Acharya Prashant addresses the question of whether suffering is truly optional. He affirms that suffering is always optional, but one cannot expect to keep their current world and life and not have suffering. People want to avoid suffering but are unwilling to change the rest of their life and their ways, which is an impossible demand. Suffering comes from the same center from which the rest of one's life comes. To do away with suffering, one must be willing to do away with the rest of their life as well, which is a price most people find too high to pay. This requires being prepared to change one's ways and patterns and to plunge headlong into a truthful life. He explains that people only talk of suffering when it becomes manifest, large, and unavoidable, but at other times, they themselves are fomenting the trouble. He uses the analogy of a man who wants to maintain his customary lifestyle, diet, and habits, yet not have the diseases that result from that lifestyle. This is impossible because the disease is the lifestyle itself, now expressed. Similarly, the fact that you live the way you live and the fact that you suffer are one and the same. Suffering is not an isolated fact; it is intermeshed with your life. It is your life, your patterns, expressed in another name. To find freedom, the speaker advises to forget about the manifest suffering and instead examine the areas of life where one thinks they are not suffering. One must change the parts of their life that appear to be alright, as that is where the troubles are hidden. What you think is right with you is exactly where you are going wrong. All that you take as your accomplishments and cleverness is where your hell is. You came asking for freedom from suffering, but the advice is for freedom from pleasures. Maya (illusion) does not attack your weaknesses; she attacks your strengths. Therefore, one must be cautious of that which they are sure of, as it is surely false. The search for truth must be directed at the things one is confident about, as that is where one is being defeated.