For What It's Worth

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The Age-Old Problem Of Adversity

(10 minute read)

Key Takeaways:

• Suffering isn’t a glitch in the system—it is the system. Every tradition that takes life seriously admits it: adversity is baked into being human.
• We are masters of distraction. Consumer culture, shallow spirituality, and endless entertainment promise relief—but mostly help us avoid the questions that matter.
• Some of our pain is self-inflicted. Toxic beliefs and rigid worldviews don’t just fail to prevent suffering—they multiply it.
• The real crisis isn’t that we suffer. It’s that we refuse to let suffering change us. Growth begins the moment we stop running and start questioning who we are.

“Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!” –Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll, 1865

Who in the World Am I?

Suffering is the one experience that unites every human life. It cuts across status, intelligence, moral effort, and belief.

From ancient religious traditions to modern psychology, humans have searched for explanations, strategies, and systems that promise relief—or at least meaning. Yet the problem of suffering persists, stubborn and universal.

In this reflection, we will explore why adversity feels so intolerable, why we so often try to escape it, and why many of our inherited explanations ultimately fail us. Rather than offering easy answers, we will ask the harder question: What if understanding suffering requires us to rethink the very beliefs we use to make sense of it?

The quote from Alice in Wonderland has been chosen carefully for this purpose. As we will see, it is less a children’s story than a psychological crisis disguised as fantasy. From the moment Alice falls down the rabbit hole, she loses every stable reference point—size, logic, language, identity. She repeatedly asks, “Who in the world am I?” not out of curiosity, but out of disorientation.

Wonderland amplifies this: it is a world without reliable rules, where meaning shifts mid-sentence and authority is absurd. It mirrors the inner chaos we experience when suffering disrupts the narrative of who we believe ourselves to be. Like Alice, we are forced to confront a unsettling possibility: the self we rely on may not be as fixed—or as coherent—as we imagine.

Two themes run unmistakably through the story: first, Alice’s relentless curiosity about the world she inhabits, and second, her struggle for self-discovery—how she fits into that world.

In her search, Alice undergoes physical, emotional, and mental upheaval. Like a comet hurtling toward the earth, she is changing rapidly—and it is anything but easy. Her adventures are often bewildering, and the symbolism woven throughout the story leaves much to the imagination.

Many authors have written about Carroll’s classic. Yet perhaps what makes Alice so enduring is its capacity to be internalized. Like all great works of fiction, we do not merely observe Alice’s journey—we inhabit it.

Still, the experience of reading the novel as a child pales in comparison to engaging it as an adult.

Consider Alice’s encounter with the Mad Hatter and the March Hare at the tea party. What first appears whimsical quickly becomes deeply unsettling. Time has stopped at six o’clock, conversation collapses into circular nonsense, and basic social rules no longer apply. The Hatter’s riddles have no answers, the March Hare’s moods shift without warning, and Alice is constantly corrected, contradicted, or dismissed.

From an adult perspective, this scene feels less playful and more destabilizing. It captures the anxiety of being trapped in a world where logic fails and communication breaks down—a quiet yet insistent psychological unease. Throughout, Alice is clearly knocked sideways and suffering, and as adults, we find ourselves caught in the net with her.

Adversity Is Part of Being Human

“Birth involves suffering, aging involves suffering, sickness involves suffering, death involves suffering, sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief and despair all carry suffering…”

–First Noble Truth, Buddhism

“To perceive is to be touched by suffering.” –Aristotle

“I have received no assurance that anything we can do will completely eradicate suffering.”

–C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“Suffering that we do not understand can be hard to bear, while it is often astounding to see how much a person can endure when he has some sense of the why and wherefore.”

–Carl Jung, The Symbolic Life

This is not an invitation to take any pleasure in other people’s pain.

Still, there is a quiet, unsettling kind of encouragement in realizing how many people have endured hardship, often far greater than ours. Somehow, they found ways to survive and, in time, to emerge on the other side still recognizably and beautifully human. Many even testify that their suffering, while excruciating, became part of what shaped them into who they are. We get to decide who we will become in the face of what we are given to bear.

Most of us, quite reasonably, do not go looking for suffering and yet it is ever present. How much of our lives are spent simply trying not to hurt? And what, exactly, do we do to avoid it? Where do we pour our time, energy, and money in the hope of dodging discomfort?

Modern advertising rarely sells products; it sells relief. Automobiles promise freedom and status, pharmaceuticals promise emotional equilibrium, vacations promise escape from ordinary life. Even toothpaste hints at romantic success. The message is consistent: discomfort is unnecessary, and the right purchase can remove it.

Escapist activities are among the most common pursuits in the modern world. We devote record amounts of time to finding ways to cope, and escape is one of our favorite coping mechanisms. At almost any cost, we look for relief from the dullness of daily routine or the ache of unmet desires. Because suffering is so subjective, even those of us who are comparatively fortunate often keep hunting for new ways to keep it at bay.

“We are all busily fleeing psychic discomfort and pursuing psychic wholeness and pleasure—it has become our primal survival agenda—we just don’t know it yet, and if we do, we don’t describe it in a common way.” –Melinda Davis, The New Culture of Desire, The Free Press, 2002

Escapism—choosing to distract ourselves from pain or pressure—has likely been around as long as humans. It taps into the same survival circuitry in the brain that drives fight-or-flight. At the same time, research suggests that a healthy dose of escapism can help us unwind and reset from daily stress (see McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken and SuperBetter).

Reading, listening to music, and sex are just a few of the “escape rooms” we regularly step into. Video games, YouTube, social media, movies, and television offer similar breaks. The right amount of escape can be restorative; too much, however, slowly pulls us away from fully engaging with our actual lives.

We all need some sense that the world is livable and that we can provide a basic quality of life for ourselves and others. But life is unavoidably shot through with unpleasantness, and of course we look for ways to cope. Learning to face these realities—gently but honestly—is one way we begin to build a healthier mental and emotional life.

Some Adversity Can Be Avoided

Much suffering is unavoidable. Yet we often prolong it needlessly. We sabotage ourselves, clinging to a worldview that breeds a toxic mindset and steadily erodes inner peace. As the saying goes, there is something absurd about making the same choices while expecting a different outcome. That pattern is not harmless—it is toxic.

In their bestselling book, Toxic Faith, Stephen Arterburn and Jack Felton argue that when a belief system becomes a way to avoid or tightly control life, it turns toxic.

A toxic belief is any conviction that promises certainty, control, or superiority but ultimately distorts reality and diminishes human flourishing. It discourages honest questioning, suppresses doubt, and often shifts blame onto the suffering rather than confronting complexity.

Arterburn and Felton focus largely on addictive religious practices, but their insights apply to almost any distorted belief. The demand for something that will fix or prevent every pain is impossible to satisfy, and sooner or later that unhealthy system starts to crack. The answer is not to abandon faith, but to abandon harmful, unbalanced toxic belief.

The Ageless Quest

Since the dawn of humanity, we have tried to make sense of the world we inhabit. We probe the good, the bad, and the grotesque. Most of our energy circles a single, stubborn question: why do bad things happen to good people? In other words, why is there suffering at all? Consciously or not, each of us builds a personal worldview to answer that question.

If you’ve read this far, there’s a good chance you once bought into an unhealthy belief system—or love someone who has. It is astonishing how far we will go, as a species, to explain away suffering, even when it costs another person their dignity.

• Pat Robertson, evangelical TV host and one-time U.S. presidential candidate, blamed the earthquakes in Haiti …on the Haitian people that “made a pact with the devil”
• Ayatollah Khomeini issues a fatwa on Salmon Rushdie, editors, and publishers for the novel The Satanic Verses, calling it …a blasphemous piece of literature that attacks the Islamic faith
• The Pope blames the sexual permissiveness of the 1960s for the …subsequent clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church

A life built on toxic beliefs eventually hits a wall. The turning point comes when those beliefs stop doing what we thought they would. They no longer buffer us from life’s ugliness. So we start blaming others, or fate, or anything outside ourselves.

We keep going through the motions—believing, confessing, affirming—yet something begins to crack. Burnout is not always a moral failure; sometimes it’s a sign the framework itself cannot bear the weight of reality.

Spiritual and psychological burnout are not metaphors; they are diagnoses. The fallout is a heavy mix of dread and impotence. We feel hopeless because the tools we trusted no longer work—often because they were broken from the start.

Suffering has a ruthless way of exposing those cracks in our worldview. (Perhaps, in the end, that is not a problem but a mercy.) Hardship is not a glitch in the system; it runs from cradle to grave. Anyone suggesting otherwise is selling something.

Put bluntly: a belief system that promises insulation from suffering is nonsense.

Nearly every belief system humanity has devised offers some account of suffering — and many provide profound wisdom. Yet any belief system, when clung to rigidly or used to avoid complexity can become toxic.

Some will argue that firm conviction is not toxicity but strength — that clarity, not doubt, sustains moral courage and communal life. The problem, however, is not belief itself but the demand that it function as a total explanation — one that removes uncertainty, shields us from doubt, or guarantees immunity from pain.

• Pray more
• Mediate more
• Embrace it
• Adversity builds character, mental toughness, etc.
• Our personal suffering helps others with their suffering, etc.

Questioning our inherited explanations isn’t the same as saying no explanation exists. It simply admits that easy metaphysical closure may be more comforting than true. Rejecting simplistic answers is not nihilism; it’s intellectual humility. Uncertainty does not erase meaning. It may be where a more honest search begins.

The real problem is how we use those answers. We reach for them as insulation instead of as means to endure. Prayer and meditation can center us, calm us, and build resilience for hardship. They are not magic charms or emotional armor. The moment we believe that “doing the right things the right way” will keep tragedy away from us and those we love, the belief has turned toxic.

Adversity can build character, and what we survive can equip us to walk beside others in their own struggles. But we are not being punished, and we are not enrolled in some cosmic lesson plan. As Stephen Fry once voiced this frustration in stark terms, “Bone cancer in children? What’s all that about?”

Often, the way forward is to revise our worldview, reset our expectations, or adopt a new image of what it means to live authentically. That work begins with a hard admission: suffering, in all its forms, is a fact of life.

Tragically, many of us cling so tightly to our current beliefs that we cannot even admit they might be too toxic to allow that simple truth in.

Until, like Alice, we tumble down the rabbit hole into a world that no longer makes sense—where words lose their power and our own identity feels so alien that we find ourselves asking, “Who in the world am I?”

That unsettling question may be the first solid ground we ever stand on.