Why Suffering Is the Best Self-Help Hack

Suffering. A word that immediately makes you want to close this tab and go watch something mindless instead. But that’s exactly the problem. We avoid suffering like it’s some glitch in the system, like life wasn’t meant to be difficult. But it was. And deep down, we know that.

If you want a meaningful life, you don’t just put up with suffering—you actively choose it. Not the tragic, life-falling-apart kind, but the kind you step into willingly. The kind that stretches you, makes you question your decisions, and weirdly, makes life worth living.

It’s why people run marathons when they could walk. Why they wrestle with impossible puzzles when they could Google the answer in two seconds. Why they have kids, despite the fact that raising tiny humans is a guaranteed one-way ticket to exhaustion and financial ruin. None of it makes logical sense—until you realise that meaning doesn’t come from comfort. It comes from effort.

Alan Watts had this way of explaining it. Imagine you could control your dreams. At first, you’d give yourself everything—riches, pleasure, an all-you-can-eat buffet that magically doesn’t make you feel disgusting afterward. But eventually, you’d get bored. You’d start throwing in challenges. Obstacles. Moments where you don’t win. And suddenly, you’d be dreaming of something suspiciously similar to real life.

That’s the trick no one talks about. The best self-help isn’t about eliminating difficulty—it’s about training yourself to handle it. Choosing the hard route. Leaning into the discomfort. Not because it’s enjoyable in the moment, but because on the other side of it, you become someone who can take on anything.

Suffering isn’t just some unfortunate side effect of ambition—it’s the engine. It’s what makes crossing the finish line mean something. The only way to feel pride in an achievement is to know you fought for it. That run where your legs felt like cement. That project that made your brain hurt. That thing you didn’t want to do, but did anyway. That’s the difference between people who get what they want and people who just talk about it.

So no, suffering isn’t a glitch. It’s not something to avoid. It’s the whole point. The sooner you realise that, the sooner you stop waiting for life to get easier and start making yourself stronger.