PracticallyPsychology

So, here’s the thing. No matter how smooth you want life to be, it never is. There’s always something. The coffee goes cold. The Wi-Fi takes forever. The Amazon package that said “out for delivery” is now delayed another day. And, of course, the person ahead of you in traffic is driving like some Victorian lady on a Sunday stroll. These little frictions pile up tiny pebbles in your shoes. And if you ask a Buddhist teacher what that is, they’d probably tell you: that’s dukkha.

Now, on this podcast called Fifty Words for Snow, the hosts did a whole episode about it. They spoke with Katherine Griffith, head teacher at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. She explained how we often hear dukkha translated as “suffering,” and that’s why so many people think the First Noble Truth means “life is suffering.” But she says that’s misleading. It’s not just suffering in the dramatic sense. It’s dissatisfaction. It’s that subtle sense that things are never fully to our liking.

And once you start looking, it shows up everywhere. Think about it—every time you get something good, you’re already worried about losing it. Even in love, the best case is you spend decades with someone you adore, and then, well, one of you dies first. Even happiness comes with an expiration date. That constant hum of “not quite right” that’s dukkha.

Griffith put it in simple words: it’s just “things not going our way.” And once you hear it that way, you can’t unsee it. It’s in the small stuff, like the coffee or the Wi-Fi. It’s in the big stuff aging, illness, loss. And it’s in the deep existential stuff just being human, knowing nothing lasts.

Here’s the twist though: Buddhism doesn’t say this is a crisis. It’s just the way things are. And if we stop being shocked by it, if we quit acting like something’s gone terribly wrong every time life disappoints us, then something shifts. The point isn’t to love it, but to stop resisting it so much.

Griffith compared it to a chair with a design flaw. Life is like that. No matter how much you shift around, it’ll never feel fully comfortable. Yet we persist in writing complaint letters to the universe. We brace against every little discomfort, like the broken zipper, the traffic jam, the fact that our dead friends aren’t reachable on any platform. But the practice is: what if we stopped expecting everything to line up? What if we met dukkha with curiosity instead of frustration? Not in a fake “everything is perfect” kind of way, but in a softer, “yes, this too” way.

And the real turning point comes when you get tired of fighting it. On the podcast they ended with a blessing: “May you notice dukkha, again and again, until one of those times you finally think, I’m tired of this.” That’s when something clicks. Not a grand enlightenment, not fireworks in the sky, just a quiet shift. Like the morning star breaking through.

Now, all of that might sound abstract, but it actually ties right into how we live today. Because if you look around, there’s this massive cultural machine built on dukkha, social media. Platforms that were supposedly built to connect us are, ironically, some of the biggest engines of craving and dissatisfaction in modern life.

In Pāli, the ancient Buddhist language, craving is called taṇhā. Literally “thirst.” And Buddhist thought says this thirst is what generates suffering. A philosopher named Lee Clarke, who actually did a PhD on Buddhist philosophy, wrote a book called Thirst: A Cultural Critique of Contemporary Society. He argues that craving now seeps into pretty much every aspect of daily life knowledge, technology, shopping, relationships. And social media is where all of these threads get tangled together.

We live in the most connected society in history. You can message anyone, anywhere, instantly. And yet, loneliness is on the rise. In fact, in 2023, the World Health Organization declared loneliness a global public health concern. Social media was supposed to reduce that, but instead it’s often amplifying it.

Why? Clarke points out that social media is always a mediated form of communication. You’re behind a screen. You get unlimited time to type your response. You can control the awkward silences. But that’s exactly why it fails to give us real connection. The spontaneity of face-to-face conversations the way they branch out into unexpected places—is where intimacy happens. Social media can’t capture that. Which means, no matter how much you scroll, it leaves a residue of isolation.

Buddhist thinking says our language and thought often split the world into subject and object me versus you, here versus there and that dualistic split keeps us from seeing reality as it is. Zen philosopher Shigenori Nagatomo even called this “ego-logical thinking.” Social media just piles another layer of separation on top. Instead of bridging people, it’s a screen that magnifies delusion.

And then there’s what Clarke calls “externalisation.” Basically, society’s obsession with appearances. On social media, people who look better are often treated better. So we end up performing curating our image for likes, comparing our lives to others, falling into what he describes as “comparative craving.” You look at your feed and wish your life was as good as theirs. But it’s all an edited reality.

This is what Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han talks about when he calls it “the aesthetics of the smooth.” Everything has to look polished kids have to be cute, food must look perfect, bodies young and sexualised. If it’s not smooth enough, you don’t get likes. The imperfection gets filtered out. But Buddhism says craving for perfection, or for a permanent sense of self, is the root of suffering. Unlike most religions, Buddhism doesn’t argue that there’s a fixed “me” or soul. Posts and images, no matter how perfected, won’t create permanence. They’ll just deepen the cycle of craving.

So, applying Buddhist thinking here, the way forward is to treat social media as an edited reality. Sometimes a bridge, sure, but often a barrier. Contentment comes more from face to face presence, not from likes. And if you see through the illusion, that’s already a form of awakening.

This theme that dukkha shows up everywhere, not just in traffic jams or Wi-Fi issues, but even in the way we chase validation online links surprisingly well with Shakespeare. Sounds like a leap, but stay with me.

Because Shakespeare, in his plays, keeps circling around the same existential tension. Take Hamlet, for instance. The whole play starts with the question “Who’s there?” And that’s not just an opening line it’s one of the most fundamental spiritual questions across traditions. The Hindu sage Ramana Maharshi taught Nan Yar? “Who am I?” as the doorway to self-realisation. Buddhism and Hinduism both circle around that inquiry.

One writer actually wrote a book called The Buddha and the Bard, exploring this exact overlap. The idea is that Shakespeare, as an actor and then a playwright, had this mind spacious enough to hold all kinds of human experience. Night after night, he emptied himself into roles. And in doing that, he may have perceived what Buddhism calls the root of suffering: believing we are fixed selves, permanent players.

Look at Hamlet’s famous “What a piece of work is a man!” speech. He praises humanity’s reason, form, and faculties like we’re angelic, godlike even. And then he undercuts it: to him, all that grandeur is just a “quintessence of dust.” That phrase is a contradiction. Quintessence was thought to be incorruptible, the substance of stars, the most precious essence. Dust is corruption and decay. So to call us a “quintessence of dust” is to name the paradox of human existence. Miraculous, but impermanent. Eternal-seeming, but fading all the same.

And that’s pure dukkha. The Buddhist sutras break it down into three kinds. First, the dukkha of painful experiences the stuff we don’t want but get anyway. Second, the dukkha of pleasurable experiences the kind that makes us uneasy because pleasure never lasts. And third, the dukkha of conditioned experience, called saṅkhāra dukkha. That’s the background hum, the sense that something is never quite right in life.

Hamlet is steeped in that third kind. He feels the world is “out of joint.” His melancholy shows us the weight of impermanence, the sense of separation, the futility of seeking ultimate meaning. It’s exactly what Buddhists call the suffering of conditioned existence.

But Buddhism doesn’t stop there. It also points to what’s beyond the dust. In Mahāyāna traditions, that’s called Buddha Nature, or tathāgatagarbha the indwelling potential for awakening. In Theravāda it’s called Luminous Mind, pabhassara citta. The Buddha himself said, “Luminous is the mind. And it is defiled by incoming defilements.” In other words, underneath the clouds, the sun is always shining. Our mind is fundamentally radiant, covered over only by temporary defilements.

Hamlet can’t see the stars for the “vapours” of dishonesty and corruption in Elsinore. Buddhists would say the same about us we can’t see our luminous mind because it’s obscured by greed, anger, delusion, arrogance. But the practice is to sit still, watch thoughts arise and pass, and slowly realise that what you are isn’t the vapour. It’s the space behind it.

Shakespeare’s characters often echo this. Lines from Juliet or Polonius sound eerily like pieces of the Eightfold Path. The point is that his plays reflect the same insight Buddhism offers: we suffer because we mistake the dust for the essence. But if we stay awake, even amid the dust, we can glimpse that spaciousness.

And that’s the thread tying it all together. Whether it’s cold coffee, social media loneliness, or a prince railing against the rottenness of Denmark, it all circles back to the same human condition: dukkha. Things not going our way. And the way through isn’t to fix every flaw, because you never can. It’s to see the flaws for what they are, soften a little, and recognise that behind the clouds, the luminous mind is already there.

Alright, that’s where I’ll leave it. Thanks for staying with me through the dust and the Wi-Fi delays and the Shakespeare. See you next time.