Um, can't we just do some woodcarving instead?
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2026
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If you consider learning, training, and/or practice to be suffering then you are setting yourself up for failure.
This is some weird masculinity bs.
Uh, I was with you until you went for the "weird masculinity" thing. (at best, mind you)
Women are my heroes upon many, many things.
I felt this was a humanistic statement..?
"No pain, no gain" which is the slogan which led several of my schoolmates to injure themselves in weight training class.
To me this rings the same.
I find that a narrow interpretation of the meaning which by no means covers the full message.
Also, if you're looking for exacting, B&W interpretations of most of these quotes, that covers all possibilities so to speak, you're probably better off paging through a dictionary, or maybe looking for religion.
Radical change does hurt. You gotta let go of dhit sometimes. Learning involves necessarily stepping outside your confidence and basically assuring some degree of social harm. Training is hard.
Men, famously good at dealing with all those things.
Radical change does not require pain. The understanding you're changing from, the naivety, that can cause suffering. Learning moves you away from that. Experiences of suffering less tend to be joyful ones.
Learning can be done with other people. Overcoming challenge tends to come with moments of vulnerability. Sharing those moments with friends makes your relationship stronger while removing the burden.
I agree you can make progress while suffering but i disagree that the suffering is necessary for progress. I think it hinders it.
People attempting to live up to the modern idea of masculinity tend to choose the route of suffering due to isolation, hence the "famously good at.." I used to be one of those people, and that suffering was completely unnecessary.
I was being sarcastic. Men are all whiny cowards.
Haha yeah given the other flak it was hard not to get wooshed.
Part of improving yourself is fundamentally denying impulses and habits you're used to from before. Eating healthier can be fun and taste good, but you still suffer cravings for junk food, or now that you're eating smaller portions only until you stop being hungry—instead of until you're stuffed—theres a minor amount of suffering to that.
Wanting to get better at socializing means making a lot of mistakes that can be humiliating. You could even have your mistakes recorded and posted online for millions of people to laugh at.
It's hard to say how you'll suffer, but improving your life and being a better person costs you something even if it's just the comfort and familiarity of how you used to be. The magnitude of suffering and how often you experience that varies though. And it's balanced by things being better like being more flexible, strong, feeling or looking better, being able to speak publicly or to people you find intimidating.
Fundamentally though you are literally carving away familiar parts of you to shape yourself into a different person. That change from habit is enough for people to call it suffering. You'll likely pine for the way things used to be. A married man with kids might sometimes wish he was living a simpler life as a bachelor, but also know their life is better with their wife and kids in their life.
You have a flawed and narrow understanding of what “suffering” means.
Pain or something more difficult to endure than voluntary mild discomfort.
you cannot learn without pain. you cannot learn without suffering.
sounds like you have a complex with masculinity or something.
you cannot learn without pain. you cannot learn without suffering.
While I've had a few hard lessons as a result of stupidity, the vast majority of my learning and training has been an experience of pleasure.
It's fun to fill curiosity, it feels good to use your body.
sounds like you have a complex with masculinity or something.
Yep! The pursuit of other's perception of it led me to a lot of needless suffering in life.
I think you're misconstruing the concept of pain and suffering with traumatic and torturous.
when you are hit, is it not painful? do you not suffer injury? the event, though possibly traumatic, was not the lesson. the lesson is the pain you suffered to not allow yourself to be hit again.
you learn by studying, doing, experiencing. this takes time, effort, willpower. all a drain on your finite resources as a mortal being. just by existing you are suffering, though the pain of existence is something you have grown accustomed to.
when a child learns how to stack blocks for the first time, they suffer through endless trials and errors until they become proficient in it. they suffer emotionally, physically, and yet they persevere. the same child as an adult attempts to stack something else. they suffered to learn that ability though they may not remember it, the lesson still remains.
the point is, you did experience pain and suffering to learn what know are today. you continue to suffer today, even though the pain is unrecognizable to you.
existence itself is suffering, but we distract ourselves from the pain by focusing on the achievements.
every trial is punctuated by the reward at the end, even if the reward is the end of the trial.
This is to grind the concept of enduring pain as to be the mere act of existing. You may be conflating suffering with expending the renewable resource of energy which we replenish nightly.
We suffer growing pains, we suffer depression, we suffer from disease.
I don't see the expression of energy without pain as something that is suffered. Something which gives joy and pleasure is also antithetical to the concept of suffering.
I am not saying we can not suffer and learn at the same time. In fact your example for a child is true. But i disagree that the analogy carries into adolescence and adulthood. I am saying that the vast majority of growth and learning is not contingent on the experience of suffering. That learning and growing can be a joyful and pleasurable experience.
Suffering related to learning and growth is often put there by an external actor: bad coach, bad instructor, unsafe or incorrect method, etc...
It is learned how to experience growth and whether we enjoy learning with or without suffering.
I am 14 and this is deep.