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.
I like how you’ve defined the terms and created sort of a scale. However, the difference between pain and suffering is somewhat unclear to me—is it that suffering is awareness of pain (which maybe makes it even more painful)? Or is the scale really just pain, expected pain, and unexpected pain?
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.
I like how you’ve defined the terms and created sort of a scale. However, the difference between pain and suffering is somewhat unclear to me—is it that suffering is awareness of pain (which maybe makes it even more painful)? Or is the scale really just pain, expected pain, and unexpected pain?
While originally agreeing that unexpected suffering is the worst of the 4 (or 3), I ran across this study that found pain was worse when expected: https://www.colorado.edu/today/2018/11/14/more-pain-you-expect-more-you-feel-new-study-shows
Of course, it might be too small a sample size (and too limited an experiment design) to fully conclude anything.