teaching that the Buddha offers after he achieves his Enlightenment is known as the setting the wheel in motion.

He has just become enlightened and he encounters a group of individuals he had practiced with

and he says to them,

life the way most of us live it is stressful.

Birth is stressful, aging is stressful, is stressful,

aging is stressful, death is stressful,

sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are stressful.

Associating with difficult people is stressful.

Being separated from the love is, loved is stressful.

Not getting what we want is stressful.

So that's pretty much referring to a large part of human experience

and basically saying it's stressful.

Two typical ways that people live that make their lives

stressful. One is by constantly chasing after pleasures that are common,

readily available, but unprofitable.

They don't create lasting happiness.

And the second way is a life of deprivation based on fear, cowering from life, not embracing life, not ever taking risks

and so forth.

In my favorite teaching the Atadanda, the Buddha says,

looking around at the world, I experienced dismay.

I saw that people lived like fish floundering and small puddles,

competing with one another over everything for no reason,

...