Why do we suffer?
The problem the Buddha, the Stoics, and Job all tried to answer.
This is a question people have asked for as long as there have been people. Every serious answer is worth taking seriously — including the disagreements between them.
What philosophy has said
From the ancient Greeks to modern existentialists, the question has never gone away. Different eras answer differently, but the answers tend to cluster around a few themes: the good, the useful, the true, and what it means to be free.
What the wisdom traditions have said
The great religious and contemplative traditions typically answer the question by first changing it — from "what is the meaning of life?" to "how then shall we live?" The answers then take the form of a practice, not a proposition.
What science can and cannot say
Science can describe how life came to be, and how brains generate the experience of asking such questions in the first place. It has, however, no method for deciding what any of this should mean to us. That is left to us.
- ◆There is no single correct answer — but not all answers are equally serious.
- ◆The question tends to change the questioner as much as the questioner answers the question.
- ◆Sitting with the question is often more useful than settling it.