Why Things Have to go Wrong – The Necessity of Suffering

In the funny, moving and downright chaotic series The Good Place there is a moment in it which genuinely made me think hard.

The show, if you haven’t seen it, is all about the afterlife and essentially the existence of “heaven/The Good Place” and “hell/The Bad Place” and what qualifies people to be in either.

I’m someone who hates spoilers so will not ruin it for anyone who hasn’t seen it.

At one point some characters arrive in The Good Place and are met with someone of the most influential, compassionate, kind and brilliant people from history who have been there since they passed.

In The Good Place they can do anything, have anything and nothing ever goes wrong.

And guess how everyone feels?

Bored.

In fact so bored that they want to die, but they can’t because they’re already dead – so they’ve been condemned to an afterlife of “perfection”.

I found this so interesting and alarmingly accurate.

People speak about winning the lottery so that they could buy this, have that, do this etc without any burden, troubles or responsibility but is that what they really want?

In this blog I’m going to be discussing why suffering is actually necessary in order for us to enjoy life.

Stories, Films and TV Series

I’d like you to think about any fictional story whether it is a book, a series or a film.

If you cut out all of the fluff and extras the story goes as follows:

1. There is a protagonist we’re rooting for
2. The protagonist has a goal they want to achieve
3. A difficult obstacle presents itself
4. The protagonist struggles through this and nearly doesn’t succeed.
5. The obstacle is overcome and the protagonist wins (potentially at some cost)

I’m not saying all stories are like this but if you break them down as simply as possible this is roughly what 90% of stories look like.

We enjoy these stories and we get emotionally involved in the struggle and feel joy at the outcome.

Now imagine that story without the obstacle.

It would just be someone wanting to do something and then doing it.

It would hold all of the excitement for an adult that an episode of the Teletubbies would.

The fact there is struggle in these stories, that there is conflict, and that there is a chance that “our hero” will either not make it or lose something or someone as a result is what makes things actually interesting.

If you look at Game of Thrones and the creator not giving a single shit that you love a character as he creates their brutal and untimely death – that is what makes a show like that so utterly compelling.

Is your life so different from a film?

Your life is a series of stories, yes they’re more likely to involve Sandra in accounts being a jobsworth or some guy called Brad Ghosting you than an epic sword battle but it still follows the same formula: Person > Goal > Obstacle > Strife > Outcome.

I don’t want to sound like I’m belittling anything that you go through in your life down to just a simple thing especially as the outcome may not actually be the one you were after.

But also, it is worth considering that the outcome you’ve got may actually be a continued part of the strife and the actual preferred outcome is still to come.

Here’s the thing though, we actually love stories and since the days of cavemen we have lived through them – we love to talk about things going wrong, we love to complain and we love to talk about how we came out the otherside again.

The suffering and the strife is what makes the story interesting and is also what makes the outcome feel so good and so worthwhile.

I’d like you to think now about your proudest achievement in life and the story you tell (or you would tell) about how you came to achieve it.

Is that story all sweetness and light?
is it butterflies and unicorns throughout?
Or is that story punctuated with hiccups, falling down and times when you thought you simply wouldn’t make it or achieve or what you have achieved?
I basically guarantee that it is the latter.

At the time you would never choose the suffering or the difficulties that you had to go through. They will have felt impossible, you wouldn’t have known how you’d get through them and perhaps you even felt like you simply had to give up entirely.

But you didn’t.

The willpower, resilience and determination that got you through it all is what makes the story interesting, it is also what gives you hope and belief that you can overcome adversity again.

The Importance of Contrast

If you were to dive deep on this you’d look into the philosophies of Nietzsche who basically said “life IS suffering so you’d better find something worth suffering for”.

I’m not sure I totally agree with life being suffering but we’re all too aware the suffering is going to happen on some level at some point.

We grow through life from our experiences and our comparison of what we are going through at any given moment with what we have experienced before.

Being well gets taken for granted until the days just after recovering from an illness at which point being well feels “amazing”.

Being in love feels so much more real if you’ve experienced true heartbreak before.

Company feels so much more satisfying if you’ve dealt with loneliness.

We are all too aware that difficulties and adversity are going to come into our life at some point, sometimes mild inconveniences, sometimes gut-wrenching heartaches, we know that it can and it will appear at one time or another – it is inevitable.

We do however have to experience these difficulties in order to appreciate the times that are easier.

Obstacles and failures force us to grow, to change and to build our personalities – they make us who we are – without them our lives would be perfect and, as a consequence, boring which The Good Place showed us that is no life at all.

If you’ve enjoyed reading about this then I’d recommend also reading my blog on Tolerating Uncertainty here and also my Blog on death being a great motivator to live your life as they both tie in with the idea to a certain degree.