James is a plastic surgeon, fresh out of residency with his own practice. James has a lot of things ahead of him: he needs to learn how to do business administration, hire his team, keep up with the newest trends in his field, to name a few. Many of his peers in medical school dropped out for various reasons and James is one of the rare ones who actually finished everything to be at his own practice. And on one day, James discovers that he’s losing hair on the side of his head.
Donna is a senior software engineer at a big tech company and recently switched over to a promising startup. She has an impressive resume that others aspire to have and as such, she received a lucrative signing bonus with the authority to hire her own team. She interviewed and hired the people she liked the most, but for some reason the team is not delivering well and her days are filled with meetings that drag on and on. The upcoming demo is not looking to be on schedule.
LeAnn is a newlywed wife with a pretty sensible and noble dream: make others around her happy. People are taking her up on her dream and she is well received by the people around her, but she notices that as time goes by the newlywed life is not going as well as she had hoped. Nearly every night LeAnn and her husband go to bed mad and although she lives the day surrounded with people who are happy thanks to her, she has to go back home.
James, Donna, and LeAnn are all suffering in their lives. The crazy thing is, they all have perfectly good reasons to be happy in their lives. They have great jobs, they have autonomy, they’re married. Then why do they suffer?
How many people suffer in the same circumstance as James? Probably a lot. The same goes for LeAnn and Donna, too; but everybody who suffers has slight variances in their lives. They may be different in age, they may be different in fields, they may be different in nationality and such.
So what is it that makes people suffer? Is it the situation they’re in? Well, although a lot of people would suffer in the scenarios of James, Donna, and LeAnn, we can’t guarantee that everybody would be suffering in the same way. There are many doctors who start their practice happily, there are many leaders of startups happily working on projects that are behind schedule, there are many happy newlywed people.
Buddha took a generalized view of the phenomenon called suffering and he categorized it into the three poisons: greed, anger, and ignorance. Let’s look at how each of these play a factor in suffering.
James was always interested in the fast track to success. The reason being, when he gets to success as soon as possible he can then be happy for the long remainder of his life. He not only wanted to get to success, but he wanted to get there quickly.
Opening a practice was supposed to be exactly that: success. Things were supposed to get very easy from now on but it actually proved to be otherwise; there was a lot more work to do with a practice than being in residency. It is at this point James realized that even when he gets the business going, this will never end: there will always be the next hard thing to do. What he chased was a mirage.
The reason why this is a problem for James isn’t that there’s too much work to do. Having a practice is also not a problem. The problem for James is that, he wants success and quick success, AND it to be easy. But none of those things are available for free, and no matter how much success you have there is more success you could have.
Donna’s meetings go on and on and on not because there is too much work, it’s because the team cannot get to agreeing on anything with ease. Donna is, rightfully, a proud engineer with a lot of accomplishments under her belt. But because she also hand-picked engineers who are of similar caliber, it is difficult for the people to concede opinions.
Everyone thinks they know what they’re doing, and everyone thinks that the way they’re doing it is the right way of doing it. When nobody is willing to budge, what can you do? You have to talk on and on and on until you win the verbal war. But Donna is about to lose her mind because she is the leader and need the team to follow her lead, but she hired competent people who share the same belief about being right.
Donna having opinions based on her expertise is not the problem. Donna’s team being rich with expertise is also not the problem. Donna is suffering because she cannot let go of the idea that she is right and others are wrong. Donna sees everything as a battle between right and wrong, but unfortunately so does everyone else. Donna wants to be right, but in Donna’s viewpoint only one person can be right and all other team members want to be right at the same time.
LeAnn wants to make people around her happy but ironically the person closest to her is not happy. LeAnn wants to make others happy because that is how she was educated, how she was supposed to behave all throughout her childhood.
The way she was taught, this was the good way to live. But why doesn’t the good way lead to a happy life? With marriage came a lot of new challenges in LeAnn’s life because the definition of a good way to live, which was so unconscious for her, was not shared by her husband.
Her husband believed in taking care of the self and not having any kind of personal loss, and LeAnn admired that when they were dating because she saw a man who tended to himself while she always tended to other people. But now that they were married, they were one unit; does LeAnn have to live like her husband or does her husband have to live like her?
The reason why this is a problem for LeAnn isn’t her husband or her established way of life. The problem for LeAnn is that she did not understand the full terms and conditions for a marriage beyond a legal union and cohabitation. Just like how purchasing a car also comes with payments, insurance bills, and gas / electricity, marriage comes with a lot of other terms but it was her ignorance that greatly oversimplified the concept.
James suffers from greed. Donna suffers from anger. LeAnn suffers from ignorance. So from seemingly great conditions of life they suffer. The converse can also be true: from seemingly a horrible condition of life, as long as you don’t have greed, anger, or ignorance, you will be free of suffering.
The antidotes to these poisons are restraint, calm, and wisdom. How would James, Donna, and LeAnn apply those in their lives? I’ll leave that for your exploration.