasonable measures has been pleasant, has its own share of suffering, enough that I am sometimes exhausted by it. To think that there are others going through much, much worse, is humbling.
Phouka, a truly good and heartfelt post, with deep understanding.
The best point now is how to encompass that understanding, and pass it down to the next generation. I’m going with Positive, because i do see younger folks wanting to get some good elder teaching, too.
I think suffering does build character to some extent. I mean, once you know what true suffering is like (such as the loss of a parent, surviving a war, physical/sexual abuse, chronic and debilitating illness, etc.), minor stuff like bad traffic or missing last night’s episode of “Lost” becomes pretty irrelevant. I’ve been through some fairly bad stuff, and right now am going through the failure of my marriage - yes, that’s what it feels like, a failure - but I know I could have it, or could have had it, a lot worse. Hearing the stories of people who are, or have been, in far worse circumstances than mine puts things into perspective for me.
phouka, my husband and I were just discussing the raising of children today, and how our culture of doing everything for children, giving them everything they could possibly want, and being nothing but nice to them is possibly raising generations of adults who won’t be able to deal with any adversity (read: reality) in their lives. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head; you want enough resistance to build muscles, but not enough to break you.
Im English,my mum was English ,my dad was Scottish from Glasgow.
He used to go up the pub every single night and get pissed up and then come back and beat my mum up also quite often my older brothers,so badly that she and they had to be taken to accident and emergency.
I learnt at the age of six that if I cried when hit that I would be repeatedly hit in the face until I stopped crying ,like my brothers I learned the art of not crying.
I swore that I would kill my dad when I grew up,but he died of T.B. when I was 12.
My mum was really into drinking and men and not parenting or housework,I loved her but she wasnt very great as a parent .
I brought myself up,got myself through grammar school but I dont think I managed to do a very good job of it though I tried my best,it wasnt my mums fault .
I think it makes you tougher, but given the choice Id rather Id have been a spoilt kid.
Well said.
Some learn from the experience and treat it as a Life Lesson.
Others go into neutral or reverse and either become a martyr/victim.
I don’t know. I think you need some character first, before you can properly deal with suffering. I think the greatest defeat is when people allow their suffering to carry over and become the suffering of others–when they treat others badly because they were treated badly, or when existence stops being a magical wonder because they have allowed themselves to become jaded.
Suffering and I have a close, personal relationship. I think part of the reason that I get wiser and stronger and more grateful every day has to do with a disposition–a genetic fluke, whatever–not to hate, no matter how hard things get, and to always try to be a better person. I’m not sure suffering had anything to do with that, because I’ve seen people grow incredibly bitter from their own experiences. And I’ve known people who have experienced things I cannot fathom who bear their suffering with such grace.
But my point is, eventually I realized how much of my suffering was self-perpetuated. I had to learn to let go and grow up and take responsibility, as an adult, for my own happiness. In a way, suffering did make me stronger, because eventually I suffered so much that I decided to stop coddling myself and grow up.
Ultimately I would have to say, it depends on the person. Sometimes suffering makes people into whining, weak, self-obsessed losers. Sometimes it tempers fearful hearts into strong and noble bastions of compassion. In my case, it more or less did one, then the other. But I think that’s more telling of the character we all have in the first place.
And I’m content with that.
Too bad that most people who pontificate publicly about the spoiled and the coddled don’t show such concern or nuance. Almost all of it is knee-jerk recreational outrage, more about the speaker or writer than society, and not at all focused on the individual ('cause remember, seeing others as individuals is a sign of modern moral decay).
I believe that suffering is a great deal like salt.
A little of either is a necessary thing, but too much of either will ruin anything.
With no suffering, people don’t grow and mature. With too much suffering, people can twist and warp into things barely recognizable as human - or simply break.