The pain you kinda enjoy...

Hey friend,

I'd bet you've felt these, even if you've never named them:

The more you try to impress people, the less impressive you feel.

The more attractive you want to be, the more flaws you find in the mirror.

The more love you feel like you need, the lonelier and more isolated you feel.

And the more you try to be happy all the time, the more easily you become upset.

The philosopher Alan Watts called this the backwards law. Chasing a positive experience is itself a negative experience. Accepting a negative experience is itself a positive experience.

The good news: accept that sometimes life is hard and things go wrong, then happy and easygoing is what you become.

Most of us chase the wrong version of happiness. Aristotle argued there are two.

1) Hedonia is the quick one: pleasure, comfort, feeling good now.

2) Eudaimonia is the deep one: purpose, meaning, a life where the suffering was worth the trouble.

The modern world is optimized for hedonia. Everything around us is engineered to keep us comfortable, drip-fed on quick dopamine hits, promised a fix in 30 days or our money back. Somewhere in there, we started mistaking comforts and highs for the real thing.

So rather than asking yourself, "what would make me happy?", the better question to ask is "what pain do I kind of enjoy that most people don't?"

That pain, and your relationship with it, is likely where most of your life's meaning hides. In the struggles you relish. In the challenges you're proudest of overcoming.

I've always kind of enjoyed the pain of hard training. I liked it enough to make it a career. And the purpose followed: the pain I chose for myself became the one I walk other people through.

Happiness was never something to pursue and achieve. It's the natural side effect of finding something worth struggling for.

Until next time,

Peter