When Life Keeps Knocking You Down

The Buddhist Eight Worldly Winds

Oftentimes, just when you think you’ve got your life in order, something happens that just undermines it all. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s experiencing this. Just when everything feels right, there’s some event throwing a spanner in the works. It’s pretty frustrating.

We’re walking around with these ideal images of how life should be, but we’re never getting there. There’s always something lacking. There’s always something going on, despite our efforts to live well. Life, so it seems, never just works without problems. It’s never as it’s supposed to be.

Prolonged adversity can gradually wear us down. Too many disappointments can make us pessimistic and almost feel destined for misfortune. I’ve felt like that often, myself, as if the devil has been toying with me since I was born. “Why me?” I frequently said out loud and, honestly, I still do sometimes.

But the Buddhists believe that the ongoing stream of unfortunate events isn’t something to be distressed about. Sure, being upset about misfortune is natural, but when we look closely at how things have worked since the dawn of time, we see that our default operating mode for handling misfortune is pretty irrational.

Buddhists have a concept called the Eight Worldly Winds, which explains why bad things keep happening and why it’s useless to be overly concerned about them. Based on this Buddhist concept, this piece explores why life keeps knocking us down and what we can do to be more resilient in the face of misfortune.

Lord Buddha - Raja Segar

Eight worldly concerns

The concept of the Eight World Winds or Eight Worldly Concerns is part of a massive goldmine of wisdom that Buddhism offers. Even this concept alone helps clarify the nature of fortune and misfortune, why they cause us suffering, and how we might become more resilient to them.

We can find the Eight Worldly Winds in the Dutiyalokadhammasutta (yes, that’s a mouthful), which describes them as follows:

Gain and loss, fame and disgrace,
blame and praise, and pleasure and pain.
These qualities among mankind are impermanent,
transient, and perishable.

Dutiyalokadhammasutta, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato

The Eight Worldly Winds are gain and loss, fame and disgrace, blame and praise, and pleasure and pain. They’re called ‘winds’, which is quite a good metaphor, as these qualities are as fickle as the wind. They are, as the Buddha stated, “impermanent, transient, and perishable”. Yet, we tend to hold on tightly to the qualities, which often leads to suffering. I’ll explain this mechanism for every wind, so to speak. Let’s start with…

Gain and loss

As a civilization, it seems we’re highly geared toward gain. There’s the financial gain, but also other forms of gain, such as making friends, finding a spouse, and building a family. When we gain something, we add something to our lives, and so we feel that our lives expand.

From a young age, we try to set ourselves up to become, well, ‘gainers.’ We want to earn a degree, build a career, and put some money in the bank. Getting one’s first car or house has almost become a rite of passage.

Often, when we paint an ideal picture, it includes things we still need to obtain, whether objects or relationships. We see ourselves in our dream houses, surrounded by a loving family and a BBQ in the summer with friends. And when we have all these things, we consider ourselves happy, at least, many do.

But the Buddha reminds us that all these things are impermanent. We will lose them eventually, and sometimes they go much earlier than expected. The wind of gain can blow for years, but before we know it, it turns into the wind of loss.

Contrary to ‘gain’, which we usually see as something preferable, ‘loss’ is seen as something bad, often tragic, which is the reason we try to avoid it.

The next ones are…

Fame and disgrace

Fame and disgrace are also forms of gain and loss, but not in terms of stuff or people, but in terms of reputation. Suffering the winds of fame and disgrace is very common nowadays, in the era of social media, where attention has become a currency. Fame and disgrace are where gossip magazines and many of today’s YouTube channels rely on, as we seem very sensitive about our reputations and those of others.

Society encourages us to build a good reputation and achieve fame. The quality of fame is so sought-after that some people nowadays do literally anything to get it, from filming yourself with a corpse in a Japanese forest to harassing people for views, risking prison. It’s not about being a contributing factor to society. It’s about relevance. And the biggest fear of those seeking fame is becoming ‘irrelevant.’

Unfortunately for those who cling to fame, the wind of disgrace or “irrelevance” can set in anytime, and there’s not much you can do about it. You can try to fight it, doing everything to stay relevant, or try to keep your name clean, but when people stop paying attention to you or drag you through the mud, what can you do? You can’t control who people choose to adore, hate, or ignore.

Let’s continue with…

Praise and blame

For this pair, I’d like to share a personal story, the great elephant in the room: my YouTube channel that I started at the end of 2018. Although I began with moderate expectations, I saw my videos gaining traction pretty fast. In August 2019, my video on Taoist philosophy, ‘TAOISM | The Philosophy of Flow’, went viral, and gave the channel a massive boost in subscribers. I quickly reached 100k, then 500k, then a million, and so on.

The channel’s remarkable growth was exhilarating. I had never experienced anything like it before. In the midst of COVID, I was getting millions of views a month and, with them, a constant stream of praise. I felt unstoppable. But I always reminded myself that this admiration is temporary: it will subside.

In 2023, around half a year after ChatGPT’s launch, I noticed a significant shift in my views and impressions. The ongoing upward trend changed into a downtrend. Along with that decline came less positive feedback and more silence. So, I tried a lot to change the tide (different topics, longer videos, new subjects), but nothing really worked. The downtrend has continued, but I seem to be settling into a new, stable normal, and I’m grateful for the substantial audience that still enjoys my work.

All praise fades eventually. Sometimes it lasts for decades, but often it’s very short-lived.

The last pair is…

Pleasure and pain

We might describe Western society as deeply pain-averse. We seek to avoid physical pain through anesthesia and emotional pain through antidepressants. We try to prevent illness, conceal death, and place great value on safety and security. The wind of pain is rarely welcomed; it is feared and resisted at almost any cost.

Pleasure, on the other hand, is something most people love. We like to indulge the senses by enjoying meals and drinks, looking at beautiful sights, listening to music, or engaging in the pleasure of touch. Why? Because these things generally make us feel good. Many people also use substances for pleasure, and some of them develop a dependency on them.

Unfortunately, we cannot totally avoid pain, nor can we always experience pleasure. Painful diseases can happen to us anytime, and the pleasures we enjoy can be taken away in an instant.

Meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg describes it as follows in her book Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness:

Life is just as it is, despite our protests. For all of us there is a constant succession of pleasurable and painful experiences.

Salzberg, Sharon. Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (p. 8). Shambhala.

Moreover, pleasure and pain are connected to the other six worldly concerns, as we generally experience pain when there’s loss, disgrace, and blame, and we experience pleasure when there’s gain, fame, and success. So, the winds of pleasure and pain are widespread occurrences.

Now that we have briefly explored the Eight Worldly Winds, let’s go a bit deeper into why these winds influence our moods so much.

Chained to circumstance

From a Buddhist perspective, the Eight Worldly Winds aren’t problematic in themselves. The problem lies in our attitudes towards them. Most people are entangled with these concerns, as they invite those representing good fortune, but avoid those representing misfortune.

Many people build their whole lives around chasing the former and steering clear of the latter. And this aversion to pain and obsession with favorable conditions is culturally reinforced. Sharon Salzberg describes this dynamic quite well in her book:

The unrelenting flux of life’s changing conditions is inevitable, yet we labor to hold on to pleasure, and we labor equally hard to avoid pain. So many images from our world tell us that it is wrong to suffer; advertising, social mores, and cultural assumptions suggest that feeling pain or sadness is blameworthy, shameful, humiliating. Underlying these messages is an expectation that somehow we should be able to control pain or loss.

Salzberg, Sharon. Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness (p. 9). Shambhala.

So, here we see a mismatch between expectation and reality. The winds cannot be stopped, no matter how hard we try. They come and go. But because we desire some winds and are averse to others, we’re happy when we encounter the winds we like but suffer when we encounter the winds we don’t like. In other words, our mental states are chained to external circumstances.

This way of thinking resembles that of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who distinguishes between things within our control and those beyond it. The things beyond our control, according to Epictetus, are health, wealth, fame, and power, or “whatever are not our own actions.” These concerns easily fit into the Eight Worldly Winds. And Epictetus’ opinion of them aligns with the Buddha’s wisdom: they are “weak, servile, subject to hindrance, dependent on others.”

A while ago, I published a video about the influence of the news on our mental states, which is a prime example of how our mental states are chained to events beyond our control. As long as we let news agencies decide how we feel, by stuffing all these alarmist messages about politics and immigrant invasions down our throats, these companies have immense power over us, and so do politicians who capitalize on how we feel.

Just as Epictetus does, the Buddha discourages us from clinging to things beyond our control. Because if we do, we’re in a very fickle position. We can feel delighted and content one day, simply because the outside world aligns with our preferences. But as soon as something happens we don’t like, such as encountering someone nasty, getting fired from a job, or a stock market crash, our moods can be ruined very quickly. And so, we have become playthings of the Eight Worldly Winds: the uncontrollable, unpredictable, and unstoppable conditions of life.

So, what can we do to become more resilient to these winds?

This too shall pass

Buddhism offers a comprehensive system for addressing the suffering inherent in life, which, of course, is too big to cover in a single piece or video. There are excellent sources that explain it in detail, such as Buddhist monks and the suttas themselves.

Still, there are a few Buddhist insights I’d like to share that may help us remain steady during life’s setbacks.

Let’s start with the simile of the two arrows, which clearly explains the distinction between the Eight Worldly Winds and our reactions to these winds. The first arrow is the inevitable pain we experience in life, which represents the “painful” winds, so to speak, which are loss, disgrace, blame, and pain.

And that’s why we often feel life keeps knocking us down: because it does. Life knocks us down all the time. That’s the first arrow, hitting us several times a day. It comes in the form of unfriendly people, flat tires, delayed trains, and delivery guys who don’t show up. We can’t prevent this arrow from hitting us. However, we can control how we respond to the first arrow.

The second arrow is the arrow of suffering, which is our internal reaction. It’s our immediate response to the first arrow, which could be a bodily reaction and our thoughts and stories about the pain, something like: “This is wrong!” “This shouldn’t happen!” “Why always me?”

When we examine these arrows closely, we discover that the real suffering takes place in our minds, not in the outside world. The winds don’t cause suffering in themselves; our reactions to these winds do the job. The good news is that the second arrow can be worked with, which is the third noble truth in Buddhism: there is the cessation of suffering. (I go deeper into these arrows in a video I made a couple of years ago, so check it out.)

In short, the suffering is fundamentally caused by clinging. We cling to desired outcomes. We cling to gain, fame, praise, and pleasure.

And when we lose these things, and their opposites confront us, we feel terrible, as we resist the pain. Let’s take a look at another part of the Dutiyalokadhammasutta:

An intelligent and mindful person knows these things,
seeing that they’re perishable.
Desirable things don’t disturb their mind,
nor are they repelled by the undesirable.

Dutiyalokadhammasutta, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato

So, it starts with being aware of transience; things come and go. A good simile is the Persian king who received a ring with the following words engraved into it: This too shall pass.

The ring was so valuable because the king experienced haughtiness when things were going well in the kingdom, but immense distress when things were not going so well. By reminding himself continually that whatever conditions within the kingdom were transient, he would be less attached to them, so they would less affect him.

And so, can’t we apply this to all worldly concerns? When we experience success, as I did with my channel, reminding ourselves that we are not resistant toward change and that our success can fade, sometimes overnight, can be a lifesaver. The same goes for fame, which is often pretty short-lived these days. For every celebrity, there now seems to be an influencer whose job is to tear them down.

We can also apply it to attachments to people: reminding ourselves that they, just as we, are susceptible to illness, death, betrayal, or other conditions that cause separation can help mitigate the arrow of loss. And we can also use it for different forms of pain, be it mental or physical.

And how about minor annoyances? Think about being stuck in traffic, waiting in line at the airport, or experiencing noisy neighbors. These aren’t fun and usually bring about discontent. But they’re almost always temporary. They always pass.

Why I like ‘wind’ as a metaphor so much is that it’s unpredictable, just as all these events we don’t have control over that just happen to us. They come and go; sometimes they hurt, sometimes they’re pleasant. We can’t stop them, so why even resist? Isn’t it better to just accept them and try to deal with them as well as we can when they present themselves?

True strength isn’t the ability to control the worldly winds, which is impossible. True strength means not being carried away by them.