“Discomfort is the means of admission to leading a meaningful life”
Susan David
As a species, we are naturally inclined to avoid pain. For obvious reasons, this has been rather useful for our survival.
The problem is that modern life has become extraordinarily good at helping us avoid not only pain, but almost every form of discomfort.
Bored? Pick up your phone.
Lonely? Open a dating app.
Stressed? Order something, watch something, eat something, drink something.
Sexually stimulated? There is an infinite amount of sexual content available within seconds.
Feel insecure? Go looking for attention or validation.
Have an uncomfortable thought? There are approximately seventeen thousand ways to make sure you never have to sit alone with it.
We have become remarkably good at changing how we feel.
And I'm increasingly convinced that our inability to not change how we feel is one of the greatest threats to our freedom.
Because if every uncomfortable internal state immediately sends you searching for something outside yourself to make it disappear, how free are you really?
I Learned This the Hard Way
I didn't properly understand the importance of discomfort until I was around 29.
I'd obviously heard all the clichés before. “No pain, no gain.” “Get comfortable being uncomfortable.” The usual stuff shouted by extremely muscular men on the internet while carrying a large tyre up a hill.
If you know me, you'll know I don't naturally gravitate toward that particular corner of masculinity.
So I mostly dismissed it.
Then life forced me to understand what those clichés were actually pointing toward.
For the first time, I went through a period of excruciating emotional discomfort without relying on the behaviours I'd previously used to change how I felt.
That was new for me.
For much of my earlier life, I'd become very good at altering uncomfortable internal states through external means. Substances, women, sex, adventure, novelty, achievement and various other forms of distraction or stimulation had all served that purpose at different times.
Some were obviously more destructive than others.
But underneath many of them was the same mechanism:
I don't like how I feel right now. What can I do to change it?
Learning that I could experience an uncomfortable feeling without immediately needing to escape it was one of the most important realizations of my adult life.
I could feel something and simply let it be there.
It wouldn't kill me.
Eventually, it would change.
Not All Discomfort Is Good
I should clarify something because the internet has done a wonderful job of turning discomfort into another competitive sport.
Pain doesn't automatically equal growth.
Taking freezing showers at 4 a.m., working yourself into exhaustion and deliberately making your life miserable doesn't automatically make you a stronger or better human being.
Some discomfort is pointless.
Some pain is damaging.
Sometimes leaving is considerably more courageous than enduring.
Staying in a destructive relationship isn't discipline. Ignoring an injury isn't resilience. Burning yourself out isn't evidence that you want success badly enough.
The question isn't:
How much discomfort can I tolerate?
It's:
What am I willing to be uncomfortable for?
That's a much more important question.
Having a difficult conversation because honesty requires it is meaningful discomfort.
Training when you'd rather stay home can be meaningful discomfort.
Telling the truth when lying would protect your image is meaningful discomfort.
Resisting an impulse because acting on it would violate your values is meaningful discomfort.
Sitting with rejection rather than immediately seeking validation somewhere else is meaningful discomfort.
The discomfort has a purpose.
It's in service of something you've consciously decided matters more.
Discomfort Creates Choice
This is where my understanding of discomfort has changed most.
I used to think learning to tolerate discomfort was primarily about becoming tougher.
Now I think it's primarily about becoming freer.
If I cannot tolerate an urge without satisfying it, I don't really have a choice.
If I cannot tolerate boredom without stimulation, I don't really have a choice.
If I cannot tolerate loneliness without seeking attention, I don't really have a choice.
If I cannot tolerate rejection without needing validation, I don't really have a choice.
If I cannot tolerate uncertainty without desperately trying to control the outcome, I don't really have a choice.
The ability to remain uncomfortable creates a gap between what you feel and what you do.
Inside that gap, you get to decide.
That's freedom.
Not freedom from desire, difficulty or uncomfortable emotions. Freedom to choose your response to them.
This Is Particularly Important for Men
I think this capacity matters enormously for men today because we're living in an environment where almost every impulse can be satisfied immediately.
This is particularly obvious with sex and women.
A man can experience sexual desire and within seconds access more sexual stimulation than men throughout almost all of human history could have imagined.
He can feel lonely and immediately start swiping.
He can feel insecure and go looking for attention.
He can experience rejection and find someone else to distract him from it.
But the same principle applies far beyond sexuality.
We can escape into work, food, gaming, social media, shopping, entertainment, substances, endless self-improvement and even productivity.
The specific escape route isn't always the most important part.
The more important question is:
What happens when you don't take it?
What happens when you simply experience the urge?
Or the boredom?
Or the loneliness?
Or the uncertainty?
Can you stay there long enough to choose what happens next?
For a long time, I couldn't.
Learning to do so changed my life.
Integrity Is Often Uncomfortable
This is perhaps where discomfort matters most.
It's easy to be a man of integrity when what you want and what you believe happen to point in exactly the same direction.
The real test arrives when they don't.
Part of you says:
I want this.
Another part says:
But this isn't who I've decided to be.
That gap is uncomfortable.
Maybe nobody would ever know.
Maybe you could rationalize it.
Maybe you've done it a hundred times before.
Maybe it would feel really fucking good in the moment.
Integrity is what happens next.
If a man cannot tolerate the discomfort created by saying no to what he wants right now, his values will continually lose to whichever desire happens to be strongest in the moment.
This is why I no longer see discipline primarily as restriction.
Discipline protects choice.
And the ability to tolerate discomfort is one of the things that makes discipline possible.
Hard Things Become Easier
One thing from my original understanding of discomfort still holds true for me:
The more willingly you experience it, the less frightening it becomes.
This doesn't necessarily mean the difficult thing itself becomes easy.
You become more familiar with the experience of doing difficult things.
There's a difference.
You learn that an urge doesn't need to be obeyed.
You learn that anxiety can rise and fall.
You learn that rejection hurts and then eventually doesn't.
You learn that you can have an uncomfortable conversation and survive the awkwardness.
You learn that you can train when you don't feel motivated.
You learn that you can make a difficult decision without knowing exactly how everything will turn out.
Every time you do this, you're collecting evidence about yourself.
I can handle this.
And that evidence compounds.
This has probably been one of the biggest sources of genuine confidence in my own life. Not convincing myself that I'm capable of difficult things, but accumulating actual experiences of doing them.
We Aren't Very Good at Letting Ourselves Struggle
There was a large section in the original version of this article about parenting, despite the inconvenient fact that I wasn't a parent.
I'll spare you most of my unsolicited parenting advice this time around.
But there was an idea underneath the rant that I still believe is useful.
We naturally want to remove discomfort.
We do it for children. We do it for people we love. And perhaps most frequently, we do it for ourselves.
Sometimes that's exactly what we should do.
But if we continually remove every experience of frustration, boredom, disappointment, uncertainty and delayed gratification, we never discover that we're capable of handling those states.
As adults, we then enter a world that has become exceptionally efficient at helping us continue the pattern.
There is always something available to make us feel different.
The challenge is learning that we don't always need it.
“A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned.”
― Naval Ravikant
The Discomfort You Choose Matters
I don't believe the goal is to become some emotionless machine capable of tolerating endless suffering.
Quite the opposite.
The point is to become more deliberate about which discomforts you're willing to experience because of what exists on the other side of them.
If you want a strong body, there will be physical discomfort.
If you want a deep relationship, there will be emotional discomfort.
If you want to build something meaningful, there will be uncertainty and failure.
If you want integrity, there will be temptation.
If you want genuine intimacy, there will be vulnerability.
If you want freedom from behaviours that no longer serve you, there will be moments when every part of you wants to return to what is familiar.
If you want a relationship with God, there will be moments when you have to surrender outcomes you desperately want to control.
Nearly everything meaningful asks us to tolerate something uncomfortable along the way.
The question is whether what we're pursuing is worth the price.
The Free Man
I've come to see discomfort very differently from how I did when I originally wrote this article.
I don't worship it.
I don't think suffering makes someone virtuous, and I have no interest in making life unnecessarily difficult simply to prove that I'm tough enough to endure it.
What I value is capacity.
The capacity to feel something without immediately reacting.
To want something without immediately taking it.
To experience uncertainty without immediately controlling.
To experience rejection without immediately replacing.
To feel desire without immediately consuming.
To hear something difficult without immediately defending yourself.
To remain with yourself when escaping yourself would be easier.
Because every time you increase your capacity to tolerate discomfort, you increase the number of responses available to you.
And when you have more responses available, you have more choice.
When you have more choice, you can live closer to your values.
And when your actions increasingly reflect your values, something interesting happens.
You begin to trust yourself.
To me, that's a far more meaningful definition of strength than simply being able to suffer.
A free man isn't someone who has eliminated discomfort from his life.
He's someone who no longer needs to escape himself every time discomfort arrives.
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