Why do some people like suffering?

Talking about drugs, a Parisian teenager once told me: “If you don’t crash a little between doses, you don’t appreciate the difference as much. I accept the really tough times for the moments of euphoria. Since I can’t get rid of my pain, I prefer to embrace it. I have no interest in developing inner happiness; it’s too hard and takes too long. I’d rather have instant happiness, even if it isn’t real and even if it gets a little weaker every time I go for it.” Hence the emphasis on sensation and momentary pleasures, and the dismissal of the search for deep and lasting serenity as utopian. And yet, while “lousy” or unhappy intervals give life a little more variety, they are never sought out for their own sake, but merely for the contrast they provide, the promise of change they hold out.

For the writer Dominique Noguez, misery is more interesting than happiness because it has a “vividness, an extremely seductive, Luciferian intensity. It has the additional attraction . . . of not being an end in itself, but of always leaving something to anticipate (happiness, that is).” What a foolish merry-go-round: Here, just a bit more pain before your happiness! Like the madman who beats himself over the head with a hammer so that he can feel better when he stops. In short, lasting happiness is boring because it is always the same, while suffering is more exciting because it is always different. We may appreciate such contrasts for the variety and color they give life, but who wants to swap moments of joy for moments of suffering?

On the other hand, it would seem more resourceful, perhaps wise, to use suffering as a vehicle of transformation that allows us to open ourselves with compassion to those who suffer as we do, or even more than we do. It is in that sense, and that sense alone, that we should understand the Roman philosopher Seneca when he says: “Suffering may hurt, but it is not an evil.” It is not an evil when, unable to avoid it, we turn it to profit to learn and to change, while recognizing that it is never a good thing in and of itself.

On the contrary, “the desire for happiness is essential to man. It is the motivator of all our acts. The most venerable, clearly understood, enlightened, and reliable constant in the world is not only that we want to be happy, but that we want only to be so. Our very nature requires it of us,” wrote Saint Augustine in On the Happy Life. That desire inspires our every act, our every word, and our every thought so naturally that we are totally unaware of it, like the oxygen we breathe all our lives without thinking about it.

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