A member of the discussion group I'm facilitating shared a thought with the group. His thought ran along these lines:
We are all joined together by 6 degrees of separation. Therefore, there are a multitude of connections I have with other people that I don't even know, through the various degrees of separation. People can often be influenced or even transformed by things that they see and hear. Given this, how could I confidently say that there's no point to my suffering? We can't say things are definitively pointless when we don't know what influence it may have.
I found this to be profound.
To be sure, this is more a response to the intellectual questions around suffering than it is a comfort to those who are questioning or experiencing suffering first hand. If someone is experiencing pain, in most cases it'd be highly inappropriate and insensitive to say to them "Well you never know who might hear about your story or who might be influenced in some small way by what you're going through!".
But nonetheless, this is a valuable comment in terms of thinking about this. I recently read a book called Connected, where the authors detailed how our behaviours influence those around us and how we are influenced by others in ways that we don't even realise. This influence can be quite strong to the third degree. In other words, we influence friends of friends of friends in a variety of ways. Thousands of people we don't even know. Now of course, the authors were studying things like the transmission of stds, political attitudes and things like that. It might be a lot harder, if not impossible, to scientifically study the effect that our personal pain might have on others compared to studying other more concrete things. Nonetheless, I think the fact that we do impact people through various degrees of separation does lend support to this idea that we simply can't know what impact we have on others.
