18 Nov 2021

Everybody wants what feels good. Everybody wants to live a carefree life, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have an amazing sex and relationships to look perfect and make money and be popular and well respected and admired and a total baller to point that people part like the red sea when you walk into the room. If I ask you.” What do you want out of life?” and if you reply something like, “I want to be happy and have great family and a job I like”. It’s so ubiquitous that doesn’t even mean anything. 

A   more    interesting   question, a   question that perhaps you’ve never considered before, is, “what pain do you want in your life?”  “What are you willing to struggle for?”  Because that seems to be grater determinant of how your life turns out. Everybody     wants    to    have     an    The Most Important Question of Life (The Next View) amazing    job   and   financial independence   but    not   everyone   wants to suffer through 60 hours works   a   week, long   commutes   obnoxious paper works, to navigate and the pain of an infinite cubicle hell. People want to be rich without risk, without sacrifice. Sometimes I ask my friends, “How do you choose to suffer?” they tilt their heads and looked at me like I have twelve noses.  But I ask because that tells me far more about you than your desires and fantasies. Because you can’t have a pain free life. 

It can’t be all roses and    unicorns.    Ultimately    that’s     the   hard   question    that   matters.   Pleasure is an easy question and all of us have similar answers. The more interesting question is pain that you want to sustain. What determines your success isn’t “What you enjoy?”  But what pain do you want to sustain?” the quality of   your   life    isn’t   determined   by   the quality of your positive experience but    negative   one.   And to get good at dealing with life. 

“Happiness costs struggle” 

“The positive is side effect of handling negative”