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The Meaning of Suffering (Patreon)

Published:
2023-05-31 20:07:39
Edited:
2024-02-16 02:27:58
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Beck on chronic illness, interrogating if there is any meaning to suffering or if it's just the raw experience of meaninglessness itself.

Files

The Meaning of Suffering

Pain can be a catalyst of growth-once we get out of it. But is there any meaning inherent to suffering itself?

Comments

jcv

yeah, this hits. gonna take some more time to process it, but it hits.

Josh Foreman

I love this. Personally, my physical suffering is not much, but being married to someone with multiple degenerative diseases gives me a lot to think about (and act on) in regards to this subject. My wife, Heather, has a couple interesting mechanisms she employs to navigate the constant pain. One is the acknowledgment that "There are people way worse off than I am." A denial of self-pity. The other, more interesting move is to take her experiences as education that she can use to help others in similar states. She's become incredibly good at research, navigation of the byzantine health system, strategies for dealing with doctors and specialists who are incentivized to dismiss or diminish. And so she is constantly chatting with someone or another or in an online group dispensing the wisdom that comes from 20 years of grinding pain. I wonder if this project of hers a way to redeem the suffering while in it, rather than painting a narrative of escape that would retroactively redeem it. (Due to a particular flavor of evangelical conservative practices that we felt put an event -healing- before relationships, she's completely turned off by all spiritual talk on the matter.) What I do know is that justifying the existence of the suffering with the idea that we can help others who suffer is a weird little circular argument I hate, and one that I've heard at church countless times, so I'm very happy that Becca did not air it!

E. LeStrange

I really like how Beck has made sense (haha) of pain and suffering in this piece. It’s certainly helping me take a different view of the bruises depression has left on my mind without the typical “gotta make Good Art about this terrible time in my life” take that I was previously using.

Rae

Thank you so much for this! I have a chronic illness and can definitely relate to the cycles of finding meaning in it, but only if I have come through a bad patch into something better. I always find that when I’m doing bad it’s hard to remember how it feels to be doing better. But then I do always start to feel better, and it becomes hard to remember how it even feels to be at my worst. But thank you for giving me something to read and think about today, when my symptoms haven’t been so good. I’m going to be thinking about ‘when God has forsaken you, Jesus is with you’ for a long time.

Kaelynthegoat

been awhile since i could connect to something relating to suffering and while mine isn't through chronic illness but mental anguish and headaches i have from depression, making art while in the state of suffering never felt like catharsis it was meaningless and what the art meant was meaningless and while it looks beautiful and cathartic it is just something made from meaningless.