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Internet Archive's 25th Anniversary Logo. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book. Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip.

Video Audio icon An illustration of an audio speaker. Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. We now reserve our ever- dwindling fucks for the most truly fuck-worthy parts of our lives: our families, our best friends, our golf swing.

And, to our astonishment, this is enough. This simplification actually makes us really fucking happy on a consistent basis. And we start to think, Maybe that crazy alcoholic Bukowski was onto something. We start to feel as though something is inherently wrong with us, which drives us to all sorts of overcompensation, like buying forty pairs of shoes or downing Xanax with a vodka chaser on a Tuesday night or shooting up a school bus full of kids.

The idea of not giving a fuck is a simple way of reorienting our expectations for life and choosing what is important and what is not.

On the contrary, I see practical enlightenment as becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable—that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death.

Because once you become comfortable with all the shit that life throws at you and it will throw a lot of shit, trust me , you become invincible in a sort of low-level spiritual way. After all, the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.

Instead, this book will turn your pain into a tool, your trauma into power, and your problems into slightly better problems. That is real progress. Think of it as a guide to suffering and how to do it better, more meaningfully, with more compassion and more humility.

This book will not teach you how to gain or achieve, but rather how to lose and let go. It will teach you to take inventory of your life and scrub out all but the most important items. It will teach you to close your eyes and trust that you can fall backwards and still be okay. It will teach you to give fewer fucks. It will teach you to not try. The child would never know a moment of suffering—every need, every desire, would be accounted for at all times.

The king built high walls around the palace that prevented the prince from knowing the outside world. He spoiled the child, lavishing him with food and gifts, surrounding him with servants who catered to his every whim. And just as planned, the child grew up ignorant of the routine cruelties of human existence. But despite the endless luxury and opulence, the prince became kind of a pissed-off young man.

Soon, every experience felt empty and valueless. The problem was that no matter what his father gave him, it never seemed enough, never meant anything. So late one night, the prince snuck out of the palace to see what was beyond its walls. He had a servant drive him through the local village, and what he saw horrified him.

For the first time in his life, the prince saw human suffering. He saw sick people, old people, homeless people, people in pain, even people dying. The prince returned to the palace and found himself in a sort of existential crisis.

And, as is so typical of young men, the prince ended up blaming his father for the very things his father had tried to do for him. It was the riches, the prince thought, that had made him so miserable, that had made life seem so meaningless.

He decided to run away. But the prince was more like his father than he knew. He had grand ideas too. There he would starve himself, torture himself, and beg for scraps of food from strangers for the rest of his life. The next night, the prince snuck out of the palace again, this time never to return. For years he lived as a bum, a discarded and forgotten remnant of society, the dog shit caked to the bottom of the social totem pole. And as planned, the prince suffered greatly.

He suffered through disease, hunger, pain, loneliness, and decay. He confronted the brink of death itself, often limited to eating a single nut each day. A few years went by. Then a few more. And then. Totally confused, the prince cleaned himself up and went and found a big tree near a river. He decided that he would sit under that tree and not get up until he came up with another grand idea.

As the legend goes, the confused prince sat under that tree for forty-nine days. One of those realizations was this: that life itself is a form of suffering.

The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. People with a family suffer because of their family. People who pursue worldly pleasures suffer because of their worldly pleasures. People who abstain from worldly pleasures suffer because of their abstention. Some suffering is certainly more painful than other suffering.

But we all must suffer nonetheless. Years later, the prince would build his own philosophy and share it with the world, and this would be its first and central tenet: that pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them. The prince would later become known as the Buddha.

There is a premise that underlies a lot of our assumptions and beliefs. The premise is that happiness is algorithmic, that it can be worked for and earned and achieved as if it were getting accepted to law school or building a really complicated Lego set. If I achieve X, then I can be happy. If I look like Y, then I can be happy. If I can be with a person like Z, then I can be happy. This premise, though, is the problem. Happiness is not a solvable equation. The Buddha argued this from a theological and philosophical perspective.

I will make the same argument in this chapter, but I will make it from a biological perspective, and with pandas. It would be awesome.

And sick. And sad. And uplifting. And necessary. After all, the greatest truths in life are usually the most unpleasant to hear.

Disappointment Panda would be the hero that none of us would want but all of us would need. Listening to him would be like watching a movie where the hero dies in the end: you love it even more despite making you feel horrible, because it feels real. We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have. This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering. Take something as simple as stubbing your toe.

You also probably blame some poor inanimate object for your suffering. That horrible stubbed-toe-induced pain, the one you and I and the pope hate so much, exists for an important reason. Physical pain is a product of our nervous system, a feedback mechanism to give us a sense of our own physical proportions—where we can and cannot move and what we can and cannot touch. When we exceed those limits, our nervous system duly punishes us to make sure that we pay attention and never do it again.

And this pain, as much as we hate it, is useful. It helps us understand and adhere to our own limitations. It teaches us to not fuck around near hot stoves or stick metal objects into electrical sockets. But pain is not merely physical.

As anyone who has had to sit through the first Star Wars prequel can tell you, we humans are capable of experiencing acute psychological pain as well. Like physical pain, our psychological pain is an indication of something out of equilibrium, some limitation that has been exceeded. And like our physical pain, our psychological pain is not necessarily always bad or even undesirable.

In some cases, experiencing emotional or psychological pain can be healthy or necessary. Just like stubbing our toe teaches us to walk into fewer tables, the emotional pain of rejection or failure teaches us how to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

You may salivate at the thought of a problem-free life full of everlasting happiness and eternal compassion, but back here on earth the problems never cease. Disappointment Panda just dropped by. We had margaritas, and he told me all about it: problems never fucking go away, he said—they just improve. All of life is like this. He sipped his drink and adjusted the little pink umbrella.

Instead, hope for a life full of good problems. Happiness Comes from Solving Problems Problems are a constant in life. Happiness comes from solving problems.

The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place. To be happy we need something to solve. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. Sometimes those problems are simple: eating good food, traveling to some new place, winning at the new video game you just bought.

Other times those problems are abstract and complicated: fixing your relationship with your mother, finding a career you can feel good about, developing better friendships. Whatever your problems are, the concept is the same: solve problems; be happy. Some people deny that their problems exist in the first place. And because they deny reality, they must constantly delude or distract themselves from reality.

This may make them feel good in the short term, but it leads to a life of insecurity, neuroticism, and emotional repression. Victim Mentality. Some choose to believe that there is nothing they can do to solve their problems, even when they in fact could. Victims seek to blame others for their problems or blame outside circumstances.

This may make them feel better in the short term, but it leads to a life of anger, helplessness, and despair. Forms of blame and denial give us a quick high. They are a way to temporarily escape our problems, and that escape can provide us a quick rush that makes us feel better.

Highs come in many forms. Much of the self-help world is predicated on peddling highs to people rather than solving legitimate problems.

Many self-help gurus teach you new forms of denial and pump you up with exercises that feel good in the short term, while ignoring the underlying issue. Highs also generate addiction. The more you rely on them to feel better about your underlying problems, the more you will seek them out.

In this sense, almost anything can become addictive, depending on the motivation behind using it. We all have our chosen methods to numb the pain of our problems, and in moderate doses there is nothing wrong with this.

But the longer we avoid and the longer we numb, the more painful it will be when we finally do confront our issues. Emotions Are Overrated Emotions evolved for one specific purpose: to help us live and reproduce a little bit better.

Much as the pain of touching a hot stove teaches you not to touch it again, the sadness of being alone teaches you not to do the things that made you feel so alone again. Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change. In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action.

When you feel them, life seems simple and there is nothing else to do but enjoy it. Then, like everything else, the positive emotions go away, because more problems inevitably emerge.

Emotions are part of the equation of our lives, but not the entire equation. Emotions are merely signposts, suggestions that our neurobiology gives us, not commandments. In fact, I believe we should make a habit of questioning them. Many people are taught to repress their emotions for various personal, social, or cultural reasons —particularly negative emotions.

As a result, many of these repressed individuals struggle to deal with problems throughout their lives. Remember, pain serves a purpose. But then there are those people who overidentify with their emotions.

Everything is justified for no other reason than they felt it. You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet. An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last. Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more.

And despite all of our sweat and strain, we end up feeling eerily similar to how we started: inadequate. This is why our problems are recursive and unavoidable. The person you marry is the person you fight with. The house you buy is the house you repair. The dream job you take is the job you stress over. Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad.

What we gain is also what we lose. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences. This is a difficult pill to swallow. We like the idea that we can alleviate all of our suffering permanently. We like the idea that we can feel fulfilled and satisfied with our lives forever.

But we cannot. Everybody enjoys what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy, and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when they walk into the room.

Everybody wants that. What are you willing to struggle for? For example, most people want to get the corner office and make a boatload of money—but not many people want to suffer through sixty-hour workweeks, long commutes, obnoxious paperwork, and arbitrary corporate hierarchies to escape the confines of an infinite cubicle hell.

Most people want to have great sex and an awesome relationship, but not everyone is willing to go through the tough conversations, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings, and the emotional psychodrama to get there. And so they settle. Because happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems. Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles. Whether you suffer from anxiety or loneliness or obsessive-compulsive disorder or a dickhead boss who ruins half of your waking hours every day, the solution lies in the acceptance and active engagement of that negative experience—not the avoidance of it, not the salvation from it.

People want an amazing physique. People want to start their own business. People want a partner, a spouse. You have to choose something. Pleasure is the easy question. And pretty much all of us have a similar answer. The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain? For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician—a rock star, in particular.

Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up on stage, playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling glory. This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on end. I had it all planned out. I was simply biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of energy and effort into getting out there and making my mark. First I needed to finish school.

Then I needed to find enough free time to practice. Then I had to network and plan my first project. Despite my fantasizing about this for over half my lifetime, the reality never came to fruition. And because of that, I failed at it. I hardly tried at all. The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit, the broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling forty pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car.

I just liked to imagine the summit. But the truth is far less interesting than any of these explanations. End of story. I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons and have chiseled abs and can bench-press a small house.

People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainties of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it. This is not about willpower or grit. Our problems birth our happiness, along with slightly better, slightly upgraded problems. Because the joy is in the climb itself. Jimmy always had various business ventures going. Jimmy was all positivity all the time.

Always pushing himself, always working an angle—a real go-getter, whatever the fuck that means. The catch was that Jimmy was also a total deadbeat—all talk and no walk. Yet the guy kept this up for years, living off girlfriends and more and more distant relatives well into his late twenties. And the most screwed-up part was that Jimmy felt good about it.

He had a delusional level of self-confidence. He actually occasionally talked people into paying him to do some public speaking. The worst part was that Jimmy believed his own bullshit. His delusion was so bulletproof, it was honestly hard to get mad at him, it was actually kind of amazing. Research found that people who thought highly about themselves generally performed better and caused fewer problems. As a result, beginning in the next decade, the s, self-esteem practices began to be taught to parents, emphasized by therapists, politicians, and teachers, and instituted into educational policy.

Grade inflation, for example, was implemented to make low-achieving kids feel better about their lack of achievement. Participation awards and bogus trophies were invented for any number of mundane and expected activities. Kids were given inane homework assignments, like writing down all the reasons why they thought they were special, or the five things they liked most about themselves. Business and motivational seminars cropped up chanting the same paradoxical mantra: every single one of us can be exceptional and massively successful.

It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.

It leads to a population full of Jimmys. Jimmy, the delusional start-up founder. Jimmy, who smoked pot every day and had no real marketable skills other than talking himself up and believing it.

Jimmy, who was quickly running out of aunts and uncles who could loan him more money. Yes, that confident, high-self-esteem Jimmy. The Jimmy who spent so much time talking about how good he was that he forgot to, you know, actually do something. The problem with the self-esteem movement is that it measured self-esteem by how positively people felt about themselves.

If a person like Jimmy feels absolutely fucking great Jimmy is entitled. That is, he feels as though he deserves good things without actually earning them. He believes he should be able to be rich without actually working for it.

He believes he should be liked and well-connected without actually helping anyone. He believes he should have an amazing lifestyle without actually sacrificing anything.

Entitled people exude a delusional degree of self-confidence. This confidence can be alluring to others, at least for a little while.

You felt indestructible around him. But the problem with entitlement is that it makes people need to feel good about themselves all the time, even at the expense of those around them. And because entitled people always need to feel good about themselves, they end up spending most of their time thinking about themselves. Entitlement closes in upon itself in a kind of narcissistic bubble, distorting anything and everything in such a way as to reinforce itself.

People who feel entitled view every occurrence in their life as either an affirmation of, or a threat to, their own greatness. Entitlement is impervious. People who are entitled delude themselves into whatever feeds their sense of superiority.

They keep their mental facade standing at all costs, even if it sometimes requires being physically or emotionally abusive to those around them. But entitlement is a failed strategy. The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences. A person like Jimmy hides from his problems by making up imagined successes for himself at every turn.

But entitled people, because they are incapable of acknowledging their own problems openly and honestly, are incapable of improving their lives in any lasting or meaningful way.

They are left chasing high after high and accumulate greater and greater levels of denial. But eventually reality must hit, and the underlying problems will once again make themselves clear.

Things Fall Apart I sat in my A. Like most thirteen-year-olds stuck in a stuffy, fluorescent classroom, I was bored. A knock came on the door. Mark, can you step outside with me for a moment?

Oh, and bring your things with you. Kids get sent to the principal, but the principal rarely gets sent to them. I gathered my things and stepped out. The hallway was empty. Hundreds of beige lockers converged on the horizon.

We get to my locker. Price says; so I do. He starts walking away. I start to get an uneasy feeling. I follow him to his office, where he asks me to sit down. He closes the door and locks it. He goes over to the window and adjusts the blinds to block the view from outside. My palms begin to sweat. This is not a normal principal visit. Price sits down and quietly rummages through my things, checking pockets, unzipping zippers, shaking out my gym clothes and placing them on the floor.

Without looking up at me, Mr. My sweat blossoms like a fungal growth. It spreads from my palms to my arms and now my neck. My temples pulsate as blood floods my brain and face. Like most thirteen-year-olds freshly accused of possessing narcotics and bringing them to school, I want to run away and hide. I feel as if I should be sounding confident in myself right now.

Or maybe not. Maybe I should be scared. Do liars sound more scared or confident? Because however they sound, I want to sound the opposite. Instead, my lack of confidence compounds, unconfidence about my sounding unconfident making me more unconfident. That fucking Feedback Loop from Hell. Each is loaded with its own silly teen desiderata—colored pens, old notes passed in class, early-nineties CDs with cracked cases, dried-up markers, an old sketchpad with half its pages missing, dust and lint and crap accumulated during a maddeningly circuitous middle school existence.

My sweat must be pumping at the speed of light, because time extends itself and dilates such that what is mere seconds on that A. Just me and Mr. Price and my bottomless backpack. Somewhere around the Mesolithic Age, Mr. Price finishes searching the backpack. Having found nothing, he seems flustered.

He turns the pack upside down and lets all of my crap crash onto his office floor. He spreads my stuff out, separating each item and coagulating them into little piles beside my gym gear. My coat and backpack now lie empty and lifeless on his lap. He sighs and stares at the wall. Like most thirteen-year-olds locked in an office with a man angrily throwing their shit all over the floor, I want to cry.

Price scans the contents organized on the floor. Nothing illicit or illegal, no narcotics, not even anything against school policy. He sighs and then throws the coat and backpack on the floor too. He bends over and puts his elbows on his knees, making his face level with mine. If you are honest, this will turn out much better for you. Price demands. He casually puts one foot down on the pack, stomping lightly, a last-ditch effort.

I anxiously wait for him to get up and leave so I can get on with my life and forget this whole nightmare. But his foot stops on something. For me the room gets fuzzy; everything goes wobbly. When I was young, I was smart. I was friendly. But I was also a shithead. I mean that in the most loving way possible. I was a rebellious, lying little shithead. Angry and full of resentment. I would write papers about abortion because I knew my English teacher was a hardcore conservative Christian.

Another friend and I stole cigarettes from his mom and sold them to kids out behind the school. And I also cut a secret compartment into the bottom of my backpack to hide my marijuana. That was the same hidden compartment Mr. Price found after stepping on the drugs I was hiding.

I had been lying. And, as promised, Mr. A few hours later, like most thirteen-year-olds handcuffed in the back of a police car, I thought my life was over. And I was kind of right, in a way. My parents quarantined me at home.

I was to have no friends for the foreseeable future. Having been expelled from school, I was to be homeschooled for the rest of the year. My mom made me get a haircut and threw out all of my Marilyn Manson and Metallica shirts which, for an adolescent in , was tantamount to being sentenced to death by lameness.

My dad dragged me to his office with him in the mornings and made me file papers for hours on end. And just when I had finally cleaned up my act and turned in my assignments and learned the value of good clerical responsibility, my parents decided to get divorced. I tell you all of this only to point out that my adolescence sucked donkey balls.

I lost all of my friends, my community, my legal rights, and my family within the span of about nine months. Not a tear was shed.

Not a voice was raised. It was a tad warm in the room, but really, everything was fine. My parents are good people. And I love them very much. They have their own stories and their own journeys and their own problems, just as all parents do. And just as all of their parents do, and so on. And like all parents, my parents, with the best of intentions, imparted some of their problems to me, as I probably will to my kids. And this assumed inability to solve our problems causes us to feel miserable and helpless.

But it also causes something else to happen. Put simply: we become entitled. The pain from my adolescence led me down a road of entitlement that lasted through much of my early adulthood. My trauma had revolved around intimacy and acceptance, so I felt a constant need to overcompensate, to prove to myself that I was loved and accepted at all times.

And as a result, I soon took to chasing women the same way a cocaine addict takes to a snowman made out of cocaine: I made sweet love to it, and then promptly suffocated myself in it. I became a player—an immature, selfish, albeit sometimes charming player. And I strung up a long series of superficial and unhealthy relationships for the better part of a decade. It was the validation. I was wanted; I was loved; for the first time since I could remember, I was worthy.

My craving for validation quickly fed into a mental habit of self-aggrandizing and overindulgence. While this period certainly had its moments of fun and excitement, and I met some wonderful women, my life was more or less a wreck the whole time.

The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against our problems, and the more entitlement we adopt to compensate for those problems. This entitlement plays out in one of two ways: 1. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment. Opposite mindset on the outside, but the same selfish creamy core in the middle. In fact, you will often see entitled people flip back and forth between the two. Most people correctly identify a person like Jimmy as a raging narcissistic ass-hat.

Because construing everything in life so as to make yourself out to be constantly victimized requires just as much selfishness as the opposite. It takes just as much energy and delusional self- aggrandizement to maintain the belief that one has insurmountable problems as that one has no problems at all. Likely people you know too. But for some reason, it appears that more and more people, particularly young people, are forgetting this.

School counselors note that more students than ever are exhibiting severe signs of emotional distress over what are otherwise run-of- the-mill daily college experiences, such as an argument with a roommate, or getting a low grade in a class. Something about recent technology seems to allow our insecurities to run amok like never before. The more exposed we are to opposing viewpoints, the more we seem to get upset that those other viewpoints exist. The easier and more problem-free our lives become, the more we seem to feel entitled for them to get even better.

The benefits of the Internet and social media are unquestionably fantastic. In many ways, this is the best time in history to be alive. But perhaps these technologies are having some unintended social side effects. The Tyranny of Exceptionalism Most of us are pretty average at most things we do.

To become truly great at something, you have to dedicate shit-tons of time and energy to it. And because we all have limited time and energy, few of us ever become truly exceptional at more than one thing, if anything at all.

Brilliant businesspeople are often fuckups in their personal lives. Extraordinary athletes are often shallow and as dumb as a lobotomized rock. Many celebrities are probably just as clueless about life as the people who gawk at them and follow their every move.

Having the Internet, Google, Facebook, YouTube, and access to five hundred—plus channels of television is amazing. But our attention is limited. Therefore, the only zeroes and ones that break through and catch our attention are the truly exceptional pieces of information—those in the All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary.

The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest physical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. The scariest threats. Yet the vast majority of life resides in the humdrum middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average.

This flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal. So more and more we feel the need to compensate through entitlement and addiction. We cope the only way we know how: either through self-aggrandizing or through other-aggrandizing.

Some of us do this by cooking up get-rich-quick schemes. Others do it by taking off across the world to save starving babies in Africa. Others do it by excelling in school and winning every award. Others do it by shooting up a school. Others do it by trying to have sex with anything that talks and breathes. This ties in to the growing culture of entitlement that I talked about earlier. In fact, the tendency toward entitlement is apparent across all of society. When I was a young man, my insecurities around intimacy were exacerbated by all the ridiculous narratives of masculinity circulating throughout pop culture.

This constant stream of unrealistic media dogpiles onto our existing feelings of insecurity, by overexposing us to the unrealistic standards we fail to live up to. Not only do we feel subjected to unsolvable problems, but we feel like losers because a simple Google search shows us thousands of people without those same problems. Technology has solved old economic problems by giving us new psychological problems.

The Internet has not just open-sourced information; it has also open-sourced insecurity, self-doubt, and shame. It has become an accepted part of our culture today to believe that we are all destined to do something truly extraordinary. Celebrities say it. Business tycoons say it. Politicians say it. Even Oprah says it so it must be true.

Each and every one of us can be extraordinary. We all deserve greatness. The fact that this statement is inherently contradictory—after all, if everyone were extraordinary, then by definition no one would be extraordinary—is missed by most people. The worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the middle of the bell curve.

Many people choose this strategy: to prove to everyone that they are the most miserable, or the most oppressed, or the most victimized. This sort of thinking is dangerous.

Once you accept the premise that a life is worthwhile only if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population including yourself sucks and is worthless. And this mindset can quickly turn dangerous, to both yourself and others.

And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. Very bad. You will avoid accepting it. But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive.

After all, that constant pressure to be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate.

And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations. Their economy was floundering, their military overstretched across half of Asia, and the territories they had won throughout the Pacific were now toppling like dominoes to U.

Defeat seemed inevitable. Both he and his commander knew it was essentially a suicide mission. In February , the Americans arrived on Lubang and took the island with overwhelming force. Within days, most of the Japanese soldiers had either surrendered or been killed, but Onoda and three of his men managed to hide in the jungle. From there, they began a guerrilla warfare campaign against the U.

That August, half a year later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered, and the deadliest war in human history came to its dramatic conclusion.

However, thousands of Japanese soldiers were still scattered among the Pacific isles, and most, like Onoda, were hiding in the jungle, unaware that the war was over. These holdouts continued to fight and pillage as they had before.

This was a real problem for rebuilding eastern Asia after the war, and the governments agreed something must be done. The U. Onoda and his men, like many others, found and read these leaflets, but unlike most of the others, Onoda decided that they were fake, a trap set by the American forces to get the guerrilla fighters to show themselves.

Onoda burned the leaflets, and he and his men stayed hidden and continued to fight. Five years went by. The leaflets had stopped, and most of the American forces had long since gone home. The local population on Lubang attempted to return to their normal lives of farming and fishing.

Yet there were Hiroo Onoda and his merry men, still shooting at the farmers, burning their crops, stealing their livestock, and murdering locals who wandered too far into the jungle. The Philippine government then took to drawing up new flyers and spreading them out across the jungle. Come out, they said. The war is over. You lost. But these, too, were ignored. In , the Japanese government made one final effort to draw the last remaining soldiers out of hiding throughout the Pacific.

Once again, Onoda refused to believe that the information was real. Once again, he believed the airdrop to be a trick by the Americans. Once again, he and his men stood and continued to fight.

Another few years went by and the Philippine locals, sick of being terrorized, finally armed themselves and began firing back. Onoda, having now spent more than half of his life in the jungles of Lubang, was all alone. The Japanese people thought the last of the soldiers from the war had come home years earlier.

The Japanese media began to wonder: if Kozuka had still been on Lubang until , then perhaps Onoda himself, the last known Japanese holdout from World War II, might still be alive as well. That year, both the Japanese and Philippine governments sent search parties to look for the enigmatic second lieutenant, now part myth, part hero, and part ghost. They found nothing. As the months progressed, the story of Lieutenant Onoda morphed into something of an urban legend in Japan—the war hero who sounded too insane to actually exist.

Many romanticized him. Others criticized him. Others thought he was the stuff of fairy tale, invented by those who still wanted to believe in a Japan that had disappeared long ago. It was around this time that a young man named Norio Suzuki first heard of Onoda. Suzuki was an adventurer, an explorer, and a bit of a hippie. He volunteered on farms for food, and donated blood to pay for places to stay.

He was a free spirit, and perhaps a little bit nuts. In , Suzuki needed another adventure. He had returned to Japan after his travels and found the strict cultural norms and social hierarchy to be stifling.

He hated school. He wanted to be back on the road, back on his own again. For Suzuki, the legend of Hiroo Onoda came as the answer to his problems. It was a new and worthy adventure for him to pursue. Suzuki believed that he would be the one who would find Onoda.

Sure, search parties conducted by the Japanese, Philippine, and American governments had not been able to find Onoda; local police forces had been scavenging the jungle for almost thirty years with no luck; thousands of leaflets had met with no response—but fuck it, this deadbeat, college-dropout hippie was going to be the one to find him.

Unarmed and untrained for any sort of reconnaissance or tactical warfare, Suzuki traveled to Lubang and began wandering around the jungle all by himself. He found Onoda in four days. Suzuki stayed with Onoda in the jungle for some time. Onoda had been alone by that point for over a year, and once found by Suzuki he welcomed the companionship and was desperate to learn what had been happening in the outside world from a Japanese source he could trust.

Suzuki asked Onoda why he had stayed and continued to fight. For nearly thirty years he had simply been following an order. Onoda had already by then given up most of his life to a phantom war. Suzuki would give his up too. Having already found Hiroo Onoda and the panda bear, he would die a few years later in the Himalayas, still in search of the Abominable Snowman. Humans often choose to dedicate large portions of their lives to seemingly useless or destructive causes.

On the surface, these causes make no sense. Or why Suzuki trekked off to his own death, with no money, no companions, and no purpose other than to chase an imaginary Yeti. Yet, later in his life, Onoda said he regretted nothing. He claimed that he was proud of his choices and his time on Lubang. He said that it had been an honor to devote a sizable portion of his life in service to a nonexistent empire. Suzuki, had he survived, likely would have said something similar: that he was doing exactly what he was meant to do, that he regretted nothing.

These men both chose how they wished to suffer. Hiroo Onoda chose to suffer for loyalty to a dead empire. Suzuki chose to suffer for adventure, no matter how ill-advised. To both men, their suffering meant something; it fulfilled some greater cause. And because it meant something, they were able to endure it, or perhaps even enjoy it. He was shuttled around from talk show to radio station; politicians clamored to shake his hand; he published a book and was even offered a large sum of money by the government.

But what he found when he returned to Japan horrified him: a consumerist, capitalist, superficial culture that had lost all of the traditions of honor and sacrifice upon which his generation had been raised. Onoda tried to use his sudden celebrity to espouse the values of Old Japan, but he was tone-deaf to this new society.

He was seen more as a showpiece than as a serious cultural thinker—a Japanese man who had emerged from a time capsule for all to marvel at, like a relic in a museum.

At least in the jungle his life had stood for something; it had meant something. That had made his suffering endurable, indeed even a little bit desirable. But back in Japan, in what he considered to be a vacuous nation full of hippies and loose women in Western clothing, he was confronted with the unavoidable truth: that his fighting had meant nothing. The Japan he had lived and fought for no longer existed. Because his suffering had meant nothing, it suddenly became realized and true: thirty years wasted.

And so, in , Onoda packed up and moved to Brazil, where he remained until he died. The Self-Awareness Onion Self-awareness is like an onion. My wife and I sometimes have a fun back-and-forth that goes something like this: HER. Nothing at all. Tell me. Are you sure? You look upset. ME, with nervous laughter. We all have emotional blind spots. Often they have to do with the emotions that we were taught were inappropriate growing up. It takes years of practice and effort to get good at identifying blind spots in ourselves and then expressing the affected emotions appropriately.