And in the irony of ironies, Onoda became far more depressed than he’d ever been in the jungle for all those years. 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. And the weight of this realization pierced him in a way that no bullet ever had. Because his suffering had meant nothing, it suddenly became realized and true: thirty years wasted.
And you know what? My ex leaving me, while one of the most painful experiences I’ve ever had, was also one of the most important and influential experiences of my life. I credit it with inspiring a significant amount of personal growth. I learned more form that single problem than dozens of my successes combined.
We all love to take responsibility for success and happiness. Hell, we often fight over who gets to be responsible for success and happiness. But taking responsibility for our problems is far more important, because that’s where the real learning comes from. That’s where the real-life improvement comes from. To simply blame others is only to hurt yourself.
Shitty values involve tangible external goals outside of our control. The pursuit of these goals causes great anxiety. And even if we manage to achieve them, they leave us feeling empty and lifeless, because once they’re achieved there are no more problems to solve.
Better values are process-oriented. Something like “Express myself honestly to others,” a metric for the value “honesty,” is never completely finished; it’s a problem that must continuously be reengaged. Every new conversation, every new relationship, brings new challenges and opportunities for honest expression. The value is an ongoing, lifelong process that defies completion.
In this sense, goals, as the are conventionally defined — graduate from college, buy a lake house, lose 15 pounds — are limited in the amount of happiness they can produce in our lives. They may be helpful when pursuing quick, short-term benefits, but as guides for the overall trajectory of our life, they suck.
Many people, when they feel some form of pain or anger or sadness, drop everything and attend to numbing out whatever they’re feeling. Their goal is to get back to “feeling good” again as quickly as possible, even if that means substances or deluding themselves or returning to their shitty values.
Learn to sustain the pain you’ve chosen. When you choose a new value, your are choosing to introduce a new form of pain into your life. Relish it. Savor it. Welcome it with open arms. Then act despite it.
Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway. All of life is like this. It never changes.
When I was in high school, my math teacher Mr. Packwood used to say, “If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”
Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.
The problem is that we’re finding out that romantic love is kind of like cocaine. Like, frighteningly similar to cocaine. Like, stimulates the exact same parts of your brain as cocaine. Like, gets you high and makes you feels good for a while but also creates as many problems as it solves, as does cocaine.
Most elements of romantic love that we pursue — the dramatic and dizzyingly emotional displays of affection, the topsy-turvy ups and downs — aren’t healthy, genuine display of love. In fact, they’re often just another form of entitlement playing out through people’s relationships.
The truth is, there are healthy forms of love and unhealthy forms of love. Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other — in other words, they’re using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.
The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy relationship comes down to two things: 1) how well each person in the relationship accepts responsibility, and 2) the willingness of each person to both rject and be rejected by their partner.
People in a healthy relationship with strong boundaries will take responsibility for their own values and problems and not take responsibility for their partner’s values and problems. People in a toxic relationship with poor or no boundaries will regularly avoid responsibility for their own problems and/or taking responsibility for their partner’s problems.
Men stereotypically lie to in this situation to make their girlfriends/wives happy. But I don’t. Why? Because honesty in my relationship is more important to me than feeling good at the time. The last person I should ever have to censor myself with is the woman I love.
Trust is the most important ingredient in any relationship, for the simple reason that without trust, the relationship doesn’t actually mean anything.