Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 6: Life is Hell

The moral case for understanding that despite life's suffering, it's still worth it.

Life is suffering.

It's a phrase people often hear but rarely do they ever understand what it actually means. For most people, they think that the idea that life is suffering means that all you're really going to ever feel is pain and suffering until the day you die. That the world is this horrible place with things like war, disease, crime and people doing terrible things to each other. While there may be some small amounts of pleasure and joy in this world, most of the time they're going just going to either hurt someone else or be hurt by someone. Knowing this makes people feel like life isn't worth living in any real sense. It's better to just accept this about the world and to do your best to make sure that you inflict more pain on other people than being on the receiving end. Which is usually why people are willing to do terrible things, because in the end none of it really matters. But is that really true?

Previously in this space, we explored the importance of accepting responsibility for yourself and the people around you, as well as the difficulty of learning to live with consequences. Then we looked at what it means to choose a future when you know that your actions will have such problems, how to take on the importance of these ideas for yourself rather than letting others tell you. More recently we looked at how all of these problems can lead someone to want to connect with a more powerful force and where you learned it in the first place, your family. However, even with all of these factors in place, you still have to learn to live in the world. You still have to get up and find a job and do all the ordinary things that make up these ordinary lives. It's the ordinary things that can drive you insane.

“I was happy. Wherever I, was... I was happy, at peace. I knew that everyone I cared about was all right. I knew it. Time, didn't mean anything. Nothing had form, but I was still me you know? And I was warm, and I was loved, and I was finished... complete. I don't understand theology or dimensions, any of it really. But I think I was in heaven... and now I'm not. I was torn out of there, pulled out, by my friends. Everything here is hard and bright and violent. Everything I feel, everything I touch... this is hell.”

Buffy has been through a lot in her life. She's saved the world so many times it's difficult to count. She's dealt with disaster after disaster and managed to find a way to live with it all. You could even say that she's managed to learn to deal with it all quite well, if not always perfectly. Part of the reason she's been able to do it however is because she didn't have to think about the little things. She always had someone who could take care of the bills and school tuition and everything else like food. At no point in her life has she had to think about where would she get the money to pay for the stuff she destroyed while fighting demons. That was someone else's problem to handle. The only thing she actually had to worry about was whether or not she could stop the world from ending. Obviously this is a really important job for her to deal with. People like her mother and Giles and everyone else couldn't do all those little things if she didn't save the world.

Eventually though, you do have to come to terms with these things. You have to be able to get a job and pay a mortgage and figure out what type of food to buy for yourself, not to mention other people. Doing these things aren't the most glamorous parts of life. They don't get praised by others in the same way that saving the world does. By comparison, they seem pretty trivial. How can they be as important as making sure the world doesn't end? Without them though, you might not be able to save the world. Only by understanding that can you truly be available to keep the world safe.

The problem is that unlike saving the world, everyone is dealing with the ordinary stuff. You have to live in the real world with real people who don't think about whether tomorrow will actually happen or not. When you have to confront the fact that in life, you're not that different from other people, it can really screw with people's heads. No matter what you might want, you are just like everyone else. Most people want to feel special, like they're different. It's only later in life that they come to realize that they're not. The world doesn't revolve around them and the things they're dealing with in any serious way. You're just you... like everybody else.

“Life's not a song. Life isn't bliss, life is just this... it's living. You have to go on living... so that one of us is living.”

Coming to terms with this reality isn't fun. To the point that people tend to reject it as a possibility outright. Instead they make every effort to differentiate themselves from those around them. Highlight what makes them special and new and deserving of being treated as such. People talk about how their experience is different from other people. They understand the world in a way that no one else does. Largely thanks to their personal issues like their family history or their desire to make the world better. At least until things come right down to it anyway. Because on some level, everyone is trying to do this. Which doesn't end very well for people.

This is where the suffering comes into play. People will do whatever they can to stop seeing this part of themselves. They will do things like drink or do drugs or have lots of sex because it gives them a little bit of a break from knowing you might not be anything special. It's a lot more fun than feeling the emptiness and loneliness of a life like that. Unfortunately, this good feeling doesn't last very long, as at some point you'll feel that pain creeping back in. So you have to keep turning to whatever makes you feel better just to hold it off. But of course constantly looking for that next fix isn't going to do anything to deal with the problem in the long run. It just puts it off until a little later.

“I don't know how I got through this day.”

“Well the important thing is that you did. It's a good first step.”

“How are you doing? Post-invisibleness?”

“Okay... still have to do some damage control from my giddy fest. Dawn was pretty freaked out. The whole taking a vacation from me didn't turn out too well.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Except... when I got Xander's message that I was, fading away. I actually got scared.”

“Well yeah, who wouldn't?”

“Me... I wouldn't. Not too long ago I probably would've welcomed it. But I realize... I'm not saying I'm doing back flips about my life but... I didn't... I don't wanna die. That's something right?'

“That's something.”

Buffy and Willow are the obvious examples of this problem. Between the two of them, they have a lot of pain and suffering that they're trying to get away from. Buffy from the realization that her friends destroyed her by bringing her back and taking her away from the perfect bliss that was heaven. Her pain gets to the point that she's even willing to believe that she's a mental patient in the hospital rather than the saviour she has always thought of herself as. Part of her would prefer that way of life to the unfortunate circumstance she's living day to day. Having a job at the Double Meat Palace and trying to deal with problems like a mortgage and giving Dawn a future only make her even worse off when it comes right down to it. Or at the very least that's the way she comes to see the way she's living.

Willow from the fact that she's using magic to solve problems that don't need magic to solve them. They're the ordinary things which don't make you feel special. Rather than deal with the fact that she's having trouble in her relationship with Tara, she chooses to fix her girlfriend by casting a spell on her. It gives her a sense of control she doesn't otherwise have. Something that in her high school experience she wasn't able to find until she learned to embrace magic. Of course it would make sense for her to lean on it. Especially since Tara is the one who opened up her horizons into the magical realm in a way she never could've understood without her.

“Oh please, this is your pitch? Buffy you hate it here as much as I do, I'm just more honest about it. You're trying to sell me on the world? The one where you lie to your friends when you're not trying to kill them? Where you screw a vampire just to feel? And insane asylums are the comfy alternative? This world? Buffy it's me, I know you were happier when you were in the ground. The only time you were ever at peace in your whole life is when you were dead. Until Willow brought you back... you know, with magic.”

This is what makes Warren, Jonathan and Andrew such perfect villains for the season as a whole. The Trio are people who have completely given up on the idea that they can deal with the ordinary aspects of life. None of them want to put in the hard work that's necessary to be functional. Warren in particular simply wants to find the easy way out of any kind of responsibility or consequences. He wants his future to be whatever he thinks it should be. He wants money without having to work for it, he want friends who don't care how he treats them, and more than anything he wants love without taking into consideration what the person he loves, or at the very least claims to love, wants. Jonathan and Andrew to a lesser extent want the same thing. They want to have access to all the benefits of success without actually working for it. Unlike Warren however, Jonathan and Andrew aren't willing to go as far as him to get it.

“Dawn, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry.”

“It's okay Buffy.”

“No, no it hasn't been, it hasn't been okay, but it's going to be now, I see it.”

“See what?”

“You. Things have really sucked lately, that's all going to change, and I wanna be there when it does. I wanna see my friends happy again. I wanna see you grow up, the woman you're going to become, because she's going to be beautiful... and she's gonna be powerful. I got it so wrong. I don't want to protect you from the world, I wanna show it to you. There's so much that I wanna show you.”

Yet what they learn over the course of time is that they don't have to let the pain and suffering they're going through overwhelm them. That the pain doesn't have to be all that they experience or understand about the world. Despite the horrible feelings and the way in which their lives suck thanks to these ordinary aspects of life, they can still have a life worth living. A life which is worth the pain they feel so they can move forward. Maybe even pass on the desire to enjoy life to the next generation.

Although we'll get into how that might happen when we examine the final season which upgraded subscribers can read now.

Check out the show on Hulu as well as Amazon and Disney Plus.

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