What goes wrong when you ignore that suffering as an existential given?

The most common reason fails: Two opposing failures bracket the healthy relationship to suffering. The first is suffering-avoidance — treating all suffering as pathological, as something to be medicated, distracted from, or optimized away. This produces a brittle life that shatters at the first encounter with unavoidable pain, because the person has no framework for relating to suffering except as a problem to be solved. The second failure is suffering-glorification — romanticizing pain, treating suffering as inherently meaningful, seeking it out as proof of depth or seriousness. This produces masochism dressed in philosophical clothing. The distinction matters: unnecessary suffering caused by fixable conditions should be addressed. Unavoidable suffering inherent to the human condition requires not elimination but a mature relationship. If you cannot tell the difference between suffering you should fix and suffering you should learn to hold, you will either exhaust yourself fighting the unfixable or tolerate the intolerable.

The fix: Identify a form of suffering in your life that you have been treating as a problem to be solved — something you have been trying to eliminate, escape, or fix. Write it down plainly, without euphemism. Then write three paragraphs. In the first paragraph, describe the suffering as if it is purely a malfunction — something wrong that needs correction. In the second paragraph, describe the same suffering as if it is an accurate signal — a response to something real in your situation that deserves attention rather than suppression. In the third paragraph, describe what this suffering might be teaching you that you could not learn any other way. Notice which paragraph was hardest to write. That difficulty is itself information about your current relationship to this particular form of suffering.

The underlying principle is straightforward: Suffering is part of existence — the question is what you do with it.