(9.154cd)Consider that although all people wish for happiness,
They swing between being troubled by suffering

(9.155) And being overjoyed by meaningless pleasure.
Not finding happiness, they suffer; and in striving to fulfil their wishes
They quarrel, fight, and hurt each other with weapons.
Thus, they consume their lives in the commission of non-virtue.

This is a pretty fair description of our modern life. All of us wish for happiness. We all wish to be free from suffering. We all do our best. Sometimes we have good moments. But most of our life is struggling through one problem or another. Wave after wave of personal calamity confront us. We are not alone in this. Everyone is going through similar suffering each in their own ways. Because most of us do not know about the sublime happiness that is possible from within, we chase after the fleeting pleasures of samsara, hoping that they will bring us some respite from our otherwise difficult existence.

For most people, going on vacation is one of the highlights of their year. They save up all sorts of money to try go on vacation. But when they go, their family complains the hotel or food is not good enough, the sun is too bright and we get a sunburn, there are too many people around us, and we feel as if we’ve spent all this money and done all of this effort to try have a good time, and everybody is still unhappy. It is about the best we get in this world. It is really quite sad.

In our work, we fight with others, jockey for position, complain about our boss or our clients. We get passed over for promotion, we never feel appreciated, or maybe our business gets wiped out by the competition.

In our personal life, we never find the one who makes us happy. We expect others to do the right thing, and when they don’t we feel disappointed or let down or even angry. If we are all alone, we think we need to be with others to be happy. But then when we are with others, they are never happy, and so we spend all of our time trying to help them be happy but never succeeding.

We spend our whole working life planning for retirement, but then when our retirement comes, we are too old or too sick to enjoy ourselves, and the enjoyments we thought we would have never quite turn out to be as good as we had hoped. As we get older our best friends get sick and die, and we are left with empty voids. Our body becomes more fragile, weaker, and it increasingly fails. It hurts everywhere and we are never able to get comfortable. We gradually start doing less and less because we are simply incapable of doing so, and we realized with sadness we will never be able to do these things again.

On our deathbed all the things that we had hoped and worked for wind up being meaningless and useless and we realize that we wasted our life chasing after things that provide no real happiness and no real protection. This is not a fiction, nor a horror story, this is all quite common. This is daily life in the human realm. And the human realm is one of the best possible places to be just imagine sufferings of other realms.