Why Do We Suffer?

As humans, we experience unavoidable pain. We get sick, the people we love get sick, the people we love die. There is an inherent, unavoidable amount of pain in the human experience.

We also experience extra suffering that is caused by our thoughts. As owners of incredible human brains, we have language, we can remember events from the past, we understand time, and we can evaluate things in our minds. We are great at thinking, and our amazing cognitive abilities help us in many ways. They empower us to solve problems big and small in our daily lives and they have enabled us to become the dominant species on the planet.