I tend to reject the notion that suffering is inherently beautiful. I often find this sentiment in overly romanticized views of the human experience, typically from younger people.
Suffering is beautiful if we can learn from it, grow from it, come out the other side a better person. But it’s not the suffering itself, it’s something that lies ahead of the suffering. It’s the underlying motivation of continuing to pursue life even when the pain is beyond measurable. The chance to turn mud into a flower is something beautiful, if not a miracle given to us by the mercy of the universe.
Suffering that we do not recover from is a tragedy, suffering we do recover from is beautiful. There is no beauty in the tragedy. We don’t say “wow that kid that got cancer when she was 7 and passed away, what a beauty that was.” Of course not! That would be sociopathic. The child did not recover from their suffering, she left this world without bearing the fruits of the terrible pain that was endured onto her. What we would say is “wow that kid who got cancer when she was 7 and recovered and went on to to do great things, what a beautiful life she turned out to have.”
I find this type of tragic suffering quite useless. I think it really has no beneficial place in Life and if I could banish it forever, I would. We need suffering for spiritual growth, there is no denying that, but we need the suffering that can be beautiful and that can be transformed into wisdom.
From Thich Nhat Hanh:
We know that suffering can teach us, we can learn a lot from suffering. If we look deeply into the nature of suffering, we may get insight on how we can get out of our situation. That is why suffering, dukkha, has been called in Buddhism a holy truth. Suffering is holy, because the contemplation of suffering can bring about insight on how to get out of suffering and transform it.
From Ram Dass:
Something in you dies when you bear the unbearable. In other words, you go beyond just the horror and pain of it because it takes you beyond it. You can’t bear it and it is only in the dark night of the soul that you’re prepared to see as God sees and to love as God loves.
I like to think that beneficial suffering in a utopia would be something periodic and hard but not unrecoverable. Something like death simulation or more advanced versions of sweat lodges . Of course you’d have the usual death and personal problems, but hopefully nothing like childhood cancer.