I agree with that Maarten van Doorn. No one “deserves” to suffer.

I want to understand the word “deserve” better. Every time I hear it, I think, “Someone is trying to manipulate me.”

Think about it…
… “you deserve a break today,”
… “you deserve a vacation (a spa day, a reward)”

Advertisers use the word deserve to create in us an unhealthy sense of entitlement that may cause us to hand our money and agency over to their clients in exchange for… what? The things we thought we should be entitled to?

That’s not going to work out well for us.

No one deserves a spa day.
No one deserves a candy bar.
No one deserves to suffer.

Perhaps we choose the spa day, we choose the candy bar… and we choose the suffering?

That may not always be true, but it is often true in my case.

And I think you make a great point about the fact that it ties back to the question of free will.

I am convinced of this:

We choose what has meaning to us, and what those things mean.

A cascade of involuntary biochemical reactions follow, just from that.