“The secret cause of suffering,” from James Joyce and Joseph Campbell, resides in the arc of our own life and our propensity for seeing/interpreting (and we cannot see without interpreting) things as we do.
We bring our suffering (and death) upon ourselves by way of our living/seeing/interpreting the events of our life in the manner that is idiosyncratic to us. One person’s suffering is another person’s inconvenience.
Dying is inevitable, but the time and place and apparent cause of our death is also idiosyncratic to us and our way with life.
We bring it all on ourselves by the way we see/interpret/think about/respond to the events and circumstances of our life. There is no “freedom of choice.”
We are bound by our way of seeing/interpreting/responding to what happens and what we say is called for in light of what we encounter and the innate way we respond to it in each situation as it arises throughout our life, from birth on.
The way we respond to things is idiosyncratic to us, to our way of seeing/interpreting/thinking about the events and circumstances of our life.
We are the common denominator holding our life together and creating the life we are living by the way our proclivities require us to respond to all that is happening.
Why “this is always happening to me” is because of the way we always deal with it every time it happens. Nothing changes until we do.
Jim Dollar's Photography and Philosophy 