Pain and suffering in Western culture is an examination of existence.

That is:

Why should our world exist with pain and suffering in the first place? And what kind of cruel creator would allow it?

Western culture takes pleasure and hedonism as a given and asks what place pain and suffering has in our world, to begin with.

This is the opposite of how the East looks at it.

The West has rightly gone to great lengths to reduce the agony of putting a blade to the body. The volumes of philosophy books written in the West on the subject of pain and suffering, as well as the universities educating the masses into asking the question at such a lofty level, all have in mind the end game of skepticism or even atheism.

-Ravi Zacharias and Vince Vitale, Why Suffering?