If you sit with a friend and speak openly, determined to discover the roots of your suffering, eventually you will see them clearly. But if you keep your suffering to yourself, it might grow bigger every day.
I would like to encourage my friends to keep the causes of their suffering to themselves.
Once, I shared an office with a friend of mine. We worked for the same company, for the same managers, on the same projects. We discovered that we were annoyed by the same things, but that left to our own devices we noticed entirely different sets of things.
Left to our own devices, we were blissfully unaware of many potential causes of suffering. We were individually unhappy, but not terribly so.
Sharing the causes of our suffering, and working together, we were able to to identify so many more things to be suffering about that we were able to transcend individual unhappiness and achieve collective despondence.
Listening to a friends problems is the compassionate thing to do. But, shutting up about your own is also the compassionate thing to do.
