What does it mean that meaning and suffering?

Suffering without meaning is unbearable — suffering with meaning is transformative.

Example: A father loses his seventeen-year-old daughter to a rare cardiac event during a track meet. For the first year, the loss is a black hole — it swallows every good memory, every reason to get out of bed, every attempt by friends to offer comfort. He cannot make the death mean anything because it does not mean anything. It is stupid, random, and irreversible. In the second year, he begins volunteering at a program that screens young athletes for undetected heart conditions. He does not do this because the screening gives his daughter's death a purpose — she is still dead, it is still senseless. He does it because the screening is an action he can take in the world that connects his suffering to something beyond itself. Over time, the volunteering does not erase the grief. It constructs a meaning framework around it: I am someone who lost a child and used what I learned from that loss to protect other children. The suffering is still present. But it is no longer only suffering. It is also material from which something was built.

Try this: Identify one experience of genuine suffering in your past — not a minor inconvenience, but something that caused real pain over an extended period. Write three paragraphs. In the first, describe the suffering as raw experience, without any meaning overlay: what happened, what it felt like, what it took from you. In the second, describe any meaning you have constructed from it — not meaning that was always there, but meaning you built after the fact through reflection, changed behavior, or new commitments. If you have not constructed any meaning from it, say so honestly. In the third paragraph, ask yourself: is the meaning I constructed genuine, or is it a defensive narrative designed to make the suffering more comfortable? The distinction matters. Genuine meaning acknowledges that the suffering was real and bad while also recognizing that something was built from its aftermath. Defensive narrative pretends the suffering was secretly good all along. One is construction. The other is denial.