Have you ever noticed how life is full of paradoxes? For example:
Failure often leads to success.
Coming to terms with death can help us better appreciate life.
The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know.
As soon as you stop wanting something, you get it.
The more competent you think you are at something, the less competent you are likely to actually be (Dunning-Kruger effect).
Here’s another one of life’s paradoxes:
If we want to experience the pleasant parts of life, we must also be willing to experience the unpleasant parts.
But wait - isn’t the whole point of life to be happy?
Many influential thinkers throughout history have certainly thought so. Chief among them was Aristotle, who argued that the only reason we do anything is in order to achieve happiness. This is partly why today, many of us view happiness as the Holy Grail of life, especially in the West.
But there’s a catch.
Aristotle wasn’t using the word happiness in the same way we use it today, to describe subjective positive emotional states like joy, pleasure or satisfaction.
Rather, the word we translate as happiness from Greek is eudaimonia, which is not a temporary emotional state but rather the process of human flourishing. In other words, “the good life.”
Why does this distinction matter?
Because happiness, although valuable, is just one small aspect of a good life.
What else, then, does a good life consist of?
Martin Seligman, one of the founders of positive psychology, proposes that the good life consists of five elements, summed up in the acronym PERMA:
Positive emotions
Engagement/interest
Positive relationships
Meaning/purpose
Accomplishment/mastery
These five elements, Seligman argues, are the foundational aspects of well-being.
From this framework, we can clearly see that there’s more to life than just positive emotions. In addition to happiness, we also need activities that challenge us, genuine relationships that nourish us, a sense of belonging to something bigger than the self, and the pursuit of achievement.
So far this sounds like rainbows and sunshine. But here’s the paradox:
The process of cultivating these positive life experiences requires us to face rather unpleasant and even negative ones.
Think about all the things in life truly worth doing, being, or having. They all require some form of discomfort or unpleasantness:
Deep and meaningful relationships require us to experience the discomfort of vulnerability.
Pursuing a different, more rewarding career involves the unpleasantness of uncertainty.
Being physically fit comes with the price tag of physical discomfort.
Raising a child demands sustained physical, emotional, and psychological discomfort.
The process of adopting new habits and letting go of old ones are both full of periods of unpleasantness.
Cultivating self-awareness requires facing some uncomfortable truths about yourself.
Getting better at your craft involves putting out imperfect work into the world and receiving criticism/feedback.
Unpleasantness, it turns out, is a necessary component of well-being. It is the gatekeeper to virtually all of the things we deem worthwhile.
Indeed, if we value well-being, we must also value unpleasantness. They are two sides of the same coin; we can’t have one without the other. As the Tao Te Ching poetically observes:
Life and death are born together.
Difficult and easy,
long and short,
high and low--
all these exist together.
Sound and silence blend as one.
Expectations play an important role in all of this. If we expect life to be a series of unending positive emotions, we will be sorely disappointed. However, if we expect and accept the vast range of experiences life offers us—both pleasant and unpleasant—we will have a richer and more fulfilling existence.
In other words, the problem is not that we have unpleasant experiences. Rather, it’s that we think we shouldn’t have them.
Our goal, then, should not be to remove all unpleasant experiences from our life but instead to change how we relate to them. One way to do this is to understand that some of our highest values require us to experience discomfort.
Summary
We must not conflate the robust idea of well-being with the more fragile idea of happiness. The consequence of doing so is a decrease in both. We think that in order to be happy, we must feel good. Then, in an effort to feel good, we avoid unpleasant things, which themselves are often entry points into well-being. And the vicious circle continues.
The more willing we are to experience discomfort, the better our quality of life will be. The less willing we are to experience discomfort, the poorer our quality of life will be.
Thus, the willingness to experience discomfort might be the most useful skill a person can develop.
Ruben Chavez is a writer and host of The Think Grow Podcast.