suffering as a concept seems so ingrained into Humanity it's almost like we should expect to suffer and that it's everywhere around us but it's not here with me right now in this room because I don't choose to suffer I have suffered enough and believe me I have gone through a lot of trials and tribulations I dug myself out of a thousand holes in order to get me to the point where I can have the privilege to do things today like go island hopping in Greece for example even though while I'm in Athens right now and
I see people from all walks of life here including people who are living on the streets and this is a fact a lot of people are going through a tough time right now and I feel this very deeply and very empathetically and I understand that this topic can be a heavy concept and I'm not saying that everyone chooses to suffer but not everyone who has a hard life is suffering I don't believe that it's something that should become a part of our identity we don't choose our circumstances but we get to choose the situations that
we put ourselves in if that makes sense you know for example years ago I was gifted Roses by my partner and I said no no no no I hate this you're wasting money there's no need for it and I got mad at him for wanting to buy me roses but last night he tried again and he bought me these three roses and I was finally happy to accept it and that made me feel so good because it's true we accept what we think we deserve and maybe at the time I didn't feel like like I
deserved love that I shouldn't have roses that I didn't deserve to have it but then I would chalk it up to oh you're wasting money this is a waste of effort when really this is a euro each so if you believe that you choose to suffer then you're going to accept that suffering much like how if you think that you are deserving of a lot of love then you will happily accept a lot of love into your life to me life is not about suffering pain doesn't make you a better person you're not a better
person just because you suffered through something especially if you're not learning the lesson from it sometimes it can even make you a worse person a bitter person from not learning from holding a grudge from resentment especially if you cannot handle the pain that comes with it and they say that pain is our biggest teacher and that we should maybe even thank the people who gave us suffering who gave us pain but I kind of still find it hard to come in terms of that but I understand what that means because when something is taken away
from you you recognize the value of what you're lacking and actually that makes you more grateful for it if you are struggling today I hope this video can help give you a different perspective on things and if you're new to my channel I'm all about improving ourselves physically mentally and spiritually so if you want to come along for the ride and see more videos from me make sure to like And subscribe to my channel and join my community and my Discord server to meet people who are just like you I believe that everyone deserves a
chance to heal from whatever is holding them back in their lives and mental health interventions like therapy can be extremely helpful better help which is the sponsor of today's video is on a mission to make starting therapy easier I have personally used better help over the last few years for various reasons like treating depression personal growth and improving my relationships everyone can benefit from it and it's affordable and much more convenient than regular in-office therapy sessions seeking therapy Tak takes courage and a level of self-awareness to admit when you need help which everyone does at
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for you if you're struggling and think you benefit from a therapy session click the link in the description or go to betterhelp.com mayis Suzuki and get 10% off your first month of therapy so thanks again to the sponsor of today's video sponsorships directly support me so I can keep making videos for you guys and I appreciate you from watching so I've been living my life Lately by the idea of stoic philosophy or stoicism which was something that is quite new to me because believe it or not I used to love to suffer this realization of
wow I actually loved suffering so much I used to seek it out it actually came to me when I went through so much that I decided that it was just enough I had enough of it life isn't supposed to be horrible all the time this is not how I wanted to live the rest of my life and how fitting is it that I'm now in the birthplace of stoicism filming this video right now for you guys I like to look back at the ow me and I thank her all the time because in all of
her lack and anger and not enoughness she gave me so much in case you don't know about this concept stoicism is about accepting that sometimes you just are in that suffering mode at the moment and because you realize that it's a defecto part of your life you overcome it by choosing to not let the suffering destroy you the stoic philosopher senica says a man is as miserable as he thinks he is it's a perspective shift as senica said we suffer more in our imagination than in reality by becoming more aware of that we might find
that the suffering wasn't even there in the first place that we actually are creating it ourselves thinking that our experience is part of our identity that it has to hurt we have to suffer when it doesn't have to be just because we went through something doesn't make us who we are and just because some someone inflicted pain on us doesn't mean that that becomes a part of us and a part of our identity it's the lesson that we maybe learn or don't learn from it that makes it a part of us and we can choose
to continue to hold on to it or we are free at any time to release it this idea honestly should not make you feel bad it should set you free to me it's like recognizing that a lot of self-induced suffering is a mirage and an illusion I've lived through it myself and obviously it's very nuanced but for some this might involve I'm doing years and years of programming and unpacking a lot of trauma but if that's you you really don't have to suffer any longer we all need to learn how to get ourselves out of
that programming that doesn't serve us we need to be our own voice of reason because if every day is pain and suffering to you then you need to find a purpose in it at least it's kind of like training for a marathon and enduring the training versus constant constant doom and for no reason they are both hard they're both painful but one of them has a purpose so choose your heart choose your pain the more you focus on your purpose the easier it is to handle everything else finding your strength to navigate through the pain
is a reward and if you focus on the pain and dwell on it it will overtake your whole life this sounds cheesy but literally sink or swim sometimes you'll find that trying to swim and survive in the water is actually the better option compared to Drowning you need to realize that even when you're sinking something different can always happen there will always be an exit for you I strongly believe that the concept of stoicism is to bring more peace to your mind and I felt that peace ever since I discovered that concept to me there
is truly no point to continue choosing suffering because of course you're going to feel pain it's natural biology that you do both physical and mental I'm probably going to be in some sort of physical and mental pain at some point in my future but do I RP over it do I get anxious over it not really stoicism is about accepting this and relieving the mind of the stress of worrying about something that is unavoidable pain is inevitable but suffering is completely optional I had a pretty enlightening conversation of my partner recently and I wanted to
share that with you and I'm so curious to hear your perspective on this as well because it's very complex but well it was more like a discourse than a conversation really we were sitting down eating dinner and he was telling me about his one encounter that has changed his entire life he visited an oranage in Brazil where he saw hopelessness everywhere around him and it was a very visceral feeling the place itself the smell the things that he was hearing and seeing and I'm not going to go too much into details but every time he
brings this up he gets really emotional about it it's something that maybe he had chanced upon and he did believe that it made him a better person and he taught him a lesson and I experienced a lot of suffering myself through my upbringing through my family having to deal with really tough mental health struggles that were never really quite dealt with because you know the society that grew up in isn't really equipped at all to handle Mental Health crisis they literally don't know what to do with it so they choose to ignore it and that's
actually why I feel so passionate about mental health and self-improvement that's one of the big reasons I didn't have the privilege of a comfortable upbringing and as an immigrant I've always seen Americans for example as being very privileged and if you have a western upbringing you are more likely to be pretty comfortable when you're growing up I know this is a bit of a blanket statement but if you grew up in a developed first world country you are probably doing fine you might have a roof over your head you might have food to eat clean
water to drink everything else around you is honestly a blessing but the vast majority of people that I interact with they don't see it that way it seems like everyone has their own version of suffering and even if you're very comfortable with basic survival necessities you're still dealing with the mass Low's hierarchy of issues like maybe your boss is mad at you and that boy is ignoring you or your best friend is gossiping about you or you're having a bad time at school or maybe you're even worried about whether or not you're going to be
seeking Enlightenment in your lifetime or something like that rather than am I going to survive am I going to have another meal in my belly I think everyone has their own concept of what suffering is to them and it doesn't make one less valid than the other and we were talking about all of this and that's when my partner brought up that if we had a kid together and the kid grows up to be very rich in privilege like you know like the way that I manifested it he would send this kid on some kind
of missionary trip to Africa to do volunteer work for a couple of months because he himself has seen suffering that changed his life that gave him a new perspective on everything and he wants this kid basically to experience what he experienced because he doesn't want the child to end up being out of touch and spoiled and not knowing any kind of suffering so then I said well what makes you think that people in these countries aren't happy and aren't satisfied and feeling blessed despite the hard life everyone has their own version of what that can
look like and I don't think that hardship and suffering and anguish always goes hand in hand and it's kind of weird for us to look at people who live in like Villages for example and see lack everywhere when they themselves don't see it also you can be very well off and still suffer a lot I know it's hard to imagine and you probably think it's out of touch but in a lot of people's heads money equals Freedom which sometimes that's not even true true either life is not black and white like that and we need
to learn that life lessons on our own time which reminded me of something that I've noticed recently I notice this thing where every person I interacted with who has gone on a missionary volunteer trip like this to a war torn country in Africa for example and I know about four of these people all of them happen to grow up rich and privileged and American or european and their parents all probably had the same thought do not get me wrong I think it's really amazing to volunteer and help people I really do but if you're not
really doing the work starting with your local community and instead you're spending thousands and thousands of dollars to travel all the way to a developing part of the world to seek out like a certain level of poverty and force that life lesson I don't know if you can force someone to learn it I truly think that these life-changing lessons that we look for it reveals itself in Divine timing and by the way when I was growing up as a child I could not even afford that kind of money to go to Africa for a few
months of volunteer it's just not something that existed in my lower middle class upbringing where I wasn't starving but I went to public school all the traveling I did when I was younger was because I was in a military family so something like traveling so far to do this type of work which I learned a new word today it's called voluntourism I mean that just seems like a luxury for me and a massive privilege and I could tell the four people who I knew who did volunteer work in Africa they felt really really good about
what they've done almost in a self-indulgent way but that's about it I don't know for sure but that's what it seemed like to me and if their lives were changed by that trip that's amazing but then they were talking about it like it's another one of their holidays and it's just something and that just somehow just never set right with me because other people's lives are not a spectacle there are legitimately great projects and Charities out there but whenever tourist money is involved and it's always systematized we always have to be a bit skeptical and
think about who is organizing these trips what exactly are they getting out of it what is their cut for example and make sure it's actually ethical for the locals and not a trip that your parents send you on or something just so you feel better about your life but if your life experience makes you more rich in your character it adds more lore to your storyline and actually gives you more meaning in your life more resilience more character more grit then that's worth it I think the biggest lesson here if it's meant for you to
learn then if anything it's a stoic lesson it helps you realize that your first world problems of things like being obsessed with someone you never met for example you keep saying the wrong things because you're awkward or you missed out on tickets to go see a concert is not that big of a deal suffering comes from not being able to control situations control things including other people but you cannot force that kind of lesson onto people because it might not turn out the way that you are hoping for it goes back to the idea that
I tend to bring up a lot which is you can influence people to do things but you cannot make people do things they need to learn in their own time to me I'm happy to not have to experience any more types of suffering and I don't want to I'm very empathetic to it having gone through a lot myself and it brings me back down to Earth all the time it makes me really grateful and appreciative of everything that I have and I cherish it but also I've seen enough suffering in my community literally right outside
of my apartment back at home and I see people suffer on the streets and when I'm in the house I grew up with my parents it was almost like every day my daily existence because my dad actually he chose suffering he chose to keep getting into situations that would land him in the hospital or in really bad situations that caused me a lot of mental torment and a lot of pain to me and my mom and then everyone around him didn't even want to be near him or else they will suffer too so did I
choose my parents maybe my soul did but I don't feel like I chose my parents and so I didn't choose that situation but I can choose to get out of that suffering so I had this Epiphany as well that people who intentionally seek out suffering like they want to constantly go through tough times for the drama for the plot that's a sign of not being healed and they seem like they haven't self enough it sounds harsh but bear with me and see this from a neutral perspective and not an emotional one because if you don't
learn from this your loved ones will suffer too everyone around you will suffer just like how I learned this behavior from my dad and I had to unlearn it so perhaps maybe in the lives of these people who want to seek out more pain who want to seek out more suffering they haven't learned that one lesson that they're meant to learn in so many religions and so many cultures we're all here to learn that one grand life lesson that we experienced in in a thousand different ways and if we don't learn it we will keep
experiencing it over and over again in different versions until one day we're going to wake up and that's when we reach Enlightenment but that lesson is not for anyone to choose and nobody knows what that lesson can look like it's for you to find out and actually do the work to uncover what that is and I'm going to leave you with this idea which might be both freeing and terrifying but it's true once I accepted that my life truly has no point and only I not anyone else can give myself purpose and meaning to it
I thought you know what screw everything I should just live in a way that makes me happy a life where I can find meaning this way I spend more time doing things that bring me joy I spend less time doing things that make me unhappy and I also spend less time being bummed out about XYZ things I won't even remember a year from now and I realized that I'm just one of billions of people alive at this moment the world won't be the same without me for sure and you either in a grand scheme of
things though we are a drop in the ocean but we're also the entire ocean in the drop and that's all okay we're all here to be present and experience it and I'm just going to make it the best experience I can with the time that I have and I hope you do the same too and yeah if you find this helpful do give me a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel and and once again I appreciate you all for watching and I hope you learned something and I'll see you in the next video [Music]
