Choose your suffering

For most of my life, I thought the goal was to be happy.

It didn’t feel like rocket science. It felt obvious—like gravity. You grow up, find a job you like, people you love, things that bring you joy. You avoid pain, stress, conflict. If something makes you unhappy, it must be bad. If it makes you happy, do more of it. Simple enough.

But the older I got, the more I noticed that’s not the case. Some of the best things in life—the things people talked about with the most pride, the most depth—were also the hardest.

No one says, “The happiest moment of my life was that one time I ordered Thai food and binged a season of something.” What they remember is climbing out of a dark place. Building something that almost didn’t work. Staying up at 3 a.m. with their newborn, overwhelmed and half-delirious, and yet—somehow—completely present.

Why do we choose those things? They don’t make us happy in the moment. In fact, they’re often exhausting, messy, and uncertain. So what’s really going on?

I think we confuse happiness with meaning.

Happiness is a flash. It’s fleeting by design—your brain wasn’t built to stay happy forever. It adapts. It resets the baseline. That’s how we’ve survived. But meaning is different. It lingers. It deepens over time. You don’t feel it in bursts—you feel it in the quiet moments, when the noise fades and you realise, this is hard, but it’s mine.

That’s what I think life is really about—not finding happiness, but finding the right kind of suffering.

Which sounds like a paradox. Why would anyone choose suffering?

Well, because you’re going to suffer either way.

Life doesn’t give you the option to avoid pain altogether. It only gives you the option to choose the form of your pain. You can suffer for nothing—endless cycles of boredom, anxiety, distraction. Or you can suffer for something—something that pulls you forward, even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard.

Not all suffering is noble, of course. Some suffering is random and pointless—like getting stuck in traffic, or being ill, or losing someone you love. You don’t choose it. It just happens. You endure it, but it doesn’t give you meaning. It just takes from you.

But the suffering you do choose—that’s different.

Raising a child. Writing a novel. Starting a company. Being present for someone you love. These things aren’t comfortable. But they’re not supposed to be. They’re meaningful because they require something of you. They cost you time, effort, maybe even parts of your identity. But in return, they give you a story worth telling. A reason to keep going.

There’s a phrase I’ve come to like: discipline is remembering what you want. I think purpose is like that too. It’s not something you stumble into. It’s something you decide to pursue, over and over, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts.

The trick, I think, is not to ask: “What will make me happy?” but “What pain am I willing to endure?” What burden would I feel proud to carry, even when no one’s watching?

Because if you look closely, the people who seem the most “fulfilled” aren’t the ones who’ve avoided hardship. They’re the ones who’ve made peace with it. Who’ve shaped it into something with meaning.

And there’s a hidden privilege here too. A luxury most people don’t talk about. It’s the privilege of choosing your suffering. Many people don’t get that choice. They’re stuck in systems they didn’t design, roles they didn’t choose, pain they didn’t ask for.

So if you find yourself in a place where you can pick your hard thing—your mountain to climb—you’re already lucky.

And if you pick well, you might just find that the hard thing becomes the good thing.

Not because it made you happy every step of the way. But because it gave you something better: a life that meant something.