“Sabka dukh alag hai, par sabka dukh samaan hai.”
(Everyone’s sorrow is different, yet all sorrow is the same.)
It came to me one evening while listening to a friend describe her life.
Her pain was sharp, filled with noise — the kind that echoes in every household that believes it’s fighting battles no one else can understand.
She compared her struggle with those who begged on the street —
“They have nothing,” she said. “I have too much pain.”
But when I asked, “Would you exchange lives with them?” she said, “No.”
That no revealed everything.
Not arrogance — but attachment.
She didn’t want to escape pain; she wanted to own it.
Because pain gives meaning.
And meaning, even when born from suffering, gives identity.
The Ego of Pain
There’s a quiet pride people take in their suffering.
It’s not obvious — it wears the mask of vulnerability, the tone of honesty.
But beneath it hides something subtle: the ego’s desire to be special even in despair.
When we say, “You don’t know what I’ve been through,” we are not seeking empathy — we are seeking validation of uniqueness.
We want our pain to feel deeper than others’.
We want it to mean something more.
As J. Krishnamurti once said,
“The moment you give sorrow a meaning, you begin to cultivate it.”
That’s what the ego does — it turns wounds into identity.
We stop being a person who suffered, and become the one who has suffered most.
We glorify pain because it gives us purpose.
It turns chaos into narrative, confusion into structure.
It says, “I am the way I am because life has tested me.”
And as I explored in The Illusion of Being Special: How People Turn Ordinary Moments, Emotions, and Stories into Performance, this is part of the same instinct — to turn ordinary experiences into performances of depth, to make our story seem larger than life.
We suffer, but we also curate that suffering — to feel significant through it.
Desire: The Root of Sameness
The Ego of Pain is itself a powerful desire — the desire to be significant, even in despair.
This connects it directly to the root of all human suffering.
Buddha never condemned pleasure.
He simply revealed the chain —
Desire → Attachment → Suffering.
The more we want, the more we imagine what could have been, the more pain multiplies.
Someone cries for not having ₹100,
another for not having a car,
another for not having peace.
The cause differs, but the ache feels the same —
because the ache is born from the gap between what is and what we want.
“Desire is a mirage — it lets us run without moving.”
Even Roosevelt, a man of immense power, once said,
“Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.”
The richest man and the poorest beggar are both captive to their wants —
one craving more comfort, the other craving survival.
In the end, both suffer from the same thirst, only from different cups.
This shared thirst is what makes all sorrow the same.
The isolating, paralyzing feeling of pain is universally identical, even if the label we put on it is different.
The Illusion of Strength
Often, people say, “I love my work,” but in the next breath, glorify how much they suffer for it.
They romanticize exhaustion, sleeplessness, and pain — as if suffering makes effort pure.
Haruki Murakami wrote,
“Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.”
Yet we choose suffering, because it lets us feel heroic.
We drag pain behind us like a badge — “Look how much I endured, therefore I exist.”
But pain is not proof of life.
Awareness is.
It’s the clear, non-judgmental sight of what is happening in this moment, without the need to claim it.
As Buddha taught — to observe suffering without identifying with it is the first step toward freedom.
Liberation: Seeing Without Possessing
Liberation doesn’t come from escape —
it comes from seeing clearly without clinging.
When desire falls silent, pain loses its grip.
When the ego stops saying, “my suffering,”
sorrow becomes just another wave in the sea of being.
“The wound does not define you — your gaze upon it does.”
Freedom is not joy without pain.
It is peace despite pain.
Krishnamurti called it “choiceless awareness” —
the state where you neither hold nor reject your emotions,
just see them unfold.
To live like that is not indifference.
It is clarity.
To love without possession,
to work without glorifying struggle,
to feel without performing the feeling —
That is liberation.
Closing Thought
In the end,
“Sabka dukh alag hai, par sabka dukh samaan hai.”
(Everyone’s sorrow is different, yet all sorrow is the same.)
Our tears may fall for different reasons, but they taste the same —
the same salt, the same ache.
And perhaps, if we can see that truth —
the universal ache rooted in common desire —
then empathy will replace comparison,
and silence will replace the need to prove how deeply we’ve suffered.
Because once the ego releases its grip on pain,
what remains is not emptiness —
but freedom.
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