When Possibility Space Collapses: Rethinking the Nature of Suffering

Introduction: What is the essence of suffering? Our first impulse might be to equate suffering with intense pain or unpleasant sensory input. A bad burn, a stabbing headache, the agony of a broken bone – these feelings undoubtedly hurt. Classic approaches, such as utilitarian ethics, tend to measure suffering in terms of the quantity and intensity of such painful experiences. However, there is a deeper way to understand suffering that goes beyond mere sensation. This article defends the view that suffering is best understood as a collapse of possibility space – a narrowing of one’s perceived futures, agency, and openness to the world. In other words, suffering is what happens when the horizons of our life-world contract and our sense of alternative paths or hopeful outcomes vanishes. We will explore this idea through multiple lenses: the insights of phenomenology (thinkers like Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Ratcliffe, Fuchs, Svenaeus), findings from cognitive neuroscience (e.g. predictive processing models, default mode network dysfunction, Karl Friston’s theories), and observations from psychology (flow states vs. cognitive rigidity, trauma research on the sense of a foreshortened future). Along the way, we will also critique the utilitarian approach to suffering, arguing that a simple calculus of pain intensity fails to capture the qualitative context-dependence of suffering – for example, the difference between a trivial paper cut and a trauma survivor’s flashback, or between “pain without distress” (pain asymbolia) and the profound anguish of grief. While utilitarian heuristics have their uses in emergency triage or policy, they fall short of encompassing what suffering means in lived experience. 

Suffering as a Collapse of World and Possibility (Phenomenological Perspectives)

Phenomenology – the philosophical study of lived experience – offers a powerful framework for understanding suffering as a world-altering event. Rather than focusing on isolated sensory inputs, phenomenologists examine how our being-in-the-world (to use Martin Heidegger’s term) is structured by mood, meaning, and possibility. In normal life, we experience ourselves as situated in a meaningful world with a range of possibilities for action: we wake up with projects, goals, and an implicit sense that the next hour, day, or year can unfold in various meaningful ways. Maurice Merleau-Ponty described this basic condition as the body’s “I can” – an embodied sense of agency and openness that allows us to navigate the world by projecting possible actions. When I am healthy and engaged, my body and mind work in tandem to let me move toward goals, interact with others, and generally experience life as an unfolding story full of potential. Suffering, however, often shatters this harmony. Phenomenologists note that intense or chronic illness can transform the “I can” into an “I cannot,” replacing fluid agency with a feeling of helplessness, paralysis, or resignation. Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that we are “condemned to be free,” emphasizing the burden of choice – yet in severe suffering, even the freedom to choose can feel condemned by circumstances, narrowed to effectively zero.

The World Shrinks and Becomes “Unhomelike”

Several phenomenological authors explicitly describe suffering in terms of a narrowing or collapse of the world. Fredrik Svenaeus, a phenomenologist of medicine, uses the term “unhomelike being-in-the-world” to characterize how illness and pain estrange us from our ordinary world. In states of physical suffering, “the world is typically narrowed down: I am forced to focus my attention on the body that hurts and have problems focusing on other things”. Anyone who has been bedridden with high fever or immobilizing pain can relate – your attention tunnels in on the aching body part or the effort just to breathe, and the wider world of work, play, or social life fades away. Svenaeus argues that health is a state of “homelikeness” in which one’s body is transparent and allows engagement with the world, whereas suffering makes the world feel alien, strange, or out of reach. In his analysis, the world in suffering “loses its meaning and is experienced as alien”, no longer offering the usual possibilities for action and enjoyment. What was once taken-for-granted – like walking to the corner store, or confidently planning next week’s activities – now feels uncertain or impossible. This loss of fit between self and world is literally dis-orienting: the structure of one’s experience changes such that the center of concern shrinks (often to the body or to a single trauma) and the periphery darkens.

Heidegger’s concept of being-in-the-world further illuminates this process. For Heidegger, our existence (Dasein) is not a detached thinking mind, but an active engagement in a world of significance. We are always already projecting ourselves onto future possibilities; our moods attune us to what matters and open (or close) various horizons. In profound suffering, this dynamic can break down catastrophically. One finds that “the intentional arc can no longer fully span across both the self and the world,” leading to a breakdown of the usual unity between person and environment. In effect, the sufferer “falls out” of the everyday world into a kind of existential void. When patients say, “It’s like my world collapsed,” they are not merely speaking metaphorically – phenomenologically, their experienced world has collapsed in structure. Goals and values that once animated them may lose reality. A recent phenomenological model describes how in severe mental suffering, “experience loses its goals, values, and ultimately the connection to the world” as “profound impairments of intentionality and practical possibilities… mirror the severance of one’s being-in-the-world”. In plainer terms, intense suffering (such as clinical depression or existential crisis) can strip life of its normal significances – nothing seems worthwhile, no action seems able to change anything, and thus one’s sense of possibility evaporates.

Depression: When the Future Becomes “Just More of the Same”

Consider the case of severe depression. The philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe, who has extensively studied the phenomenology of depression, observes that its hallmark is a collapse of the sense of possibility. In deep depression, “the world no longer includes significant possibilities” and the whole predicament of one’s life feels “unchangeable, eternal”. It’s not merely that the depressed person feels bad – more profoundly, they cannot imagine things being different in any way that matters. Ordinarily, even in difficult times, we maintain a basic sense that tomorrow or next month could bring change (new opportunities, improvement, unexpected events). Depression fatally undermines this sense of contingency. As Ratcliffe notes, normally any situation carries an implicit feeling that “things could be different” – that our current state is not permanent – but in depression, that sense disappears. One’s experience of time alters: instead of a flowing river carrying one forward, time congeals into a static, oppressive ‘eternity’ of despair. Sufferers often describe feeling that “there is no future” or that the future will only be a repetitive continuation of the miserable present. Indeed, Ratcliffe writes that for the depressed individual, “the future lacks the potential to be significantly different from the past; it is just more of the same”. This is possibility collapse at its starkest – not a single door seems open. The felt structure of time (what phenomenologists call lived time) flattens out; anticipation and hope, which normally draw us into the next moment, are replaced by a crushing certainty that nothing new under the sun will occur. The English expression “to be in a rut” only begins to capture this – it’s more like being entombed in the present. As Thomas Fuchs and others have argued, depression involves not just a change in mood but a change in the phenomenological structure of space and time: the world contracts (often literally, as the sufferer withdraws socially and physically), and time loses its directional thrust, looping or stalling in painful inertia.

Losing One’s “I Can”: Embodiment and Agency Under Duress

Merleau-Ponty’s insight that our primary stance toward the world is an embodied “I can” helps highlight another aspect of suffering: the loss of agency and spontaneity. In ordinary health, we are barely aware of our body as an obstacle; it is a transparent medium for our projects (I reach for a cup of coffee without thinking of each muscle, I walk while planning my day without doubting my legs). Illness or intense emotional pain shatters this transparency. The body, formerly an unseen facilitator, now looms as an impediment or source of torment. Classic phenomenological analyses of illness (such as by Merleau-Ponty and Svenaeus) describe how the sick person experiences a “breakdown” of the habitual body: movements that used to be easy are now effortful or impossible, and attention narrows to bodily functions that normally operate in the background. Havi Carel, a contemporary phenomenologist, notes that in serious illness the Husserlian attitude of practical ability – the tacit ‘I can’ – is replaced by ‘I cannot,’ an attitude of helplessness and dis-ability. You can feel this even with a bad flu: suddenly you cannot get out of bed, cannot think clearly, cannot “be yourself” in the usual way. In more chronic conditions, this “I cannot” can seep into one’s identity; a sufferer may start to see themselves as fundamentally limited, defined by what they cannot do.

This withdrawal of agency is tightly linked to a collapse in possibility. If I no longer trust my body or mind to cooperate, the horizon of possible activities dramatically contracts. The mountain climber with a freshly broken leg knows her planned climb is now off the table; the musician with severe depression no longer sees musical creativity as within reach. In psychological terms, suffering often creates cognitive rigidity – a feeling of being “stuck” or unable to imagine new solutions. This isn’t just a metaphor. Research shows that cognitive flexibility, the mental ability to adapt to change and generate alternatives, is impaired by stress, depression, and trauma. Depressed individuals frequently exhibit ruminative thinking and black-and-white predictions (“nothing will ever get better”), which are signs of diminished flexibility. In effect, their mental model of the world has lost alternatives; it’s locked into a pessimistic groove. Cognitive scientist Anil Seth has poetically said that the brain is a “prediction machine” constantly guessing what’s next – in suffering states, that machine seems to predict nothing good and refuses to update those predictions. We will revisit this predictive processing angle shortly, but phenomenologically we can say: suffering closes down the space in which freedom and novelty operate.

Søren Kierkegaard, the existential philosopher, described despair as the feeling of being trapped within one’s own potentials – a self that cannot escape itself. In a similar vein, phenomenology suggests that despair and severe suffering trap a person in a narrowed sphere of being, where one’s usual openness to the world is replaced by a sense of confinement. It’s as if the person is alive, but their world has shrunk to the size of a prison cell. The world no longer calls forth engaging possibilities; it no longer “holds” the person securely in a fabric of meaningful relationships. Janice, a patient with chronic pain, illustrates this: she says that ever since her pain became constant, “I feel like my world has gotten smaller and smaller – now it’s just me and this pain in a room.” Her friends invite her out, opportunities knock, but from her standpoint inside the bubble of suffering, those doors might as well be locked. The collapse of possibility space is thus not a distant abstraction – it is visible in the withdrawn gaze, the slumped posture, the words of someone who can no longer see a way forward.

The Brain’s Perspective: Predictive Processing, Rigidity, and the Default Mode Trap

Modern cognitive neuroscience provides a complementary perspective on why suffering feels like a loss of possibilities. The brain can be viewed as a prediction engine: according to Karl Friston’s free energy principle and predictive processing framework, the brain is constantly trying to minimize surprise (or “free energy”) by adjusting its internal model of the world. In simplistic terms, uncertainty or unexplained signals are experienced as distress, and the brain works to reduce them. Under healthy conditions, this process allows us to learn and adapt – we seek out new information, update our beliefs, and discover new possibilities (new ways to reduce surprise in the long run). However, what happens when the brain’s model gets stuck?

In states like depression and chronic anxiety, neuroscientists have observed what we might call maladaptive certainty – the brain becomes overly rigid in its predictions, even if those predictions are bleak. For example, a depressed person might have a deeply ingrained prediction that “no one cares about me” or “nothing I do will succeed.” This isn’t just a conscious thought; it’s an expectation embedded in neural circuits that biases perception and attention. According to predictive processing theories, such a brain will give little weight to prediction errors (evidence that contradicts its gloomy model). If a friend calls with support (a positive surprise), the depressed brain might dismiss it (“they probably feel sorry for me; it won’t last”) to preserve its prior expectation of isolation. This is a recipe for a self-confirming loop – a collapse of possibility because the brain systematically filters out evidence for any positive possibility. Neuroscientists have found, for instance, that depressed individuals show reduced neural sensitivity to unexpected rewards or positive feedback, essentially “tuning out” good news while amplifying negative expectations. In predictive coding terms, pessimistic predictions' precision (confidence) is cranked up, and the person becomes blind to countervailing information. The result is a kind of cognitive imprisonment: the person literally cannot imagine or predict a different future, because their brain isn’t letting them update their model. This aligns with the phenomenological reports above – the future feels foreclosed because, on a neurological level, the generative model of the future has narrowed to a tunnel.

Another neuroscientific angle comes from examining the brain's default mode network (DMN). The DMN is a large-scale network of brain regions that becomes active when we are at rest, not focused on an external task – often associated with self-reflection, mind-wandering, and imagining future or past events. In healthy individuals, the DMN helps construct a coherent narrative of the self across time (for example, when you daydream about what you’ll do this weekend, or recall a memory, you’re engaging the DMN). However, overactivity or hyperconnectivity of the DMN has been linked to disorders like depression, where it correlates with excessive rumination – the trapped, repetitive recycling of negative thoughts about oneself. Instead of exploring new possibilities, it’s as if the mind is endlessly chewing on the same bitter cud. Neuroimaging meta-analyses have shown increased functional connectivity between the DMN and the subgenual prefrontal cortex in depression, a linkage that predicts the degree of depressive rumination. This means the brain’s self-referential network is coupling strongly with an emotion and withdrawal-related region, creating a closed loop of self-focused negative thinking.

Regarding possibility space, such rumination is the enemy of novelty – it’s a sign the mind cannot break out of a particular orbit. The depressed brain often defaults to internally generated pessimistic content, rather than externally oriented exploration. Interestingly, difficulty in imagining optimistic future scenarios is a documented cognitive feature of depression and PTSD. Clinically, many depressed or traumatized individuals report an inability to visualize a hopeful future for themselves, sometimes called prospective anhedonia. Trauma therapists note that “the inability to visualize a positive future… is indeed a hallmark” of post-traumatic stress. The person literally cannot see a compelling image of tomorrow – their inner simulation machine yields only blanks or nightmares. This aligns with what we saw: the future is felt as closed.

The default mode network’s dysfunction can also be understood as a network dominance issue. In a healthy brain, there’s a dynamic balance between the DMN (self-focused, imagination, recall) and networks that deal with engaging outward (like the executive control and salience networks). When you get into flow states (more on this shortly), the DMN quiets down, and networks for attention and action take over. When you’re suffering (especially in depression or chronic anxiety), the DMN can become hyperactive and decoupled from engaging with the outside world. People stuck in worry or sadness often retreat into their own heads, replaying memories or catastrophizing – essentially living in a default-mode bubble. Neuroscientists Ulrich et al. found that activity in the default mode network significantly lowered during flow states (those moments of complete absorption in a task, which are often pleasurable). In flow, you aren’t self-consciously ruminating; you’re immersed in present action, which corresponds to a broader possibility space being utilized (you’re actively making choices in the moment). By contrast, attention is locked inward and backward in many forms of suffering, not outward and forward. It’s telling that rumination is literally correlated with stronger DMN activity, while flow and mindfulness practices (which alleviate suffering) correlate with suppressing the DMN. In summary, the brain’s own networks can get stuck in a pattern that sees no options – a neurological echo of the phenomenological “world-collapse” we discussed.

Finally, Karl Friston’s concept of free energy minimization can be interpreted in the context of suffering. Friston suggests that organisms (and brains) strive to minimize free energy – essentially the gap between expected and observed inputs, or surprise. One way to minimize surprise is to retreat into a narrow range of experience you can predict. If every new experience courts uncertainty (and thus potential pain), a system may settle for inaction or repetitive, rigid behaviors to avoid the unexpected. This is a double-edged sword: the system fails to learn or find new rewards by minimizing surprise too much. One might see chronic depression as a case where the brain has over-minimized surprise by shutting down exploratory activity – better to expect nothing and do nothing than to risk hope and be hurt. This manifests as the anhedonia and avoidance we observe: depressed patients often withdraw from activities and social interactions (reducing surprise at the cost of missing opportunities). The “certainty” of despair feels safer, in a twisted way, than the uncertainty of trying and possibly failing. Cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth has even likened emotional pain to a high free energy state – the brain interprets it as a signal that something is wrong and needs attention. But suppose it cannot resolve the uncertainty (for example, one cannot undo a traumatic loss). In that case, the brain might dull its reactions, lowering its expectations to the bare minimum. In this light, suffering involves a kind of informational darkening: fewer and fewer signals from the world matter, because the brain’s model has decided nothing can make a difference. It’s another angle on how possibility space, which in information terms is like the range of model predictions, gets restricted.

Psychological Views: Flow vs. Rigidity, Trauma and the Foreshortened Future

Psychology, especially positive psychology and trauma research, provides vivid concepts that resonate with our thesis. Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s notion of flow represents the polar opposite of the suffering state we’ve described. Flow is the experience of being so engrossed in a challenging but doable task that one loses self-consciousness and a sense of time. When people are in flow – a pianist lost in the music, a programmer in the coding zone, a child absorbed in play – they report a feeling of mastery, agency, and even joy. Notably, in flow one’s attention is fully attuned to the present environment and the task’s possibilities; one is making constant use of possibility space (e.g., a rock climber in flow is creatively finding holds, adjusting movements moment-to-moment). Psychologically, flow is characterized by clear goals, immediate feedback, a sense of control, and a balance between challenge and skill. What’s absent? Self-criticism, worry, rumination – basically the hallmarks of suffering. In flow, “self-referential thinking (e.g., worrying, self-reflection) is very low”; as mentioned, the brain’s DMN quiets down. This suggests that well-being has to do with an expanded engagement with possibilities, a state where one’s skills and the world’s challenges meet in harmony. The skier in flow is constantly making tiny adjustments to terrain – exploring many possible moves. In contrast, a person in pain or fear might be paralyzed, making no moves at all.

Now consider cognitive rigidity, the opposite of flexibility. Psychologists find that high stress and trauma can induce a kind of mental inflexibility where people have trouble updating their strategies or envisioning alternative outcomes. A telling example is the concept of learned helplessness from classical psychology. Suppose animals or people are exposed to uncontrollable stressors for long enough. In that case, they may stop trying to escape even when escape becomes possible, because they have learned that “nothing I do matters.” This is essentially a collapse of perceived agency and possibility. The cage door might be open, but the dog that’s been shocked too many times no longer runs out. Humans show analogous patterns. For instance, survivors of long-term trauma or captivity sometimes struggle to make decisions or initiate changes even after they’re free – their possibility space was so constrained for so long that their minds still operate within narrow boundaries. Trauma research speaks of a condition called “foreshortened future” in PTSD, where a person cannot imagine living a long or fulfilling life. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) actually lists “sense of a foreshortened future” as a symptom: the person might not expect to have a normal lifespan, or cannot picture themselves in future milestones (career, marriage, etc.). One psychologist explains that it involves “feeling as if life will be cut short… feeling you won’t be able to reach milestones”. This is a direct loss of future possibility in the mind of the sufferer. It’s common, for example, in young people who have survived school shootings or soldiers returning from war – they report that while their peers chatter about future plans, they themselves feel “futureless,” as if time stopped for them at the trauma. Trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk has noted that traumatized people often live in the eternal present of the trauma, with the past intruding (flashbacks) and the future unimaginable. It’s as if the trauma’s massive emotional pain froze the person’s timeline, trapping them in a loop of reliving rather than living forward.

Flow and trauma thus illustrate two ends of a spectrum: one where possibility space is wide open and one where it is crushed closed. In flow, a person perceives lots of affordances for action and experiences a sense of growth or progress (“time flies, and I’m accomplishing something”). In trauma or depression, a person sees few or none (“time crawls or stands still, and nothing I do makes a difference”). Importantly, it’s not simply the intensity of emotion that distinguishes these – flow can be intense, even stressful in the moment (think of an athlete in a high-stakes game), and depressive numbness might be very low on immediate sensation. What distinguishes them is the structure and context of experience: openness vs. closedness, efficacy vs. helplessness, a feeling of movement vs. stasis. This is why a purely utilitarian or hedonic metric (measuring suffering by amounts of pain or pleasure) struggles to capture the difference. Two people could rate their pain as “7 out of 10” in intensity. Still, suppose one is in flow (say, a marathon runner pushing through pain toward a goal) and the other is traumatized (re-experiencing a past injury with no sense of control). In that case, the subjective meaning of that pain diverges radically. The runner’s pain is part of a larger narrative of achievement and will likely be interpreted as “worth it”; the traumatized person’s pain is tied to terror, loss of control, and will likely be interpreted as intolerable suffering.

Another psychological concept worth mentioning is meaning-making. Psychologist Viktor Frankl, a survivor of Auschwitz, famously argued that human beings can endure incredible pain if they find meaning in it, but will suffer deeply from even minor pain if it seems meaningless. Meaning is like a cognitive context that can expand or contract possibilities. For example, a woman giving birth may endure extreme pain, but the meaning (bringing new life, the expectation of joy with the baby) provides a broad temporal horizon – she imagines the child growing, the life ahead, which places the pain in a larger story. Contrast this with someone suffering purposeless chronic pain day after day with no relief in sight; that pain often leads to despair precisely because it shrinks the world to “only this pain, forever.” Studies on chronic pain patients find that those who can reframe their pain in a meaningful way (perhaps as part of a life lesson, or by helping others with similar issues) often report less suffering even if the pain intensity remains high. What’s changed is their perceived possibility: they see possibilities for purpose despite pain, whereas others might see only an endless tunnel of misery. Thus, suffering is inseparable from narrative and context. As one medical phenomenologist put it, “Suffering consists not only in physical pain but in being unable to do basic things that bestow meaning on one’s life… not being able to be the person one wants to be”. Losing core life activities or identities (no longer being able to work, relate to others, pursue one’s passions) is essentially a collapse in the possibilities one values most, which is often more central to suffering than the physical sensations.

To sum up this section, psychological research supports the idea that suffering is linked to stuckness and narrowed cognition, whereas well-being is linked to flexibility and engagement. The flow state is a model of absorbed, meaningful activity with minimal suffering; severe trauma is a model of paralyzing experience where one’s world seems to end. Even the language of therapy reflects this – therapists aim to help clients “open up”, “explore options”, “reframe” experiences (all about widening perspective), and to get out of “mental ruts” or “traps” (narrow repetitive loops). Healing, in many cases, is experienced as regaining possibilities – for instance, a depressed patient starting to feel interested in hobbies again (“Maybe I could try painting, after all…”), or a trauma survivor starting to envisage a future (“I signed up for a class next month – something I couldn’t imagine doing last year”). These are signs that the person’s possibility space is expanding, not merely that their pain is below some threshold.

Why Utilitarianism Misses the Mark on Suffering

The discussion so far has emphasized the qualitative, contextual nature of suffering – its dependence on how an experience is situated in a person’s life-world and sense of self. This poses a challenge to utilitarianism, especially in its classical forms, which seek to reduce ethics to a calculus of pleasure and pain. Utilitarianism, in a nutshell, says that we should act to maximize overall happiness (or minimize overall suffering), often treating pains and pleasures as commensurable units (Bentham’s calculus). While this approach has a certain logical simplicity, it risks flattening all suffering onto a single quantitative scale, ignoring the very differences in kind and context that we have argued are crucial.

Let’s consider a few scenarios to make this concrete:

• Paper Cut vs. Trauma Flashback: Imagine Person A gets a paper cut that causes a quick, sharp pain (say a 5/10 pain for 10 seconds). Person B, a war veteran, hears a car backfire and is thrown into a 10-minute flashback of a battlefield, reliving terror (their physiological stress skyrockets, they feel as if death is imminent again). Now, a naive utilitarian might try to compare these by “amount of pain.” Maybe the paper cut was moderately painful but very brief. In contrast, the flashback is intensely distressing for a longer duration – one could assign some numbers and possibly conclude that the flashback produces more total “disutility.” But this exercise already feels absurd – the suffering in these cases is not just a matter of aggregated pain units. Person A will shake off the paper cut and go about their day, perhaps annoyed but fine. Person B might be severely shaken, pulled back into weeks of dread, and that single flashback could reinforce a world-view of constant threat. The paper cut is an isolated nuisance; the flashback is tied to an entire traumatic meaning-network. It represents, for B, the fact that they are not safe even at home, that their mind is not under control, that their past can colonize their present. The suffering of B is qualitatively different – it’s a collapse of possibility (in that moment, the person has returned to a deadly world, losing the safe possibilities of civilian life) and a reinforcement of a narrowed existence (many PTSD sufferers begin to avoid public places or loud noises, thereby shrinking their world to avoid triggers). Summing “10 minutes of fear” vs “10 seconds of pain” utterly fails to capture this difference.
  
  

• Pain Asymbolia vs. Normal Pain: Earlier, we mentioned a condition called pain asymbolia. In this rare condition, people feel pain (the sensory-discriminative aspect) but do not find it unpleasant or distressing. One famous description is that patients report pain but are not bothered by it – they recognize the sensation of pain but are “immune to suffering” from it. What an extraordinary fact! It shows that pain and suffering, though related, can be decoupled. A utilitarian metric that just counts “pain signals” would completely misjudge the situation of an asymbolic patient. For example, Patient X (asymbolic) and Patient Y (normal) might both have a similar surgery, causing identical nerve output for pain. X will say “Yes, it hurts, but oh well” with a smile, whereas Y might be in agony despite painkillers. The suffering differs dramatically because of the brain’s appraisal and integration of pain. Pain asymbolia usually results from specific brain lesions (often in the insula or cingulate cortex) that prevent the normal emotional processing of pain. This neurological case beautifully underscores that suffering is not merely the raw signal but the context, the meaning, the “alarm” aspect of pain. Normally, pain comes with a built-in alarm, meaning “this is bad, make it stop, it threatens you.” In asymbolia, the alarm is absent: the person has the information (“my arm is cut, pain 6/10”) but not the despair or urgency. How would we account for this if we were doing pure utilitarian calculus? We’d have to assign a value to the “unpleasantness” separate from the intensity. But classical utilitarianism often glosses over such nuance, treating all disutility as fungible. More fundamentally, utilitarianism has no obvious language for why context (like brain lesion vs. not, meaning vs. not) matters – it would have to treat the asymbolic person’s pain as just lesser disutility somehow, but that begs the question of understanding what suffering fundamentally is. Our view provides an answer: suffering requires that the pain be experienced as curtailing one’s possibilities (here, the person’s brain literally does not interpret the pain as limiting or threatening, so the person doesn’t suffer in the same way).
  
  

• Intense Grief vs. Physical Pain: Imagine someone grieving the sudden loss of their child versus someone experiencing the worst physical pain of their life (say, kidney stones). Both are incredibly negative experiences, but the structure of suffering is different. Grief, especially profound grief, is often described as not just sadness, but a kind of collapse of meaning. A grieving parent might say, “When my child died, the world stopped making sense.” This is not hyperbole – grief can make the everyday world, once vibrant with the presence of the loved one, appear surreal, empty, and absurd. One author described grief as “the collapse of meaning… plans vanish, the self fractures… the future ceases to exist”. In our terms, it is a paradigm case of possibility-space collapse: the many imagined futures involving the loved one are instantly annihilated; one’s role (e.g., “I am a mother”) may be fundamentally altered; time becomes a loop of painful memory or a dreary stretch without purpose. Contrast this with the kidney stone sufferer: they are in excruciating pain (often cited as akin to childbirth in intensity), and during the attack they have no attention for anything else – their world shrinks to the pain in that moment. However, once the stone passes or medication kicks in, the physical pain can subside, and their world reopens (they don’t usually find that the experience permanently robbed life of meaning, though it certainly was torturous while it lasted). A utilitarian might say: well, a day with a 9/10 pain vs. a day with 9/10 emotional anguish, suffering is suffering. But for the grieving person, the context is a real loss and a radically changed life narrative.

• In contrast, for the kidney stone patient, the context is “a terribly painful medical ordeal, after which life goes on.” This is why many would say the grieving person is suffering in a deeper sense. It’s not just longer duration (grief can last years, true); it’s that grief transforms one’s identity and world, whereas transient physical pain (however intense) does not necessarily do so. In one case, possibility space is permanently altered (the child is not coming back; a whole set of possible experiences – seeing them grow up, etc. – are gone), in the other, possibility space is temporarily restricted by pain but then returns to normal. Utilitarian calculus could try to fold all that into intensity over time. Still, it requires essentially knowing that context (losing a child) is worse than some amount of physical pain, which is precisely our point: you can’t escape qualitatively judging context.
  
  

What these comparisons show is that suffering is qualitative and context-dependent. A simplistic aggregative ethic misses this. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, famously claimed “the quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry” – implying that only the amount matters, not the quality of the activity or experience. By the same logic, one might say, “a pain is a pain, wherever you find it – just minimize it.” But we can now see how misleading that is. Pains or displeasures are not uniform bricks that can be piled up regardless of context. The moral intuition of most people recoils at certain pure aggregations. In the rationalist community, there’s a well-known thought experiment by Eliezer Yudkowsky: Would you rather save one person from being tortured for 50 years, or prevent an astronomically large number of people (3^^^3, a hyperbolically huge figure) from each getting a mere dust speck in their eye?. Strict utilitarianism, if you treat a dust speck as a tiny negative and torture as a huge negative, will say “at some large number, all the specks added up outweigh the one torture, so choose the dust specks (i.e., choose to torture the one person).” This strikes many as morally absurd – it seems obvious that no number of fleeting motes of discomfort in billions of lives compares to the moral horror of one person’s life destroyed by 50 years of torture. Why? Because suffering is not linear or additive in that way. The torture constitutes a different kind of wrong, a total collapse of that person’s life possibilities for decades, an immersive horror that cannot be disaggregated into minute blips of pain. No amount of trivial “specks” in others, which don’t meaningfully limit anyone’s agency or future, seems to accumulate to the qualitative nightmare of extreme, sustained suffering. This doesn’t mean consequences don’t matter – it means our value system must account for the texture of experiences, not just totals.

Even within effective altruism or utilitarian circles, sophisticated approaches recognize this issue. Some utilitarians introduce weightings or lexical thresholds for suffering – e.g., no amount of minor inconveniences can outweigh an instance of truly extreme suffering. Others differentiate between higher and lower pleasures/pains (John Stuart Mill, a utilitarian, famously argued that pleasures of the intellect or imagination have a higher quality than base pleasures – “better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied”). This was an implicit concession that a purely quantitative view is incomplete. Our argument pushes further: suffering has an existential dimension. It involves the whole person in context, not just a snapshot of sensation. Utilitarianism, which tries to be context-blind (“each counted equally”), struggles with this. The case of the trauma survivor’s flashback versus the paper cut, or torture vs. dust specks, shows that ignoring context can lead to conclusions that violate our basic moral sense.

The Role and Limits of Utilitarian Heuristics

Now, it’s important to acknowledge that utilitarian-style reasoning does have its uses, particularly in scenarios that demand quick aggregation or impersonal decision-making. In emergency medicine, triage nurses often operate under a rule akin to “save the greatest number of lives.” This is a utilitarian heuristic – when resources are limited, prioritize interventions that have the best number of lives saved or harm averted. For example, in a mass casualty incident, medical teams might categorize victims by who can be saved with available resources, explicitly aiming to maximize the number of survivors (the greatest good for the greatest number). Such protocols can be cruel on the individual level (someone with low chance of survival might be left untreated in favor of treating others). Still, in the aggregate they make logical sense to minimize total loss of life. Similarly, public health policies often weigh suffering in statistical terms – e.g., comparing a disease's harm to a vaccine's side effects in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). These are useful heuristics for decision-making at scale; they force consistency and can guard against certain biases (for instance, the tendency to over-prioritize a single identified victim over many statistical victims).

However, these approaches are procedural tools, not deep insights into the nature of suffering. They trade detail for decisiveness. In real-time triage, a doctor does not have the luxury to ponder each patient’s existential situation – they use a rough metric (e.g., breathing, heart rate, responsiveness) to allocate help. Utilitarian calculations in such contexts are morally justifiable as emergency measures, but even there, we often supplement them with additional ethical principles (like fairness, not sacrificing someone against their will for organs even if it would save multiple others – a classic non-utilitarian constraint). Notably, when time allows, good practitioners do try to account for qualitative aspects. For instance, pain management in medicine increasingly recognizes that patient-reported pain scales aren’t the whole story – the patient’s psychological state, support system, and sense of control drastically affect outcomes. Two patients with identical tumor pain can have different degrees of suffering depending on their mindset and context; palliative care teams address meaning and coping, not just morphine doses.

In public policy, utilitarian heuristics have limits, too. A policy that reduces total suffering on paper might concentrate intense suffering in a minority, raising issues of justice and dignity that a pure utilitarian metric would miss. Consider cost-benefit analyses that assign a monetary value to a human life-year, which are helpful for budgeting. Still, no one believes that it captures the value of a life because it matters to the person living it.

Ultimately, our critique of utilitarianism in the context of suffering is this: you cannot capture the true moral weight of suffering with a single-scale metric of pain intensity or disutility, because suffering is essentially about the collapse of a person’s world of possibilities, and worlds cannot be compared merely by counting units. A small but world-collapsing harm (like permanent paralysis of a pianist’s hands) might be, from the person’s perspective, worse than a larger but temporary harm (like a year of painful recovery that nevertheless ends with restored function). Context is everything. Utilitarianism tends to either abstract away context or force it into the calculus artificially.

What do we do instead? Does rejecting a simplistic utilitarian view mean we cannot make any interpersonal comparisons or tough choices? Not at all. It means we strive to incorporate qualitative understanding into our ethics. It means perhaps using utilitarian reasoning as a servant rather than a master – a tool that can inform, but not the sole arbiter. When we acknowledge suffering as collapse of possibility, we naturally prioritize helping people in ways that restore their openness to life. For example, effective mental health interventions (therapy, community support) might not “score” as highly in DALYs averted as distributing mosquito nets. Still, they address a profound form of suffering that is harder to quantify: the difference between a life in despair and a life in hope. A purely utilitarian charity evaluator might miss that because it is easier to count malaria deaths averted than to measure someone regaining a will to live. This is not to dismiss the importance of fighting physical illness (both matter!), but to expand our moral imagination.

A pluralistic approach that considers utilitarian outcomes and the qualitative dimension of human experience will serve us best. We should indeed seek to reduce pain and save lives (those are non-negotiably good outcomes). Still, we should do so with an understanding of why suffering is bad – it’s not just because pain receptors fired X times, but because of what suffering does to a conscious being’s connection to the world, to others, and to themselves. If we keep that richer picture in mind, we are less likely to make cold calculations that, for instance, sacrifice the few for the many without acknowledging the moral tragedy involved, or that treat minds as simple pleasure-pain containers rather than meaning-making agents.

Conclusion: Toward a Humanity-Centered Understanding of Suffering

We have journeyed through phenomenology, neuroscience, and psychology to arrive at a richer understanding of suffering. The central claim is that suffering is best understood as a collapse of possibility space – a shrinking of the perceived and experienced options for being in the world. Whether it’s the world-collapse of severe depression, the frozen future of trauma, or the focus-lock of physical pain, suffering involves more than raw sensation. It entails a change in the structure of experience: the loss of open horizons, the dimming of one’s “I can,” and the severing of connections that make life meaningful.

Phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty taught us that we exist not as isolated minds, but as beings already thrown into a world of significance, navigating by way of possibilities. Moods and illnesses can radically alter that navigation: a person suffering enters a different mode of being where the world’s usual signposts disappear or show only one dreary direction. Ratcliffe, Fuchs, and Svenaeus provided language to describe how depression or illness can make the world feel alien, time feel stuck, and possibilities vanish. Cognitive neuroscience added that the brain’s own predictive models can trap us in cycles that confirm our worst expectations, essentially learning helplessness at a neurological level. The default mode network’s role in rumination illustrated a physical substrate of being “stuck in one’s head,” while concepts like free energy minimization showed how a system might choose the devil it knows (a constrained world) over the uncertainty of hope. Psychology rounded out the picture by contrasting states of engagement (flow) with states of withdrawal (trauma, despair), reinforcing that engagement with possibility is what makes life feel worth living. When engagement is broken, suffering ensues.

We also confronted utilitarianism and found it wanting in this domain. It’s not that reducing pain or increasing happiness is unimportant – on the contrary, those are laudable aims – but a purely utilitarian framework fails to account for qualities of suffering that matter: the difference between pain that is meaningful vs. meaningless, between suffering that isolates vs. suffering that can be shared or redeemed, between transient pain and existential devastation. We argued that context matters immensely. As a result, ethical decision-making must be sensitive to more than just totals; it must respect the integrity of persons and the texture of their lived worlds. This perspective aligns with what many humanistic thinkers and indeed many religious or spiritual traditions have long held: that suffering has dimensions of dignity, identity, and meaning that cannot be summarily weighed on a scale.

Understanding suffering as collapse of possibility has practical implications. It suggests that alleviating suffering isn’t just about numbing pain, but about restoring possibilities. Therapies for PTSD, for example, focus on helping the person imagine a future again, piece by piece – essentially widening the aperture of possibility that trauma had narrowed. Palliative care for the dying often centers on finding meaningful activities or legacies in one’s remaining time – opening emotional and relational possibilities even as physical life wanes. Even on the personal level, when we comfort a friend in grief, we often do so (implicitly) by helping them see that some form of tomorrow exists, that not all is lost, that their world, though changed, can find a new equilibrium. We help them keep their possibility space alive, even if just a crack, until they can walk through it.

Moreover, recognizing the primacy of possibility might shift how we prioritize interventions. For instance, treating chronic depression or loneliness might not save a life in the immediate way that a surgery does, but it can give back a life in terms of quality and engagement. Policymakers and philanthropists might, under a purely utilitarian lens, undervalue mental health or social wellness programs because their outcomes are harder to measure than, say, reductions in disease. But if we truly appreciate that a life with a pulse is not the same as a life fully lived, we will put more emphasis on those interventions that help people expand their worlds. A person who goes from being socially isolated and hopeless to connected and hopeful has potentially the same “quantity” of life in years, but a vastly different experience of life. Any moral framework worth its salt should care about that difference.

In closing, this view of suffering as a collapse of possibility does not negate the commonsense idea that pain is bad; it refines it. Pain is bad mostly because of what it signifies and results in – the damage it signals, the projects it interrupts, the fears it instills, the shrinking it provokes. By addressing those deeper aspects, we treat not just symptoms but the very meaning of suffering. It also fosters compassion: when we see someone suffering, we can recognize that their whole world may be contracting around them. Our urge to help can then aim to gently expand that person’s world again – through support, options, care, and understanding – not just to extinguish pain but to reignite possibility.

Ultimately, human flourishing is the opposite of suffering not because it has zero pain, but because it is rich in meaningful possibilities. As the phenomenologist Viktor Frankl implied, the salvation of man is through love and meaning, not through comfort alone. A society focused solely on minimizing discomfort might achieve a kind of shallow pleasantness, but a society that understands suffering in this richer way will aim higher: to maximize the true freedoms and horizons people have. Suffering, seen rightly, is a call to widen the world for those whose world has shrunken. In our personal lives and our collective efforts, let’s strive to respond to that call – to treat sufferers not as broken sensors to be numbed, but as fellow travelers who need help to find their path back to an open future.

References: The insights and quotations in this article draw on a range of sources bridging philosophy and science. Phenomenological descriptions of world-collapse in depression are summarized from Ratcliffe’s work on existential feelings and Fuchs’ analyses of temporal experience. Svenaeus’s notion of unhomelikeness and the narrowing of the world in pain is cited in his 2014/2017 accounts of suffering. Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of the “I can” and its breakdown in illness are discussed by Carel, and Heidegger’s being-in-world by Klar & Northoff in the context of nihilism. Cognitive neuroscience findings on depression, predictive processing, and DMN come from studies of rumination connectivity and theoretical expositions of the free-energy principle. The link between trauma and inability to envision a future is noted in clinical trauma literature. The contrast between flow and DMN activity is based on flow research and neuroimaging. The critique of utilitarianism is informed by classical statements from Bentham and thought experiments from the rationalist community (Yudkowsky’s dust specks vs. torture), as well as analyses in medical ethics of triage practices. All these sources underscore the multifaceted thesis that suffering is more than sensation – it is the human condition under constraint, a plight of possibility cut off, which we must understand to truly alleviate.