But only saying awakening reduces suffering caused by misperception of self, doesn't really help. People need real world examples of the kinds of problems they have that will be reduced by awakening and those that won't be reduced by awakening.
I completely resonate with your question.
It seems that all this awakening stuff belongs to a realm of perception that is very sophisticated, subtle or "transcendental". It is hard to talk about it: teachers either speak about it in mystical-shmystical poetic metaphors (which sounds like quackery) or they try to explain it phenomenologically/scientifcally/pragmatically, which sounds overly abstract. When a teacher says: "Awakening will free you from the pain associated with the illusion of self", 99,999% of people would not understand what are they talking about. It just sounds abstract and philosophical.
Shinzen Young once said that the curse of awakening is that nobody will understand what are you talking about. I suppose that it's like trying to talk with a fish about the water that it lives in. Someone said that the "fundamental suffering" is like a large burden that you carried all of your life so you are not aware that you carry it (because you don't know how is it to be without it).
I think that, fundamentally, there are no "real world examples" for this. Any concrete examples (such as eliminating some addiction etc.) are just anegdotes, not universal for all awakened people. And they belong to the realm of psychology, not awakening.
I like the explanation given by Kenneth Folk (you can google it): he says that awakening brings "meta-okayness" - anything can arise in your mind, as before awakening, but now there is "more space" around it, a background okayness. So, everything is the same, but, at the same time, everything is different, because things are now in this different, better context.
In several of his recent interviews, Daniel was directly asked what are the benefits of awakening, and each time he answered with a long list of things, to name a few: all negative emotions last much shorter, you can see thoughts as thoughts (you see that they are not objective reality), there is more spaciousness so suffering feels smaller in comparison, reality feels much more pleasant etc.
However, this all sounds abstract. I guess that subtle and paradoxical nature of awakening just makes it necessary to talk about it in that way.