In our modern culture, many people tend to avoid suffering as much as possible, instead always seeking happiness for it's own sake, but who can blame them -- everyone wants to be happy after all.I'm looking for books offering a different perspective and perhaps even promoting the beneficial effects of suffering.
>>23329889That's just masochism. Christ was not a masochist. He endured for the sake of achieving a goal. He didn't seek suffering for its own sake or make something superficially spiritual or significant out of it.
>>23329889>beneficial effects of sufferingkek, this is what happens if you try to broaden yourself beyond a hedonistic horizon but your mind is still too constricted by angloid utilitarianism.
>>23329889Infinite Jest and The Pale King. Although they don't really consider what you are talking about as suffering and are more about the shortsighted pleasure seeking at cost of long term happiness which results in long term needless suffering.
>>23330078>needlessI meant to replace that with "pointless" but forgot.
>>23329889>the beneficial effects of suffering.Such as?
>>23329897I guess that's what I'm looking for but I was not eloquent about it. I'm going through some tough times and I usually get through things by reading, sometimes as an escape from reality but this time I actually have to deal with it; I can't just sit it out.I'm looking for literary fiction which deals with themes of suffering and doesn't try to avoid it/where suffering is inevitable and the MC knows there's no happy ending but they still try anyway. Either that or philosophy but not useless self help books.
>>23329889I'm sure there's good practical self-help books.Life has seasons. There's sowing season where you bust your ass and work hard and get nothing for it. Then there's a harvest where you can relax and collect on all you've done.I'm almost done with this sowing season bullshit.
>>23330180Idk. On Fr Garrigou-Lagrange's wikipedia page, it says that he wrote "an essay on the problem of pain, in the essay he mentions the intellectual, moral and artistic advantages of suffering". I was interested in exploring that line of thought because surely he wasn't the only one who thought about this before
>>23329889>promoting the beneficial effects of suffering.i don't like that approach.imagine someone being tortured and skinned alive while some stupid philosopher out there talks about the "benefits" of that.
>>23330635Maybe promoting isn't the right word to use but I mean stuff that recognizes that suffering is bad but shows how can still find good out of it
>>23330620same poster:If you try to refuse this dynamic of life, and live either the penitent life of suffering or the cozy NEET pleasure-only no-stress allowed life, everything will crumble around you. You will have either a legacy of bitterness and resentment, or no legacy at all.
>>23330646I'm not trying to live one of the extremes. I'm just going through a difficult situation and want some books where people deal with it. I recognize that it won't always be this way and things will get better.
>>23330614>Either that or philosophy but not useless self help books.For the theology of accepting divine providence, including suffering, read: Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence. It is a short, profound book.Victor Frankl, Man's Search for MeaningWalter Ciszek, He Leadeth Me. A Catholic priest in Russia is held for several years in Lubianka prison, then sent to Siberia for over a decade of hard labor. His journey involves tremendous psychological and physical suffering. The descriptions of Lubianka are evocative of Kafka.>Lubianka had formerly been a hotel. Its cells were still more like hotel rooms than prison cells. They were small but neat, very clean, with a shining wooden floor, and whitewashed walls and ceiling lit by a naked light bulb hanging from the center. There was a regular window in the room, but it was completely barred and covered over with a huge sheet of tin. Only a little bit of sky showed through at the top, where the tin had been tilted away from the window frame to let in light and air. The door was a regular hotel-like door, but iron-sheeted, with a special bolt operated from the outside and a round peephole for the guard to look through that was there was no end to it, at least as far as the prisoner could control or foresee. The days seemed to stretch out endlessly, hour after hour, with no variation other than the fact the guard might begin serving meals from one end of the corridor instead of the other and so vary by an hour or more the prisoner's constant craving for food. An hour can seem an eternity in such isolation, and time has little meaning at all after a while. A week was simply seven identical twenty-four-hour days, a month simply a mathematical way of marking four such weeks, thirty such days of sameness. The world of the solitary confined is a universe of its own... And then there was the silence. Whether to enhance the morguelike quiet of Lubianka, or simply for comfort and cleanliness, the guards wore special cloth shoes so you couldn't hear them moving along the corridor until they were practically on top of your door. There was never anyone to talk to; there were few sounds along the corridor except at mealtimes. As a result, prisoners became abnormally sensitive to the slightest sound. You couldn't help straining unconsciously, nearly always, to hear something that would break the total and all-pervading silence that seemed to close in around you and threaten you constantly. The sudden sounds of the guard swinging open the peephole or of a door bolt being crashed back made everyone jumpy. It was a cause almost for terror, and yet the tomblike quiet was constantly terrifying in its own way. I spent five years in Lubianka, most of it alone in such silence.
