I have the intuition that voluntary suffering might not be bad. This is primarily due to personal experience: I often feel sad (sympathy) when I encounter sad stories or sad situations, but I don’t have the intuition that this is bad for me, because I don’t feel like I ought to look away or stop feeling sad in response to these and I often feel like thinking/learning/reading more about these situations even if I feel more sadness because of it (and I usually do). This happens to me with both real and fictional situations (I was a fan of tragedies for a while). Furthermore, sometimes in the past, when I’ve been depressed about my own life, I didn’t want to be happy and even preferred to be miserable.
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It’s suffering that’s bad, intrinsically (though suffering can be instrumentally good)
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I’m a hedonistic utilitarian, and I think that even voluntary suffering is be intrinsically bad, as long as it’s still suffering at that point.
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Buddhism would say that if you experience sadness without craving that the sadness go away, you continue to feel sadness but you don’t suffer from it.
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My intuition is that suffering is bad, but sometimes (all things considered) I prefer to suffer in a particular instance (e.g. in service of some other value). In such cases it would be better for my welfare if I did not suffer, but I still prefer to.
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I think we don’t quite have the words to distinguish between all these things in English, but in my mind there’s something like
- pain – the experience of negative valence
- suffering – the experience of pain (i.e. the experience of the experience of negative valence)
- expected suffering – the experience of pain that was expected, so you only suffer for the pain itself
- unexpected suffering – the experience of pain that was not expected, so you suffer both the pain itself and the pain of suffering itself from it not being expected and thus having negative valence
Of them all, unexpected suffering is the worst because it involves both pain and meta-pain.
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I noticed that reading only “positive” and “joyous” stories eventually feel empty. The answer seem that sad elements in a story bring more depth than the fun/joyous ones. In that sense, sadness in stories act as a signal of deepness, but also a way to access some deeper part of our emotions and internal life.