Voluntary Discomfort

How much do you really love someone? Enough to protect them? Or so much you want them to hurt?

German philosopher, Fredrick Nietzsche, said the discipline of suffering “produced all the elevations of humanity so far?”

Nietzsche wasn’t one to hold back. He called it like he saw it, and what he saw was often way ahead of his time. In this case, Nietzsche saw a world trying its best to avoid suffering, or at most accepting it, when what we should be doing is seeking it out. Inviting it in. Having dinner with it.

Modern-day philosopher, and pretty great Podcaster, Joe Rogan, agrees.

“Do things that are difficult. It’s very important to struggle. You don’t get to know yourself without struggle. You don’t know who you are until you get tested.”

That’s why Colin O’Brady traversed the arctic alone, Ross Edgley swam around Great Britain, and Alex Honnold soloed El Cap. And why man will continue to dare existence itself. Because we need too. Because we were born too. Because in filth it will be found — “In sterquiliniis invenitur.”

To make all that pain worthwhile, Nietzsche goes on, we must find our purpose, or what he called an “organizing idea.” That’s the first step to becoming Superman — the best man we can be.

“The organizing idea that is destined to rule keeps growing deep down — it begins to command, slowly it leads us back from side roads and wrong roads; it prepares single qualities and fitnesses that will one day prove to be indispensable as a means toward a whole — one by one, it trains all subservient capacities before giving any hint of the dominant task, “goal,” “aim,” or “meaning.”

Without a purpose, without a reason for the pain, without something to aim at, we can’t focus our torment on the target. That’s when life becomes too much to bear. But align yourself with an organizing idea, and maybe that pain doesn’t hurt as much. Perhaps it’s even worth it.

Next, Nietzsche said, learn to suffer.

You’d think we popped out fully formed, just knowing how to suffer, but that just isn’t the case. Like being a bad winner, there’s such a thing as a bad sufferer.

Complaining about your situation, for one, certainly doesn’t help anything. Nor does comparing your life to everyone else’s. And you can all but forget fair right now. The chances of life being fair are about as good as the chances of winning the lottery.

What Nietzsche meant by learning to suffer had more to do with how we carry ourselves when all we want is to give up. It’s crawling when all we can do is crawl, walking when all we can do is walk, and running into the battle we were destined to fight.

This doesn’t come at all naturally, of course. That’s why Nietzsche called it “the discipline of suffering.” Because it takes a lot of work and years of practice to get good at it. And you’ll still screw it up. That’s ok. The point isn’t perfection; it’s persistence.

Nietzsche was so adamant about developing suffering as a skill, in fact, that he wished hardship for all those he cared for.

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities — I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt, the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.”

Think about that. How much do you really love someone? Enough to protect them? Or so much you want them to hurt?

Bliss was never the goal. Hell, the goal was never the goal. It’s the way to the goal that gives life meaning. Without it, no matter how comfortable things seem, we revolt.

“Shower upon him every earthly blessing,” Dostoyevsky said, “drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.”

We can do our best to prevent even an ounce of discomfort from creeping into our lives, but a life lived without struggle is just suffering of a different sort.

“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world?,” Agent Smith says in The Matrix. “Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.”

Or we can voluntarily choose burden over bliss and be prepared for the times when unforeseen catastrophe strikes, forcing us to question the cosmos itself. To ask the world’s most common question, “why me?”

That’s when practice pays off.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations,” Archilochus said, “we fall to the level of our training.”

And more importantly, our reason for living matters most.

“He who has a why,” Nietzsche said, “can bear almost any how.”