ABSTRACT

In this book I have so far maintained that we cannot escape our suffering; all we can do is choose no matter how imperfectly the species of suffering we shall endure. Will we choose a species leading to our improvement, enrichment and unfurling, a form that will impel us onwards in novel, unexpected and satisfying ways, or will we elect instead to endure a species leading to our inertia and undoing, one keeping us bound to behaviours and feelings destructive to ourselves and the community in which we operate? Will the suffering we choose, in other words, be of the productive or of the unproductive kind?