It is clear that nobody escapes it. The forms vary enormously, the intensity varies, the timing varies - but suffering, in some shape, finds everyone. It is the one thing that does not discriminate.

The Buddha made this the very first of his Four Noble Truths: dukkha - often translated as suffering, but more precisely, the unsatisfactoriness that runs through all conditioned existence. Not just pain or grief, but the low-grade friction of impermanence, of things not quite landing the way you wanted, of the gap between what is and what you hoped for. He did not say life is suffering to be pessimistic. He said it to be accurate - to name the condition before attempting to address it. You cannot treat what you will not acknowledge.

We are not, however, very good at talking about it honestly. We either sanitize it into something inspirational, or we compete over it, or we hide it entirely. None of these serve us particularly well. So here is an attempt at something more honest - about what suffering actually is, where it comes from, and what, if anything, we can do with it.

The kinds.

Physical suffering is perhaps the most legible kind - the body makes itself impossible to ignore. I have lived with chronic illness and autoimmune conditions since childhood, and what I can say about it is that it becomes, over time, a kind of background noise you learn to function within. Not gracefully, not without cost, but you learn. Asthma attacks in overcrowded metros. Palpitations that send you to the hospital more times than you would like. A body that is perpetually negotiating with itself. You carry it because you have no choice, and eventually carrying it becomes part of how you move through the world.

And then there is suffering that goes beyond inconvenience into something much closer to devastation - the kind that does not leave room for function. A diagnosis that takes the future away. A disease that consumes the body so completely that the person inside is barely alive anymore. The loss of someone around whom you built the whole architecture of your life - a loss so large it does not fit into ordinary language and does not pass the way ordinary grief passes. The loss of self: of who you were, what gave you direction, what made you make sense to yourself. Purpose dissolving under you like ground that was supposed to hold. Fates that feel, to those living them, like a cruelty that was not deserved and cannot be explained. These are not rare. They are happening to someone right now, somewhere not far from where you are reading this or maybe to you yourself.

This kind of suffering - the physical, the body-consuming, the catastrophic - is visible to yourself, and sometimes to others. There are kinds that exist with no outward sign. The anxiety that sits in your chest during a motorcycle ride on a busy highway. The specific claustrophobia of being pressed into a public train with no room to exist. The fear that is not dramatic enough to name but constant enough to exhaust you. The experience of being in a room where everyone else seems to belong more than you do, and staying anyway. Abuse that wears one down and strips something from you over time. The losses. The people you cannot get back.

And then there is the kind that happens closest - inside what is supposed to be the safest place, at the hands of someone you love. Words that replay long after the moment has passed. The particular exhaustion of being hurt by someone who also made you. That kind of suffering is among the hardest to speak about, because naming it feels like a humongous and irrational betrayal but not naming it means carrying it alone - so most people do neither, and it lives somewhere in the middle, unnamed and heavy.

Then there is the suffering that comes from circumstance - from what you were born into and had no say in. The fractures that happen in families. The financial realities that shape what is available to you and what is not. The everyday indignities that are simply part of navigating certain public spaces as a woman - the harassment that is so common it almost stops registering, except it never really does, and it touches everyone regardless of age.

These are not exceptional experiences. They are ordinary ones, for a very large number of people, including myself. They are the texture of middle class life in a crowded city - not a tragedy, just a fact of what the conditions are.

The comparison problem.

There is a particular trap that suffering invites, which is the urge to rank it. To look upward and feel cheated, or to look downward and feel guilty for acknowledging your own pain at all. Both directions are distorting.

The truth is that suffering is not purely external. It is a function of what happens outside and what happens inside - the intersection of circumstance and the particular interior landscape you bring to it. Two people can face the same loss and be devastated to entirely different degrees, not because one is weaker or more deserving, but because of everything accumulated before that moment: what they had been given, what they had been taught, what they had already survived, what they still had to lean on.

The Buddha pointed at this with his concept of tanha - craving or clinging - as the second arrow. The first arrow is the event itself: the loss, the pain, the circumstance. The second arrow is what we do with it internally - the resistance, the replaying, the narrative of why it should not have happened. He was not saying the first arrow does not hurt. He was saying we often drive the second one in ourselves, and that the two together cause more damage than the first alone. The external conditions matter enormously, but they do not fully determine the suffering. The inside does some of the work too.

This means that evaluating someone’s suffering by its external cause alone will almost always lead you wrong. The person who appears to have it easier might be carrying something you cannot see. The threshold at which something becomes unbearable is not a fixed number - it is specific to a person, a history, a moment. Comparison, in this light, is not just unhelpful. It is a category error.

I want to say plainly that I might have been lucky in some ways, because it is true and because I think honesty about this matters as much as honesty about difficulty and suffering. I was never made to feel the weight of financial precarity while I was still young enough that it would have shaped me differently. I was able to come out the other side of illnesses that others have not. My mother has been my constant pillar and source of truly unconditional love and support. Someone once said something I have not been able to shake: you can be very deep in water, but a person drowns not because of the depth alone but for not getting out in time. The depth is not the verdict. But it determines how hard getting out is, and how long it takes, and sometimes whether luck or something you cannot name finds you before you run out of time. Sometimes it is not just will or effort or character that determines who comes out. Sometimes it is also timing, or a hand that appeared when it did not have to. I find something calming in that because it shows the presence of distress alone is not the sentence.

I was ultimately able to pursue what I wanted to pursue. None of this was guaranteed. Other people, facing versions of the same circumstances, have not had the same outcome.

Acknowledging this does not diminish what was hard. The two things coexist. Life tends to be that way.

What we can do with it.

Nothing is permanent. The Buddha called this anicca - impermanence - one of the three marks of all existence. Everything arises and passes. The suffering you are in right now is not the final state. Neither, for that matter, is the good. This is both the consolation and the sting of it: you cannot hold on to either one. What you can do is learn to move with it rather than brace against it.

Suffering will come for everyone in one form or another. The question is not how to avoid it - you cannot - but what you make of having been through it, and what you do with other people who are in the middle of theirs.

Being kind when you are suffering yourself is genuinely difficult. I do not think we should pretend otherwise or feel guilty that it is not always possible. The Buddhist practice of karuna - compassion - is often presented as a lofty ideal, a thing for monks on mountainsides. But its most practical form is much simpler: the recognition that the person in front of you is also carrying something. You may not be able to help. You may not have the capacity. But you can at least try to not add to it. That circle does not stop at the edge of our own species either - speciesism is real and the suffering it causes is not smaller for being less spoken about, but that is a harder, separate conversation than this essay has room for.

Suffering being universal does not make it easier. But it does make it less isolating, once you let it. The person next to you on the train, the one in the meeting, the one you are frustrated with - they have a plate too. It just looks different from yours.