Prompt Writing: Is Suffering Necessary for a Meaningful Life?

In this series, I generate a writing prompt from ChatGPT then just write away — my way to keep the muscle from atrophying completely.

Prompt: Is suffering necessary for a meaningful life?

Yes. There is no hot without cold, or up without down. The distinctions that give rise to dualities and dichotomies are literally the only pathways from which to experience living. So that’s my argument just on an ontological basis. 

But even from the perspective of one’s psychology, people rot who have stayed too long at Hotel California. Pleasure in abundance becomes dull and requires a dramatic shake-up, lest you or I reach the end of the road and passive boredom turns into something more actively vicious and even self-sabotaging, by default or by choice. That’s what drugs do. That’s what money and fame can do without the required discipline to maintain one’s health and humility. Basking in the sun can give you a nice full-body tan, but chasing that warmth for too long leaves you inevitably burned. 

Suffering as a choice is necessary to find meaning because it presupposes a goal that you have already set out to attain. In other words, you suffer because you’re incomplete, so to speak, currently falling short of your potential of an objective that you have made worthy of your effort.

And so the space between your exact starting position the very moment you proclaim your goal, and all the pain and conflict that you must confront on your way to reaching that goal, is where all the meaning exists. It’s ripe and juicy and delectable, if only you can understand that the journey is the destination, that the process is the point.

When I signed up for last year’s Fight Night in September, I immediately made myself a “marked man.” The glory of potentially winning a 6-minute bout didn’t seem to outweigh the risks, chiefly that I could get viciously knocked out at my home gym in front of hundreds of people that know and engage with me specifically as a coach, and take instruction from and pay me a lot of money to teach them the art of fighting. So to then lose a fight brutally would undo all of that in just 6 minutes. And for what? I was comfortable already with enough clients and clout for me to continue coasting along. 

And yet, I signed up for the fight with presumably little to gain, at least superficially. Why? Because it was my soul that wanted to thrive. A little voice in my head nagged me every time I saw a poster promoting the upcoming Fight Night. “You know you want to do it, but you’re just scared,” the voice kept saying to me. “You’re a fucking pussy, aren’t you.” It gnawed at me for weeks, despite my rationalizations that I had little to gain from competing. And so I put my name in the hat and set my sights on a goal worth my effort and attention, and that became my exact starting point from which all choice-based suffering duly ensued.

From that point on, I embraced 8 weeks of physical and mental strain as I prepared for my moment in the ring. I trained six days a week, including two to three hard sparring sessions. I ran and sprinted on the treadmill, which isn’t so much physically tiring as it is mentally torturous to perform a task that feels so Sisyphean. I cut down on food to lose 15 pounds. 

And so that was just on the physical side. Mentally, I met fear and anxiety at almost every turn as my mind played out a thousand scenarios of what exactly might transpire in the ring on November 15th. Some days I felt confident, while other days my mind betrayed me and asked of itself, “How the fuck are you going to do this in front of all these people?” It was exhausting, no doubt. 

But I kept on. There was little else to do but keep on. The pressure of performing in front of an audience — one that expects great things from you as a coach, no less — demanded a training regimen commensurate to the stage at hand.

And so all the preparation — physical training and mental practice — culminated in a six-minute performance that saw me TKO my opponent. And for one glorious night I got to bask in the elemental joy derived from a favorable result that 8 weeks of nonstop work eventually led to. 

But in the days following the victory, there was a dramatic come-down. I felt empty again as the thing I’d be working toward for the last two months of my life was abruptly no more. What was I supposed to do with myself now? Where was I supposed to go? What was I meant to focus my time and energy on now? 

And it’s here that I realized a couple of clichés that still hold up: 

The journey is the destination. 
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop. 

The self-imposed suffering I had put myself through was the whole point. For 8 weeks, the decision to fight in front of all those people filled me with a singular purpose that arose in me a dormant hunger and determination. The end result was, in fact, immaterial. That there was a tangible goal, and that I strived for it and paid the daily toll with my blood, sweat and tears, was what counted and breathed meaning into my life.

And that says something to me about the human condition. Meaning is derived from work. And work can be joyful, but it is always work, and to work is to suffer. To suffer is to ultimately live because it presupposes a goal or conflict, which is the foundational structure of every story that has ever been told. There is no gripping movie where the main character has no goal to reach for, or a conflict to overcome. Humans are moved instinctively by conflict and the desire to resolve it, because the human spirit demands it — I think so that it can know itself experientially by moving through the distinction of dualities and dichotomies. In other words, striving for a goal requires a gap between where you are and where you want to be. And that gap of being is where the story unfolds. My soul wanted to experience itself as brave, or as a winner, or as a performer, etc. And so to become those things, I had to work — suffer — and be less than those things, so that I could journey into being them. That is where my soul found meaning, regardless of whether I raised my hand in victory, or hung my head in defeat.

All that is to say that life is lived in the gaps. The space between you and your goal is filled with suffering. And you must move through it with all your soul to achieve meaning and self-definition.