Why Do We Hurt? On Suffering and the Search for Meaning

Recovered still, Source SIGNAL 10-2025, integrity 46%.

SIGNAL 10-2025 // Fragment: Why Do We Hurt? On Suffering and the Search for Meaning

Translation Confidence: 55
Recovered From: /ghost_archive_2025/
Declassification Date: 2025-10-09

I. The Question – Why Do We Hurt?

There are many kinds of pain.

The sudden pain of loss. The slow pain of being overlooked. The dull, invisible ache that hums in the background of a life. Some pain leaves scars. Others leave silence, an absence where meaning should have been^[1]. We are told that suffering builds character, that it has purpose, that it refines us. But often, it just hurts. And sometimes, it stays.

Philosophy did not invent suffering. But it did begin with it.

The earliest questions were not about atoms or gods. They were about pain. Why must I suffer? Why do others suffer more? Is it punishment? Is it chance? Is there a way through it? And if not, what does that mean?

The religious traditions tried to answer it. The Buddha built his entire path around suffering. So did the Hebrew poets. So did the early Christians and mystics and martyrs. But even those who rejected religion could not reject the question. Suffering is the one fact no one escapes. And so it becomes the place where every worldview is tested.

Some pain has a name. Other pain has only questions. What makes one person survive the unspeakable, while another breaks from a word? Why do some stories of suffering make us stronger, while others unravel us completely?

This essay does not promise answers. It begins instead with the ache that no system can fully soothe. Because to ask why we suffer is not just to seek relief. It is to ask what kind of world this is, and what kind of creature we are.

And perhaps, most hauntingly: what if there is no reason?

II. The Historic Spark – The Philosophers Who Stared Back

For most traditions, suffering is not merely a problem to be solved, it is the raw fact that makes philosophy necessary. It sits before the abstractions. Before questions of truth, or freedom, or meaning. Before knowledge, there is the wound. And though many have tried to argue their way past it, some have stopped at the edge of suffering and stayed there. They did not try to explain it away. They made it the center.

Arthur Schopenhauer was one of the few Western philosophers who admitted that suffering might not be an error or a failure of perspective, but rather the underlying condition of life. Writing in the 19th century as a lonely figure in the shadow of German idealism, he rejected the optimism of his age. Against Hegel’s triumphant march of reason and spirit, Schopenhauer offered something quieter and colder: the view that life, in its essence, is will, an endless, unconscious striving. And from this striving comes pain. Not episodically, but structurally. To will is to lack. And to lack is to suffer. His was not a doctrine of despair, but of unsparing clarity.

In a world that worshipped reason and progress, he asked a darker question: what if pain is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be endured with open eyes?

Epictetus had fewer illusions to begin with. Born into slavery in the Roman Empire around 55 CE, he lived his early life under someone else’s control. And yet it was within that life of restriction that he crafted one of the most resilient and quietly powerful philosophies of suffering ever conceived. For Epictetus, pain is real, but its meaning is not fixed. The outer world may grind against us, but how we respond belongs to us alone.

Suffering, he claimed, emerges not from the events themselves, but from our judgments about them. If we can learn to distinguish between what is up to us and what is not, we can begin to loosen suffering’s grip.

His Stoicism is often mistaken for indifference. But it is not coldness. It is discipline. An inner sovereignty forged in fire. Pain reveals what we can and cannot control. And in that clarity, Epictetus finds a kind of freedom.

Albert Camus came two thousand years later, after the world had seen too many systems collapse. Writing in the 1940s in the aftermath of war and genocide, he no longer trusted the old answers. He did not begin with metaphysics, or ethics, or theology. He began with revolt. The absurd, he said, is the gap between our hunger for meaning and the silent indifference of the universe. It is not that life has no meaning. It is that it refuses to give us one. And so the question becomes: can we live without it?

Camus did not seek a cure for suffering. He believed the attempt to rationalise pain, to fold it into some divine or teleological plan, was itself a moral failure. The honest response was to look the absurd in the face and still choose to live. To suffer, and yet not submit. To create, even when the canvas will be burned.

These three thinkers share little in tone, temperament, or tradition. Schopenhauer is metaphysical, Epictetus ethical, Camus existential. But all three agree on this: to be human is to suffer. And in that shared wound, they each built a philosophy. Not to explain it away, but to meet it.

III.1 – Arthur Schopenhauer

“Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim.” ^[2]

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788, into a world already pulling itself apart. His childhood straddled Enlightenment promise and post-revolutionary collapse. His father, a stern merchant, instilled in him a sense of cold rationality and fierce independence. But it was his mother who immersed him in the literary and philosophical world of his time. Schopenhauer grew up disillusioned with both: suspicious of optimism, alienated from society, and scornful of the era’s faith in progress.

He came of age while German philosophy was at its most confident. Hegelian idealism claimed history moved according to reason, that Spirit revealed itself in the unfolding of time. But Schopenhauer saw something else: war, hunger, repetition, cruelty. He dismissed Hegel’s grand systems as pompous illusions. “A colossal piece of mystification,” he called them. In their place, Schopenhauer built a philosophy not on Spirit or Reason, but on Will: a blind, insatiable force that underlies all existence.

In his central work, The World as Will and Representation (1818), Schopenhauer divides reality into two halves. First, there is the world as we experience it, as representation, shaped by our minds. But behind that experience is something deeper, darker, and more primal: the Will. Not will in the human sense of conscious intention, but a metaphysical drive. Pure, directionless, endless striving.

This Will animates all things: the plant reaching for light, the animal fleeing pain, the human wanting what it cannot have. And because Will is never satisfied, because to will is to lack, life itself becomes suffering.

In Schopenhauer’s view, happiness is not real in itself. It is merely the brief silence between needs^[3]. We do not enjoy satisfaction, we are only briefly free of wanting. And that is why, he says, “life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.” This is not a temporary condition to be fixed with better planning or wiser choices. It is structural. To exist is to suffer. And therefore, any honest philosophy must begin there.

But Schopenhauer’s bleakness is not nihilism. From this recognition of suffering, he draws out two paths. The first is aesthetic: in art, especially music, he believes we can momentarily escape the Will. Music, for him, is a direct expression of the Will without the suffering it brings. It lifts us out of our own desire. The second path is ethical: through compassion. Because we all share the same Will, to recognise suffering in another is to see our own reflected back. Schopenhauer’s ethics are not built on duty or consequence, but on fellow-feeling in a world of shared torment. Compassion, he writes, “is the basis of all true justice.”

His later essays, like On the Sufferings of the World and On the Vanity of Existence, only deepen this view. He does not soften. He does not retract. But he sharpens the point: we may not be able to avoid suffering, but we can choose to face it without illusion. And in that cold, unsentimental, and oddly tender clarity, there may be something like dignity.

Schopenhauer was not widely read in his own time. But in the century that followed, after the wars, after the broken promises of reason, he became prophetic. Nietzsche took up his challenge. Freud borrowed his concept of the unconscious Will. And generations of artists, composers, and existentialists found in him a voice that named what others tried to ignore.

Suffering, he argued, is not a question to be answered. It is the condition we must learn to see without flinching.

III.2 – Epictetus

“It’s not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.”
—Epictetus, Discourses

Born a slave in the Roman Empire around 55 CE, Epictetus early life remains mostly undocumented, but it is clear that he was owned by Epaphroditus, a freedman of Nero. At some point, Epictetus suffered an injury or illness that left him physically disabled. Some accounts say his master broke his leg. Others say the damage was congenital. Either way, his body bore suffering in its permanent form. But what emerged from that life was not a lament. It was a discipline.

Epictetus was a Stoic, but unlike the more polished voices of the Roman elite, Seneca, with his wealth and political clout, or Marcus Aurelius, with his emperor’s pen, Epictetus taught in the open, directly, harshly, without decoration. After gaining his freedom, he established a small school in Nicopolis, where he taught through conversation and example. His teachings, recorded by his student Arrian in the Discourses and distilled in the Enchiridion, form one of the most clear-eyed responses to suffering in philosophical history.

At the center of his thought is a division so simple it almost disappears: what is up to us, and what is not. Disease, death, misfortune, cruelty, these are not up to us. They lie outside our control. But how we understand them, how we judge them, how we respond, those, Epictetus insists, belong to us alone. It is not suffering itself that destroys us, but our belief that we were not meant to suffer. Our protest, not our pain.

This is not stoic detachment in the cartoon sense, emotionless endurance or cold indifference. For Epictetus, control is not about suppression, but freedom. He does not teach us to deny pain. He teaches us to deny its tyranny.

“Men are disturbed not by the things which happen, but by the opinions about the things” ^[4]

Yet his teachings are not abstract. Epictetus is practical to the bone. He tells his students to rehearse hardship. To wake each day prepared for insult, injury, death. Not to wallow in fear, but to be ready. “Don’t say, ‘I have lost it,’” he writes of grief. “Say, ‘I have given it back.’” This is not the denial of grief, but the framing of it within a world where nothing was ever truly ours to begin with.

What makes Epictetus remarkable is not his system, but his embodiment of it. He lived what he taught. His words are not meant to impress, they are meant to anchor. There is little speculation in his writing. No metaphysical digressions. Just the task: to train the self to meet pain with clarity and courage.

His influence has echoed far beyond ancient philosophy. In the early Christian desert fathers, in the manual discipline of soldiers, in cognitive behavioral therapy, which borrows heavily from Stoic methods of reframing judgment. Even today, his words appear in military handbooks and personal journals. Quiet reminders that strength is not found in power, but in perception.

Epictetus does not deny suffering. He denies its dominion. And in that refusal, he makes room for something else to grow, agency, even in the most broken circumstances. That is his answer to pain: not to erase it, but to refuse to be erased by it.

III.3 – Albert Camus

“There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.” ^[5]

Albert Camus did not believe in heaven. He had seen too much of hell.

Born in 1913 in French Algeria to a poor pied-noir family, Camus grew up in the sun-bleached outskirts of colonial life. His father died in the First World War when Camus was an infant. His illiterate, half-deaf, and emotionally distant mother worked as a cleaning woman. From the beginning, Camus understood that the world was indifferent. There was no special protection, no promise of fairness. His genius was not to flee this knowledge, but to let it shape him.

During the Nazi occupation of France, Camus joined the Resistance. He edited the underground newspaper Combat, writing with a clarity that cut through both propaganda and despair. But it was in The Myth of Sisyphus that he made his most enduring philosophical mark. There, he begins with what he calls the “only serious philosophical question” ^[6]: whether life is worth living. Not because of sorrow, but because of absurdity. The yawning contradiction between our hunger for meaning and a world that refuses to give it.

Camus does not believe that suffering teaches us anything by default. He doesn’t speak of trials as refinement, or pain as purifying. In fact, he warns against these rationalisations. “There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn,” he writes, but he does not mean contempt for life, he means contempt for the lie. The lie that suffering must have meaning. That pain must serve a higher end. Camus rejects that framework. He sees it as the ultimate betrayal of the human spirit. If we cannot accept suffering without making it holy, then we have made a god out of denial.

And yet he refuses nihilism. His famous image of Sisyphus, endlessly rolling a boulder uphill only to watch it fall, is not a cry of defeat. It is a cry of rebellion. If the universe is silent, then meaning is what we make in spite of it^[7]. If there is no plan, then freedom becomes a form of protest. We choose to live, not because life is just, but because living itself is an act of defiance.

Camus’s suffering is not Schopenhauer’s metaphysical condition, nor Epictetus’s moral training ground. It is a brute fact. A given. And yet he finds in it a fierce, almost luminous courage. In The Plague ^[8], he tells the story of a town consumed by disease. Its hero, Dr. Rieux, does not find hope in God or fate or destiny. He finds it in tending to the dying, one day at a time, without illusion. That, for Camus, is heroism: not the triumph over suffering, but the refusal to abandon dignity in its midst.

He called it lucid revolt. A form of truth that doesn’t demand consolation. And that revolt, he believed, was not cold. It was tender. “In the depth of winter,” he wrote, “I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

Camus died young, in a car crash in 1960. He had won the Nobel Prize five years earlier, and never stopped resisting both despair and dogma. In his work, suffering is neither redemptive nor meaningless.

IV. Tensions and Echoes

Each of these philosophers began with the same premise: suffering is undeniable. But what they made of it could not be more different. Their answers don’t align along a spectrum. They cross, fracture, contradict. And in doing so, they offer three radically divergent ways to live with pain.

Schopenhauer and Epictetus: System vs. Stance

Schopenhauer sees suffering as the engine of life itself, inescapable, rooted in the ceaseless hunger of the Will. To him, freedom is an illusion; all beings are trapped in the same cycle of wanting and lacking.

Epictetus, by contrast, insists that suffering is not what happens to us but how we judge what happens. Pain exists, but whether we suffer is a matter of discipline.

Schopenhauer offers understanding, bleak and profound. Epictetus offers sovereignty, demanding and resolute. One says: you are not free, but you can know. The other says: you are free, but you must choose to be.

Epictetus and Camus: Control vs. Confrontation

Where Epictetus teaches mastery over one’s own perceptions, Camus finds even that to be too much. The absurd is not a problem to be solved but a condition to endure. Camus will not grant meaning to pain, not even the meaning of moral growth. He rejects Stoic clarity in favor of existential honesty.

And yet, both thinkers share a kind of defiance. Epictetus turns inward, builds a fortress of the will. Camus remains exposed, but refuses to kneel. Both speak of dignity. But for Epictetus, it is found in virtue; for Camus, in resistance.

Camus and Schopenhauer: Absurdity vs. Resignation

Schopenhauer saw the futility of striving and urged quiet withdrawal, pierced only by the soft light of compassion. Camus saw the same futility, but spat it out like spoiled wine. He would not bow before meaninglessness. If suffering is baked into existence, then so be it, but he would still write, still love, still climb the hill.

Schopenhauer leans toward silence; Camus toward rebellion^[9].^[10] And yet, in both, there is a strange tenderness. Each sees pain not just as a private burden, but as a thread that binds us to others.

V. Return to the Question

Why do we hurt? It’s the first question a child asks when they scrape their knee and are met with silence. It’s the question whispered by the grief-stricken when no one calls. It’s the question buried inside the sleepless, the displaced, the betrayed. We do not ask it out of philosophy.

We ask it because the pain is already there. The asking is what makes us human.

We’ve seen three attempts to hold the weight of that question. One said it is the nature of life to ache. One said it is not the pain, but the story we tell about it. One said there is no story, and still we must carry on. None of them gave comfort. All of them gave form.

[ARCHIVE FOOTER – TRANSLATION SUMMARY]

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