The blessing of suffering

You know how the story goes. A single parent, typically a mother, living in abject poverty, toils day and night vending, cleaning homes, or doing some other gruelling, yet low-paying task, and still manages to support the family, and raise “decent” and hard-working children.

It’s the sort of story that we revel in, the heroic members of society who overcome extreme adversity. It makes for a feel-good moment, a viral share on Facebook, and a brief respite from the everyday chaos that we call life.

There is, however, a more sinister side to this fascination. Like a virus it infects the mind, turning suffering into a blessing. It clouds perception, and shifts attention away from a larger societal problem, to the way in which a predicament motivated a particular type of person to seemingly thrive — without fully understanding the physical and psychological ramifications on the hero.

Homo sapiens respond to trials in different ways. A fascination with suffering as a means of motivation is sadistic. It leads to the mentality of: if person A can overcome misfortune, then persons B to Z have no excuse.

It’s often the mentality of those apt to believe in a disciplinarian, “no-nonsense approach” to tackling societal issues; apt to tell the disadvantaged, “you have no excuses”; or apt to rationalise a worldview based on books of fiction, the dubious advice of fly-by-night “life coaches” and born-again sages, or atypical stories — rather than nuanced data trends and real-world observations.

The blessing of suffering provides an excuse, a scapegoat, a way to assuage our conscience that systematic socio-economic inequality, psychological trauma, and society’s disturbing hardships aren’t as big of a problem as those crazy researchers and progressive-minded people claim.

Consider the issue of social safety nets, or the welfare state. Particular types of citizens complain that the Government provides too much. And supposedly, as a result, people are lazy, unproductive, and leeching off of the State. Their solution: reduce expenditure on transfers and subsidies. If some can rise out of hardship, then it mustn’t be all that bad, right?

Rest assured sadists, there is no shortage of suffering to be experienced in life — from heartbreak to death — to teach us painful lessons. But, suffering that is preventable and tied to our very ability to access food, shelter, employment, and other basic necessities to survive, may motivate the few, but cripple the many.

The societal eco-system is complex, and those unwilling to shift focus from the individual to the environmental and surrounding circumstances, will never grasp its inter-connectedness.

It’s easy to look at the money that we’ve thrown into education, healthcare, food cards, public assistance grants, and other initiatives; see a society in crisis; and equate one with the other. People must just need to suffer a bit more to find the motivation that we had in the good old days, right?

At the same time that we’ve been spending this money, we’ve also been massively altering the structure of our communities; the very fabric of what holds a society together. I wonder, how a change in environmental design can affect socio-economic outcomes.

Luckily, some crazy people like to do something called research. Here’s a small sampling:

Ewing et al found that the more spread out an urban area is, the lower the socio-economic upward mobility. As compactness doubles, a child born into the bottom fifth income group has a 41 per cent greater chance of making it to the top fifth by the age of 30. The major reason: ease of job access. The measure of compactness is increased by high population density, mixed land use neighbourhoods, a robust and inter-connected street network system, and other factors that, since Independence, we continue to deliberately design out of the local environment.

A London School of Economics study, which looked at countries like China, India, and those within sub-Saharan Africa, recommended that maximising economic productivity requires “investment in public transport-oriented spatial development…walkable and human-scale local urban environments, and functionally and socially-mixed urban neighbourhoods”.

Perhaps it’s not the money being spent on transfers and subsidies that’s creating the problem, but rather that the money isn’t enough to compensate for the problems being created by other factors that some defiantly choose not to see or believe.

It’s one thing to glorify the one who was able to overcome, it’s another to do so at the expense of understanding why the other ninety-nine weren’t.

We’re on a slowly sinking ship. We’ve been spending our resources on bailing the water out, instead of sealing the holes. Worse yet, many on the boat are blaming the misfortune on the bails and not the holes, or are unconcerned because they are strong swimmers.

Ryan Darmanie is an urban planning and design consultant with a master’s degree in city and regional planning from Rutgers University, New Jersey, and a keen interest in urban revitalisation. You can connect with him at darmanieplanningdesign.com or email him at ryan@darmanieplanningdesign.com

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