Buddhism divides the various states of suffering one can get caught in into three kinds.
First there is the so-called suffering of suffering.  It is the roughest and most obvious kind: when nothing works, when we are ill, friends or family members die or we experience unpleasant states and pain for different reasons. Always precise in his statements, Buddha further itemized this kind of suffering. It includes the suffering of birth, aging, and death; suffering of being away from the ones we love or meeting unpleasant circumstances, not obtaining something we would like to have and having to protect what we obtained.

Furthermore, there is a second kind of suffering, which is frequently confused with happiness - the suffering of change. Sometimes the ever changing situations in life may seem interesting and varied or we enjoy the present state. But the very moment we try to keep the pleasant impressions the seeds of suffering are already sown.  As much as we may wish it – nothing can last permanently, every situation und every state will redissolve and everything will eventually come to nothing. Therefore, explaining the suffering of change points out how painful it can be to expect permanent happiness from impermanent things.

The third kind of suffering goes undetected by most people since they are too preoccupied with the first two kinds. It is a fact that our mind is almost always obscured and therefore we cannot keep our lives under control. This suffering of conditions means that in the cycle of conditioned existence we constantly experience only suffering and that compared to our true nature, Buddha nature, even the most pleasant states we know are painful. The joy of enlightenment goes far beyond all conditioned states of happiness.

If understood correctly, the true subject matter of all these explanations on suffering is permanent happiness. Buddha points out that we cannot trust even the most pleasant states we experience right now. Since they will redissolve, eventually we can only truly count on perpetual values. This is far from pointing out that conditioned happiness should be avoided; the point rather is changing our inner attitude towards impermanent states of relative happiness. Instead of exchanging the extreme of attachment with the extreme of  renunciation we choose the middle way of enjoying without inner clinging to conditioned happiness.