The Opposite of Suffering

“If there’s any light to be found in the darkness, it’s this: while we may suffer alone, we are never alone in suffering.” —George Loewenstein, The Opposite of Happiness

“What’s the opposite of suffering?” I asked towards the end of my conversation with Sharon Salzberg and George Loewenstein, and as I did, I realized I didn’t know the answer.

George’s book is called The Opposite of Happiness. The title intrigued me from the moment I received the pre-publication galley. George, a founder of behavioral economics and a professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, had written a book about why we are so often miserable. Impatience, boredom, anger, envy, jealousy, rejection, guilt, shame, anxiety, regret, loneliness, depression: his book wanders through the landscapes of psychic pain and asks what those feelings might be doing for us.

So, I asked them both: What’s the opposite of suffering?

George paused before responding. Maybe pleasure, he offered. Maybe happiness. But as soon as he offered the answer, he complicated it. Suffering, he suggested, is more varied than happiness. There are so many distinct ways to be miserable. Regret isn’t loneliness. Shame isn’t envy. Anxiety isn’t depression. Each has its own flavor, its own logic, its own way of recruiting the body and mind. Happiness, he noted, seems simpler.

Sharon went in a different direction. As she so often does, she turned toward lovingkindness, toward compassion. She spoke of people who’d endured enormous suffering and remained oriented toward the well-being of others. People imprisoned, traumatized, displaced, and still seemed to ask, in one way or another: Did you have enough tea? Are you alright? How can I care for you?

When it was my time to answer my own question, the word that came to me was wholeness.

For me, the opposite of suffering hasn’t been happiness. At least not happiness as pleasure; that’s too fleeting. Nor has it been the absence of fear, or grief, or pain, or loneliness. It’s been the capacity, hard-won and always imperfect, to take in more of what is true and good about the world without having to cut off some part of my experience or constrain my identity to meet someone else’s definition of lovability, to survive.

This conversation with George and Sharon is the third in a series we’ve been calling The End of Suffering. In the first, Sharon and I explored the difference between pain and suffering. Pain is part of life. Illness, loss, fear, grief, aging, and death aren’t aberrations but evidence of life itself. We suffer more when we make pain mean something about our worth: when we add shame, isolation, judgment, resistance, and the belief that because we hurt proves we are therefore broken.

In the second conversation, my long-time friend, the writer Parker Palmer, joined us, and the inquiry expanded outward. Suffering does not remain private. What we don’t transform, we transmit. Our unexamined fear, grief, shame, and rage—each a manifestation of our suffering– leak into our families, our organizations, our politics, and the ways we exercise power. The pain we refuse to know in ourselves becomes, too often, pain we enact upon others.

And now, George helped us explore the machinery of misery itself.

One of the central claims of his book is that bad feelings aren’t simply malfunctions. They’re part of the system. Evolution didn’t design us to be happy. It designed us to survive and reproduce. Fear, anger, shame, envy, jealousy, loneliness, anxiety, and regret all have work to do. They warn us. They motivate us. They narrow our attention. They push us to repair, protect, compete, reconnect, or avoid danger.

As George put it in our conversation, happiness is one mechanism the brain uses to get us to act. Misery is another. And misery, he noted, is often the more powerful mechanism.

There was something strangely relieving in that for me. As a striver, as someone who spent much of his life trying to outrun old fear through achievement, I once believed that suffering meant I had done something wrong. If I were stronger, wiser, more disciplined, more successful, more loved, surely, I wouldn’t feel this way. Surely fear was evidence of weakness. Surely sadness was a failure of gratitude. Surely shame was telling the truth.

George’s work refuses that moral indictment. Bad feelings are part of being human. They are not, by themselves, proof of failure. Or as I used to tell my clients, “Just because you feel like shit doesn’t mean you are shitty.”

That insight doesn’t absolve us of responsibility. A feeling may arise unchosen. What we do with it still matters. Anger may signal that a boundary has been crossed. We are angry because we have been wronged. And yet, anger can also consume the one who carries it, increasing our suffering. Shame may once have served some social function, but it can also exile us from the very connection that would help us heal. Anxiety tries to protect us from danger; it can also mistake uncertainty for catastrophe.

Instead of asking, “Why am I feeling this?” as if the feeling were an indictment, we might ask, “What is this feeling asking of me? Is it warning me? Protecting me? Distorting me? Pulling me toward wisdom or pushing me toward another round of suffering?”

The overlap between George’s behavioral science and Sharon’s dharma teaching came when we spoke about what George calls meta-emotions: feelings about feelings. We don’t simply feel envy; we become ashamed that we feel envy. We don’t simply feel sadness; we worry that sadness means we are weak, ungrateful, or broken. We don’t simply feel fear; we become frightened by fear itself.

Sharon recognized it at once as the second arrow.

The first arrow is the pain life sends our way. The second arrow is the one we shoot into ourselves. It sounds like this: This shouldn’t be happening. I shouldn’t feel this. This means something is wrong with me. This will never end. No one else could understand. I must get rid of this now.

Years ago, in my thirties, when depression returned with great force, I began to learn this in my own body. In early meditation practice, I remember sitting with a surge of anxiety so intense it felt like panic. Everything in me wanted to flee. The feeling itself seemed unbearable, but underneath the anxiety was something even more terrifying: the conviction that the anxiety would destroy me, that it would never end, that I could not survive its presence.

Then I heard the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön’s voice in my head: “Sit. Staaaaay.”

So, I stayed. Not heroically, of course. I stayed the way a frightened animal might stay when a trusted hand reassures that all will be well. I watched the fear rise and move through me. I watched the body insist that something terrible was happening. I watched the mind search for an exit. Eventually, I watched the feeling pass.

Later, when I spoke about this with Dr. Sayres, my analyst of more than thirty years, she named it with her characteristic loving precision. I had a fear of the feeling; a fear of fear—a second arrow.

The teaching was not in the sentence alone. It was in the ease with which she reassured the frightened animal within me. She didn’t treat my panic as evidence of some special brokenness. She recognized it as human.

That recognition loosened the knot. What I had taken to be annihilation was also a pattern. Just like me, others feared their fear. Just like me, others were ashamed of shame. Just like me, others believed that pain hurts so much, it must also be a judgment. It’s not, of course; pain is just pain. 

This is where George’s notion of the empathy gap becomes so useful. He writes about having known, intellectually, during a period of depression, that the state would pass. He had studied this very phenomenon. He understood that when we are in one emotional state, we cannot easily imagine being in another. When we are calm, we underestimate what anger, hunger, craving, or despair will do to us. When we are depressed, we cannot imagine not being depressed.

Knowing didn’t spare him. He knew the state would change, and still, emotionally, it felt endless.

Insights like that help, but insight isn’t magic. Meditation helps, but it isn’t always enough. Therapy helps, but not because it prevents pain from arising. Medicine may be necessary. Friendship may be necessary. Rest, community, confession, time, and mercy may all be necessary.

Practice, therapy, and a loving witness can help us endure a state without fully believing the world it creates. When depression says, “There is no future,” someone else may remember on our behalf that futures return. When shame says, “You are alone,” another person’s presence may reassure the frightened animal within you. When fear says, “Run,” the breath may offer one more moment of staying.

The conversation sharpened when we turned to hope. George has a chapter on the ways hope can deepen misery. He described a study of people who received colostomies. Some had irreversible procedures. Others had procedures that might someday be reversed. At first, the possibility of reversal seemed like an advantage. But over time, the people with potentially reversible conditions became more miserable. The possibility of escape kept them suspended. They couldn’t fully adapt because they kept imagining that their real life was waiting elsewhere.

Sharon heard attachment. In Buddhist psychology, she said, hope is often bound up with fear: hope-fear, hope-fear, hope-fear. When we cling to hope in that way, the future must unfold as we require, or we cannot be okay. The diagnosis must change. The relationship must return. The child must become who we need them to become. The company must survive. The body must recover. The grief must end.

Hope, in that form, can keep grief at bay. And when we refuse grief, we also refuse an aspect of life itself.

The alternative isn’t hopelessness. Sharon has often spoken of wise hope, and I find myself returning to that phrase repeatedly. Wise hope does not demand a particular future as the price of participation. It sees pain clearly. It does not require denial. It releases the future we insist upon without abandoning the future that is still becoming.

That distinction feels essential for anyone who leads, parents, grieves, loves, ages, organizes, or tries to repair a broken world. We are not asked to stop caring. We are not asked to stop acting. We are asked to notice when our demand that life be a certain way severs us from the life that is here.

When I think again about the opposite of suffering, I think about the people Sharon described, those who endured suffering and emerged not hardened but enlarged. I think, too, about traveling in Tibet after an earthquake and walking through a devastated city, carrying blankets, bottled water, and supplies. Buildings were gone. Lives had been torn open. And yet, again and again, I met people whose first impulse was toward concern for someone else.

I don’t mean to make suffering noble. It can embitter us. It can isolate us. It can make us cruel, frightened, controlling, or numb. But pain held in compassion, pain held in relationship, pain allowed to belong to the whole human story rather than become a private indictment, can become part of a larger life. Pain may move us towards the opposite of suffering.

Perhaps this is why George’s book may help people despite itself. It doesn’t promise to make us happy. It doesn’t offer seven steps out of misery. But understanding misery can ease the shame around misery. And, as George himself seemed to discover during our conversation, what we often want most when we share our pain is not advice. We want understanding. We want someone willing to feel, even a little, with us.

The end of suffering is not the end of pain. It’s not the achievement of uninterrupted happiness. It’s not a perfected self who no longer feels fear, envy, shame, grief, loneliness, or despair. It’s something humbler, more demanding, and more available.

It’s the capacity to say: this hurts, and I am still here. This fear is present, and it’s not the whole of me. This grief is real, and I am not alone. This hope may need to change shape, and I can still take part in life. This suffering is mine, and it also belongs to the human family.

Perhaps the opposite of suffering is not happiness after all. Perhaps it is belonging: to ourselves, to one another, and to the whole unbearable, beautiful truth of being alive.