Fear Suffering? Suffer from Fear.
French philosopher Michel de Montaign wrote in his Essays that "A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.”
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Not in the abstract, philosophical way you think about quotes you see on Instagram. In the way where you read something and it describes the exact shape of the hole you’ve been standing in without realizing it.
Most of the limitations I’ve bumped up against in life come down to a version of this idea. I know what I’m supposed to be doing. I know the next move. I actively avoid it because I’m afraid of what comes with it. And that avoidance doesn’t buy me peace. It buys me a low-grade anxiety about my own abilities and the nature of the world around me. A tax I pay every single day for the privilege of staying comfortable.
The math on this has never once worked out in my favor.
Every time I have experienced a real, measurable leap in the quality of my life, it was preceded by a period of intense discomfort. Getting my master’s degree was uncomfortable. The 400% increase in salary that followed was not. Quitting smoking was uncomfortable. The respiratory health I’ve enjoyed since was not. Leaving the house I still have a mortgage on in Arizona to venture out as a nomad on a quest to see the national parks in the western United States was, by most reasonable definitions, insane.
I slept on couches. I bounced from town to town with no home base. I didn’t see all the parks I wanted to see. I saw the twenty-odd that mattered most to me. I also met the woman I’m lucky enough to build a life with along the way.
You don’t get those outcomes without the discomfort. You don’t get the salary without the two years of grinding through a graduate program while working full time. You don’t get the lungs without the withdrawal. You don’t get the love without the loneliness of not knowing where you’re sleeping next week.
The times I have avoided suffering are the times I’ve given in to a laziness that I believe is baked into the human experience. I don’t say that with judgment. I say it because I’m living it right now.
My current job has me paralyzed. I don’t know if AI will displace me. I question whether I’m good enough, whether I have what it takes to land somewhere else if I had to. In my relationship, I’ve struggled with the fear of difficult conversations, the ones where you say the thing you’ve been holding and you don’t know what comes out the other side.
In both cases, the course of action is clear. I need to take the technical preparation for a job search more seriously. I need to stop being afraid of saying what I actually feel. Both of these things will be temporarily uncomfortable. Both of these things will, without question, lead to a richer life than the one I’m building by avoiding them. And even if they fail, the lessons learned along the way are worth more than the comfort of never having tried.
Fending off stagnation becomes harder the older you get. Nobody tells you this. Your growth is not guaranteed. It’s not some natural byproduct of being alive for another year. The quicksand of mediocrity has a way of wrapping itself around you so slowly that you don’t notice until you’re chest-deep. Short term, it feels like comfort. Long term, it’s regret. The pondering of what if. The wondering what could have been.
It is better to deal with the pain of suffering than the pain of regret.
There’s part of me that wishes I’d figured this out sooner. Many of the people I look up to most seem to have grappled with this earlier. My friends in tech were preparing as early as middle school. A peer who played professional sports was bench pressing 185 pounds in seventh grade. The friends who seem to have the healthiest relationship with work made time for exploration and hobbies in their early twenties, before the weight of obligation settled in.
I think about this in the context of parenting. We all want the best for our kids. Shielding them from the suffering of growth feels like protection. It’s not. Pushing them to become the best version of themselves from a young age, letting them sit in the discomfort of not being good at something yet, seems like one of the greatest gifts you can give.
The best time to start was yesterday. The second best time is now.