Transcript of Suffering is the only honest certainty

There's one experience no human being has ever escaped and no human being ever will. It isn't love. It isn't joy. It isn't even death. It's suffering. Pain touches you long before death ever does. And it lingers long after pleasure fades. You know it because it has already branded your life. Whether in the form of grief, rejection, disease, failure, or that dull emptiness that eats away at you in the middle of the night. Think about it. Everything else in life can be doubted. Success is unstable. Happiness slips through your fingers. Even memory betrays you. But pain, pain stays. Pain insists. It doesn't ask for permission. It carves itself into the body, into the mind, into history. A child loses her mother to cancer. A man works his whole life only to be discarded by the company that promised him security. A nation burns while the world watches through screens. These aren't exceptions. They are the rule. And that's why suffering is the only honest certainty. It doesn't flatter you. It doesn't lie to you. It doesn't pretend to be something it isn't. It's there when you wake up with dread. When you bury someone you love. When you realize that no dream, no matter how bright, can shield you from the shadow waiting behind it. Philosophers have fought over truth for centuries. Religions have tried to sanctify it. Science has tried to suppress it. Yet the only thing that has never been defeated, never been disproved, never been avoided is suffering. The rest is illusion. And if that statement unsettles you, good. It should because deep down you already know it's true. The first betrayal is the body. Long before society, before memory, before philosophy, there is pain written into flesh. Birth itself is violent. A child enters the world screaming, gasping, torn from the only warmth it has ever known. The mother bleeds, the infant cries, and existence begins not with celebration, but with agony. What could be more honest than that? Life's introduction is suffering. Our bodies are not fortresses, but open wounds waiting to happen. A broken bone, a tooth rotting, a fever that makes even breath unbearable. These are not accidents of life. They are life. The nervous system itself is designed as a monument to suffering with pain signals firing as a constant reminder that the body will never be safe, never be invulnerable. Arthur Schopenhau said, pain is the positive element in life. It is what is immediately given. Pleasure, he argued, is only the absence of pain, a temporary silence of the scream that never really leaves. And when you look at your own body, the truth of his words becomes obvious. Every meal digested, every heartbeat, every breath is not a triumph, but a postponement of collapse. History proves it mercilessly. Entire populations erased by plagues. From the Black Death to the recent pandemic. Families shattered in hospital corridors waiting for news that never comes. Bodies left unclaimed after wars. Famine carving children into skin and bones. These are not tragedies in the sense of rare events. They are the normal rhythm of human existence. Science does not free us from this. It only sharpens the picture. Biology explains how cells break down. How neurons misfire, how DNA carries hidden diseases like time bombs, medicine delays but never cancels. The body's descent. Modern hospitals with all their machinery are cathedrals of pain management, not salvation. Every doctor knows this. They do not cure suffering. They rearrange it, stretch it, disguise it for a little while. And so the body stands as the most undeniable witness to suffering. You cannot philosophize your way out of illness. You cannot pray your way out of decay. You cannot pay your way out of death. Whatever illusions the mind builds, the body will one day dismantle them all. Suffering then is not a question of if. It is the only physical truth that requires no belief, no persuasion, no ideology. Your body will remind you if it hasn't already. What the body begins, the mind prolongs. Physical pain ends with recovery or with death. But mental pain lingers in ways far more cruel. The mind remembers. It replays. It invents torments that never even happened but feel as real as scars. A wound in the flesh eventually closes. A wound in thought can fester for decades. Here lies the true torment of being human. Consciousness itself. To be aware is to suffer twice. Once from the event and once from the memory. As Emil Kioran wrote, "Consciousness is much more than the thorn. It is the dagger in the flesh. You cannot step outside of your own mind. There is no anesthesia for thought. A soldier survives the battlefield but wakes every night in terror, reliving explosions that no longer exist. A mother loses her child and lives with the phantom presence of absence. An emptiness that has more weight than a body. Even the smallest humiliations resurface in silence, replayed in shame long after they have been forgotten by everyone else. The mind refuses to let them go. This is why Schopenhau claimed that human life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom. He understood what most prefer to ignore. The mind is not a neutral observer but a factory of torment. When pain is absent, the mind invents its own suffering in the form of restlessness, dissatisfaction, emptiness. The silence after suffering is never peace. It is the anticipation of the next blow. Neuroscience confirms this cruelty. The human brain is wired with a negativity bias. It clings to bad experiences five times more strongly than to good ones. Evolution shaped us not for happiness but for survival. And survival demands vigilance. Which means that anxiety, dread, and sadness are not accidents of the mind. They are the very conditions of its design. Even in moments of joy, suffering waits. Think of laughter at a dinner table. It lasts seconds. But grief for a lost parent lasts a lifetime. A child forgets a game quickly but remembers an insult forever. The scale is tilted and it has always tilted toward pain. The mind then is not a refuge from suffering but its most sophisticated chamber. The body bleeds once. The mind makes the wound eternal. Open any history book at random and you will not find peace. You will find war, conquest, enslavement, famine, genocide. The very ink that writes the story of humanity is blood. What we call progress is almost always born from devastation. Every empire was built on corpses. Every revolution fed by executions. Every so-called golden age shadowed by suffering. Nze once declared, "To live is to suffer. To survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. He was not romanticizing tragedy but exposing its centrality. Civilizations are carved by trauma not by comfort. Without suffering there is no art, no philosophy, no religion. Because all these things are attempts to make sense of catastrophe. The 20th century alone is proof enough. Avitz did not emerge from the abyss of one man's cruelty, but from the machinery of an entire modern society. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not natural disasters. They were decisions engineered suffering multiplied a thousandfold. Rwanda, Cambodia, the middle passage of slavery, these are not marginal notes in history. They are history. And yet suffering is not confined to the monumental tragedies. It permeates the everyday fabric of collective life. A factory collapse in Bangladesh kills hundreds of workers sewing clothes for global brands. Children die quietly from malnutrition while the world measures stock market growth. Entire generations are displaced, wandering across borders, carrying their homes only in memory. What this reveals is merciless. Humanity's story is not progress against suffering, but suffering shaping progress. The vaccines we celebrate were born out of pandemics that left millions dead. The rights we claim today were rung from centuries of oppression and revolt. Behind every advance stands a graveyard. Philosophy is clear here. No one can argue that history is a triumph of joy. To deny that history is written in blood is to deny history itself. The monuments we visit are often tombs. The songs we sing were born in mourning. Humanity's narrative is not one of happiness interrupted by tragedy, but of tragedy occasionally interrupted by fleeting moments of relief. And if the past is drenched in suffering, what guarantee is there that the future will not be the same? None. The opposite is true. Everything points towards suffering as the rule, not the exception. Science promised relief. But what it delivered was a sharper awareness of how inescapable suffering really is. The more we understand the body and the mind, the more we realize that pain is not an accident to be eliminated but a fundamental condition of being alive. The microscope, the MRI, the genome sequence, all of them have revealed not salvation but deeper layers of fragility. Hospitals are monuments to this truth. Behind the sterile walls and the hum of machines, what happens is not victory over suffering, but its endless negotiation. Chemotherapy extends life, but through agony. Anti-depressants numb despair, but rarely erase it. Ventilators by hours or days, but not eternity. Science has not abolished suffering. It has only diversified the ways in which we endure it. Neuroscience lays bare the cruelty of our own design. Studies show that the brain reacts more strongly to a threat than to any pleasure. Evolution did not shape us for happiness. It shaped us for vigilance. This means anxiety, dread, and pain are not malfunctions. They are the very features that ensured survival. In other words, we suffer not because something went wrong, but because life itself was built on suffering as its engine. Even progress carries its own kind of torment. Technology promises connection, yet loneliness has never been more epidemic. Medicine prolongs lifespans, but often stretches the years of illness, decay, and dependency. We do not escape suffering, we extend its duration. As Kioran wrote with brutal clarity, "We do not die of suffering. We live on it." Consider this paradox. Every great medical advancement exists because millions first endured tragedy. Penicellin was born from infections that decimated populations. Vaccines emerged from plagues that devastated entire continents. Trauma and death are the currency with which progress is purchased. The illusion is that progress is our triumph over pain. The truth is that pain is the condition for progress itself. If one day science were to cure every disease, we would still face death, loss, meaninglessness. The machine cannot touch despair. No technology will erase the fact that every joy is temporary. Every body is perishable. Every mind will betray itself. There is no laboratory that can rewrite that law. Suffering, therefore, is not the enemy of progress. It is its fuel, its origin, its shadow. Science does not liberate us from pain. It only teaches us how deeply pain is woven into the structure of life. Every philosophy ends where suffering begins. You can argue about God, about free will, about the meaning of life, but no one can argue with pain. It requires no belief system, no ideology, no persuasion. It asserts itself without permission. The one fact that no skeptic can deny. Death is often mistaken as life's ultimate certainty, but that is a simplification. Death is an instant. Suffering is continuous. You do not experience dying until the very end. But you experience suffering every day through loss, through illness, through fear, through time. That is why suffering, not death, is the only honest certainty. Shan wrote with pitiles precision, "It is not worth the bother of killing yourself since you always kill yourself too late." His point was brutal but unshakable. Life is not defined by death, but by the torment that precedes it. To be born is to be sentenced, and the sentence is not merely to die, but to suffer until you do. Look closely, and you'll see it is universal. The rich suffer as much as the poor. Different masks, same wound. The religious suffer as much as the atheist. Different prayers, same silence. The genius suffers as much as the fool. Different thoughts, same despair. There is no exemption, no escape clause. Suffering is the only experience democratically distributed to every human being. Even joy when it comes is tainted by this law. We celebrate knowing the moment will fade. We love knowing separation is inevitable. Every beginning already carries its ending within it. Every light carries the certainty of shadow. Suffering is not the opposite of happiness. It is the framework in which happiness briefly flickers. So when people speak of hope, of progress, of meaning, they are not wrong. They are simply incomplete. These things are fragile, contingent, uncertain. Only suffering refuses to collapse. It is the skeleton of existence, the truth that does not dissolve. Everything else is temporary. And that is why to face life honestly is to accept suffering as its foundation. Not as accident, not as punishment, but as the very fabric of being. Deny it, disguise it, delay it. It will return. It has always returned. If there is one truth that does not flatter, one truth that does not deceive, it is this. Suffering is the only honest certainty. To those who are already members of this channel, thank you. Your support is not just financial. It is proof that these words matter, that this space we are building together has value. You are the backbone of what keeps this message alive. And I don't take that for granted. If you are watching this now, you are already part of it. Simply being here, listening, thinking, questioning, that alone is an act of support. Sharing the video, leaving a comment, or even letting these ideas echo in your own conversations helps keep this dialogue alive, and for that, I'm deeply grateful. But if you want to take a step further to stand closer to the heart of this community, becoming a channel member opens the door. Members gain access to exclusive content, deeper discussions, and the chance to be part of shaping where this journey goes next. It's not just a transaction. It's belonging. A way of saying this matters enough for me to invest in it. And if membership isn't the path you choose, there is also the super thanks option, a way to give a direct nod of appreciation to say that what you've heard here resonated with you in a way worth marking. Every contribution, no matter the size, strengthens this project and makes it possible for me to continue creating with honesty and intensity. Still know this. Whether you support through membership, a super thanks, or simply by watching and sharing, you are already part of the reason these words reach anyone at all. And for that, I thank you.