On purpose, suffering, and the things that still ask something of us
This essay is a reflection on why modern life so often feels dull, and why human beings keep returning to difficulty when comfort fails to satisfy.
You wish to know the art of living, my friend?
It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering.
— Henri-Frédéric Amiel
The Quiet Dulling of Modern Life
Human beings have become exceptionally good at removing friction from modern life. We are safer, more comfortable, and more insulated from consequence than at any point in our history. Most days ask little of us physically, and even less of us in any deeper sense.
The result isn’t misery. It’s something quieter. Life flattens. Days blur together. Time moves quickly, but nothing really lands. It feels like skimming across the surface of the water instead of being in it. And when nothing meaningful is required of us, we drift.
Happiness as a False North
When that drift sets in, our response is predictable. We chase happiness. We look for pleasure, comfort, novelty, anything to make the days feel fuller. If life feels dull, add something enjoyable. If something feels hard, avoid it.
That instinct makes sense. But happiness, pursued directly, is unstable. It's a mistress that comes and goes. Sometimes you hold it briefly, but it always slips away. It depends too much on circumstances. And it does very little to answer the question that quietly forms underneath everything else:
What is being asked of me?
When Purpose Replaces Pleasure
For a long time, I believed happiness was the point. Like Aristotle, I believed in the “good life.” If you made enough right choices and arranged things carefully enough, happiness would follow. That view fits naturally in a world built around comfort and stability.
Then a single line challenged everything I thought I understood about it. In the show Vikings, Ragnar Lothbrok whispers to his son:
Happiness is nothing.
What struck me wasn’t the severity, but the clarity. Not because happiness doesn’t matter, but because it doesn’t lead. Purpose does. Direction does. Being required by something that demands effort and carries consequence.
When happiness shows up at all, it arrives later as a byproduct.
Where Purpose Actually Appears
Once happiness stops being the goal, the question changes. If feeling good isn’t the aim, then what is? What kinds of pursuits actually supply purpose, not once, but repeatedly?
Again and again, the answer points the same way. Purpose shows up where something real is required of you. Where there is effort, risk, and the possibility of failure. Not comfort, but commitment. Not escape, but engagement.
Purpose tends to appear when quitting stops being easy.
Pain, Chosen and Shared
Sociologist Mike Atkinson describes this as a pain community. These are people who voluntarily enter shared difficulty. The suffering isn’t accidental. It’s understood. It’s prepared for.
This is not masochism. The pain itself is not the point. Endurance athletes are not chasing discomfort for its own sake, and they do not revel in suffering. As Atkinson observed, what provides fulfillment is not the pain, but its resolution. The release of tension. The moment when the demand finally lifts and you know, without ambiguity, that you stayed.
Pain is simply the cost of entry. It accumulates when something meaningful is pursued honestly and without escape. The satisfaction comes at the end, when the effort is complete and the answer is clear. Not because it hurt, but because it ended.
In that context, pain stops being something to avoid at all costs and becomes something that can carry meaning. Not because it hurts, but because it reveals. It clarifies what you’re willing to commit to when comfort is no longer available.
That idea matched my own experience immediately. Not just in sport, but in life. I found myself drawn to commitments that required most of me. Things that wouldn’t let me disengage once they became uncomfortable.
There was something steady in that. Something clarifying.
When genuine demands are made of you, enjoyment becomes secondary. What matters is whether you’re willing to meet them.
The Red Corvette Problem
This is why endurance sports are easy to misunderstand. From the outside, they can look like midlife ornamentation. The modern red Corvette.
Sometimes that criticism is fair. There are ways to use challenge as avoidance. More gear. More validation. More motion without real engagement.
But a Corvette insulates you from discomfort. It smooths the road. It signals something outward.
Endurance does the opposite.
- It removes insulation.
- It introduces friction.
- It doesn’t hide inadequacy. It exposes it.
Why Finish Lines Look the Way They Do
That difference is impossible to miss at the finish line. People cry. They collapse. They cling to strangers.
Not because they’ve won anything, but because they’ve reached the end of something that demanded everything they were willing and able to give.
The emotion looks excessive only if you forget how rarely modern life allows people to be fully vulnerable, fully tested, and unmistakably present all at the same time.
The finish line doesn’t create those feelings. It releases them.
Looking for Lions
For most of human history, life contained lions. Real ones, or their equivalents. Scarcity, exposure, and consequence were forces that demanded competence and attention whether people wanted them to or not.
Modern life has been remarkably successful at removing those threats. In doing so, it has also removed many of the tests that once told us who we were. We don't always know how to deal with that.
So we go looking for them.
Sometimes recklessly.
Not unconsciously.
But deliberately.
We choose challenges that can’t be optimized away or escaped. Commitments that reintroduce consequence into lives that have become too safe to be clarifying.
The lion is no longer an animal.
It’s the thing that requires you.
The thing you can’t fake your way through.
The thing that asks a simple question:
What is your quality?
A Way of Living
Over time, this stopped being about sport. It became a lens. I began to look for lions everywhere.
- In work that carried responsibility
- In family obligations that didn’t bend to convenience
- In commitments that couldn’t be postponed
Not because difficulty is good in itself, but because consequence clarifies.
Lions keep you honest.
They demand presence.
I no longer expect happiness to lead. If it comes, it comes later.
What I look for now is purpose.
The quiet certainty that what I’m doing is required of me.
And that is enough.