I’ve been meditating nearly every morning for the past year and a half or so. It is now a crucial part of my morning routine. It allows me to ground my thoughts and center my mind before I let the external world bombard me with things outside of my control. Negativity, pessimism, cynicism, and overstimulation are all things we must contend with in the modern world on a daily basis. I’ve found that taking ownership of my mental state through meditation early in the morning allows me to better combat those forces. It’s not a magic bullet by any means, but I am consistently in better spirits when I take five to ten minutes to practice before I start my day. The problem is that I find it difficult to concentrate sometimes as my mind wanders easily. Meditation is a fascinating discipline in that one must master the act of bringing their own subconscious mind to heel repeatedly by actively controlling their conscious mind to that end. In order to help me try to better master this discipline, I took a meditation class last week.

The class was an introduction to Buddhist teachings, so it consisted of active meditation and also a lecture on the philosophy of it. The similarities between Buddha’s wisdom and that of the Stoics in Ancient Greece in regard to the importance of controlling your mind was striking. As a generally curious (and non-religious) person, I make it a priority to try to stay open-minded to all things and then search for the throughline between the advice/wisdom/information of those I consider reputable. I’ve only attended one class so far and I intend to finish the four-part series over the course of this month, but what stood out to me already was the fact that Buddhism seems to be much more of a belief in one’s own divinity and power than an indoctrination into fairytales. That is in stark contrast to most religions (that I know of). Its essence is rooted in empowering the individual by awakening them to their own internal strength and good nature rather than attempting to control their lives through fear of punishment or eternal damnation.

During the lecture, we learned about the Four Noble Truths, which in Buddhism, are considered the truths (or realities) for “the spiritually worthy ones.” The instructor spoke of only the first of these four truths in that class. It is “The Truth of Suffering,” and it basically states that although life is a gift, it comes with inevitable suffering. That experiencing pain is an innate characteristic of our existence. To live is to feel and to feel is to hurt sometimes. From my understanding, the whole religion is based on the idea of forming acceptance of this fact and then training yourself to endure your own suffering through developing love and appreciation for life and all other living beings. The Stoics of Ancient Greece weren’t quite as chill about it, but they had closely related ideologies. Suffering was considered part of the deal as a human being and although it cannot be circumvented completely, you can greatly reduce your suffering by controlling your mind and faulty qualities. The Stoics believed that virtuous behavior is the path to an agreeable existence.

As I sat there and listened, it became more and more apparent to me that there were many overlapping concepts being delivered in different messages between these two belief systems. When I hear two or more incredibly wise theories about life from honorable figures who lived in different parts of the world at least a hundred years apart finding common ground on serious topics – I pay attention to those theories. They weren’t emailing each other to compare notes, so the believability factor increases exponentially for me in these cases. I’ve sat in deep contemplation about this for a number of days now and without further ado, I’ll share my takeaway from this idea of inevitable suffering and what you can learn from it to better your life today.

I’m not going to sugarcoat this – life requires you to eat a certain amount of shit over the course of your existence. What do I mean by, “eat shit” exactly? For the purpose of this blog post, we’ll define eating shit as the act of experiencing the opposite of what we’d like for extended periods of time. Suffering, if you will. It’s an unavoidable fact and it doesn’t matter how rich, poor, short, tall, smart, dumb, pretty, plain, young, or old you are. It doesn’t matter where you come from, what god(s) you pray to, or what ethnicity you are – life doesn’t discriminate when it comes to handing out shit pies. At some point on this whacky journey, you will find yourself flat on your face contemplating the meaning of life and why the fuck it’s so unbearably difficult and painful. You’ll wish you could have a different one as you compare your life to a bunch of fake bullshit on a phone app while staring down a heaping plate of shit a la mode. You’ll sit and cry and feel overwhelmed and want to give up. But then you’ll have to wake up tomorrow and do it all over again anyway. Ouch.

We are incapable of choosing whether or not we eat shit (suffer) in life, but we can take an active role in determining the size of the portions and the duration of the buffet. How? By choosing to eat it now as opposed to later. What I mean by this is that you can choose to recognize navigating hardships, making sacrifices, and having the discipline to do things that aren’t the most fun or pleasurable right now as necessary parts of securing your idealistic version of the future. Likewise, on an internal level, you can realize that questioning the meaning of your life and experiencing the growing pains of maturing spiritually is essential to becoming the best possible version of yourself. Your acceptance of the inevitability of suffering allows you to set the foundation for the mentality needed to make meaningful changes and shape your behavior in a way that makes you actively seek out the difficulties of life. While everyone else is trying to run and hide from them, you decide you’re going to welcome them so that you can get them over with now.  

Here’s my theory on this: If you dive in headfirst and voluntarily eat the shit now, you can drastically minimize the window of shit eating you need to do as a total percentage of your life. Ask for the difficulties and the personal growth now. Pursue the knowledge of the world and the awareness of self now. Understand the inherent level of uncertainty and discomfort that is intertwined within the human experience now so that you don’t keep falling into a false sense of security. The alternative to this choice is of course eating the shit later (avoiding suffering). Avoidance takes many forms, and the truth is that even if you successfully avoid eating shit now, you’re still going to have to eat it later. The difference is that you’ll most likely end up eating It for the rest of your life. If you do it now, you can convert maybe half a life’s worth of shit eating into a significantly smaller, finite block of time. The choice is yours.

I’m pretty sure I heard this from a clip of Tony Robbins on Instagram, but it really drives my point home succinctly. He said, “There are only two pains in life. The pain of discipline or the pain of regret. Discipline weighs ounces and regret weighs tons.” I’ll talk about the topic of regret another time and discuss what I’ve learned about it over the years, but let’s just say that ounces to tons is not an exaggeration. What this all means is that you cannot become the person you need to be in order to achieve your dreams unless you are capable of regulating yourself. You have to be able to establish routines and be consistent in acquiring knowledge and sharpening your skills. You have to be able to hold yourself accountable to making the progress you want to see and not allow distractions to get you off track. You have to commit to your desire and follow it earnestly even though our culture today doesn’t really celebrate that quality anymore. It’s about having the courage and conviction to bet on yourself and then really putting in the work to get to that next level. Discipline, at its core, is voluntarily eating shit now so that you can eat less shit overall. It sucks in the moment, but it pays off big on the back end. A lack of discipline, on the other hand, leaves you vulnerable to being completely blindsided when easy street and lemon drops turns into treacherous terrain and shit sandwiches.

I’m going to use a fictional example to illustrate my point here – don’t feel triggered if any of this applies to you or hits close to home. This is a common situation that unfolds for people over time. Let’s say you’re a woman between twenty-four and twenty-eight years old and you work at a bank right now, but you actually love working with hair. You know you could have a successful business running a salon if you just put in an hour of work when you get home from your day job and stay home on the weekends to put in bigger chunks of time. You come home and even though you’re tired, you’re committed to your vision – so you practice mastering your craft, file for an LLC, design logos, build a website, and construct a social media and marketing strategy. Your friends make fun of you for being a hard ass, but meanwhile you’re saving a small fortune not going out all the time and are able to reinvest it into your business. You eventually turn your part-time side hustle cutting hair in the kitchen of your apartment into a full-time position and quit your job at the bank. Three years later, you open your first physical location in a major city you always wanted to live in. Ten years after that, you’re now the majority owner of a multi-million-dollar franchise.

Are you guaranteed to achieve that level of success? Of course not. But wouldn’t making $70,000 a year doing something you love and being your own boss be enough anyway? Either of those outcomes is only possible if you’re willing to have the discipline to go after your dreams. A lot of people think they’re going to pull it together in their thirties and get serious or “catch up.” Which is totally reasonable and possible to do – but they don’t. Why? Because an undisciplined person cannot form structured disciplinary actions overnight. A much more common occurrence is that they follow the same behavioral patterns throughout adulthood until it catches up with them. Let’s take a look at an illustration of how this scenario usually plays out for the vast majority of people.

You’re the same person with the same set of circumstances, but instead of having discipline, you work eight hours at the bank, and you hate it. When you get home, you know you should put time into building your business idea, but you just want to get into bed and watch Netflix. Your roommate “convinces” you to go out Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. You sleep in Sunday and go to brunch and then repeat your week over and over again on autopilot. You end up putting zero hours into your dream and remove every chance of building the life you want just by making those seemingly inconsequential decisions because they’re easy to make and they feel good in the moment. You settle for your paycheck even though you don’t like your job because it pays the bills and offers steady advancements that you find adequate enough to rationalize staying. Everything is going great until you wake up one day and you feel a sudden dread wash over you – your life is essentially the same as it was seven years ago except for a slight increase in pay. You start worrying about starting a family and settling down, but your social life and network revolves around activities that aren’t conducive to that. The lifestyle you lead is no longer harmonious with your wants and you feel trapped in a life you don’t truly enjoy. You settled on your career, so you end up settling for a partner too and eventually get married, buy a house, have kids, and then… you start to wonder “what if?” That’s the pain of regret – and it comes crashing down on you like a ton of bricks.

Maybe this is dramatic or oversimplified, but it feels pretty damn accurate to me for a lot of people purely based on observation. You can apply this to anyone who has a dream and 98% of them choose to avoid the discipline needed now to achieve it and end up suffering from regret later as a result. In the first scenario, all the woman did was voluntarily eat a few helpings of shit in the form of putting the work in and sacrificing some of the fun she could be having in that moment in order to achieve her dream. In the second scenario, the avoidance of suffering became the ultimate priority for her, and that choice quite literally crushed her dream. This is something that each individual person needs to confront themselves on. If something is holding you back from your dreams and causing you to allocate your time improperly and overextend yourself into having “fun” all the time – consider reevaluating. You don’t need to have a ban on fun and cut the world off, but you do have to have strict boundaries and a reason to keep yourself beholden to them. It’s the only way to avoid the much more severe pain and suffering of regret later on.

If you don’t want to end up in a position where you have to settle for less than what you really want out of life because you didn’t give yourself options – with a job you don’t really like, a spouse/partner you don’t really like… a situation and a life that you don’t really like – then listen up. You need to internalize the fact that you cannot escape the hard part. Life is going to test you and make you earn your keep one way or another. By attempting to deny that reality, you’re just setting yourself up to endure the unpleasant part of life much longer than necessary. My personal advice would be to analyze yourself and your decisions and get really honest about whether or not they are guiding you to where you ultimately want to be. If the answer is no, you need to take that seriously. Reaching the end of your life with what ifs and regrets is something I don’t wish on anyone. It may seem too daring a mountain to climb or too pointless an undertaking to bother with when you consider pursuing a dream, but those are just excuses.

I started this blog to say what I feel explicitly, and the truth is that the world is not going to change for you. You need to change yourself to thrive within it. Recognize reality for what it is, accept it for what it is, and then adapt to it. Your life will not get itself together for you. If you focus your energy fully on what is within your control and constantly push yourself to achieve better outcomes, you can actively shape your own reality. The idea that you’re going to wake up one morning a few years from now and suddenly feel capable of taking control of everything you need to be doing is incredibly flawed logic. Don’t defer the shit eating until later – it will only set you up for a world of hurt as you age. Put your bib on, grab a fork, and dig in NOW.