...And There's No Fixing It / Suffering and a Life Worth Living

It’s important to distinguish two kinds of suffering: Some suffering can be alleviated or eliminated. But there’s other suffering that we can’t reasonably hope to “fix.”

Lecturer at Yale College and Life Worth Living Co-Founder, Ryan McAnnally-Linz considers what to do when we can’t “fix” suffering—in this this chapter-by-chapter video curriculum series based on his bestselling book (with Matt Croasmun and Miroslav Volf), Life Worth Living: A Guide to What Matters Most.

Transcript

There’s a lot of suffering in the world. There’s a lot of suffering in most of our lives. How to respond to that suffering is a critical part of any plausible vision of life worth living.

It’s important to distinguish two kinds of suffering. Some suffering can be alleviated or eliminated. But there’s other suffering that we can’t reasonably hope to “fix.”

In this video, I’ll be considering this second kind of response: what to do when we can’t “fix” suffering.

In our culture, there are two especially common approaches to intractable suffering. One is to reject the category entirely, to treat all suffering as a technical problem, just a matter of finding the right means to crack the nut and get rid of the suffering. Call this techno-optimism. It has at least two problems. For one thing, we don’t have all the solutions right now, and there’s going to be plenty of suffering while we’re still looking for them. And we still have to ask how to respond to that suffering. For another, so far, suffering seems to follow a whack a mole dynamic. Even as we’ve largely addressed one kind of suffering (say, polio), others have cropped up or grown. Think of something like opioid addiction. Given this history, how fully can we trust that all suffering is solvable?

The other common approach to intractable suffering is to glorify it. This is the “what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” “no pain, no gain,” response. It urges us to embrace suffering and make something good out of it. There might be something to this. It’s certainly more creative than techno-optimism. But is it really adequate for all intractable suffering? Aren’t some tragedies too deep and horrible to be seen as just more lemons for making lemonade?

There’s a thorny question here, and these common approaches aren’t up to the task of responding to it. We need to turn to the resources of philosophies, religions, and cultural traditions to uncover or build sturdier version of the common approaches or to find entirely different, more compelling responses to the suffering that troubles our life together. And then we need to respond for ourselves. How will you?