Perspective

Summary: Always keep in mind that you need hardship in order to appreciate the good things in life. Be thankful for hardship, shift your perspective on suffering and acknowledge it as something that help you grow.

Something else I find insanely interesting is the idea of perspective.

Once you endure something uncomfortable for an extended period of time, that discomfort becomes your new norm. On the other hand, when you experience something which is slightly better objectively, your perceived enjoyment will skyrocket.

Bit convoluted? Check out this analogy:

I went on a 20-ish kilometer coastal walk from Coogee to Watsons’ Bay with two good friends who were a year above me and had just finished the HSC. It was a pretty hot day (35 degrees Celsius); we walked that track for 5 hours with no food and just a few liters of water. On the way, we passed by a Coles, and bought an eight dollar Rotisserie chicken (on discount!), and decided to eat it once we got to Watsons’ Bay; with the sun slowly setting over the silhouette of Sydney and its harbour, on that first bite of food, one of my mates said it was the best chicken he had ever eaten and I’m pretty sure he was crying.

Though the food was objectively not amazing, after not eating for hours and doing a long and gruesome walk, his perception of it got him, a grown man, to shed a tear.

The founder of the grueling Barkley Marathon Gary Cantrell said "I think people are obsessed with comfort to the point that they forget if you don't have any discomfort in your life, how do you know when you feel good."

This is one of my favorite quotes - if I don’t go through hardship, struggle, pain, and tears, how the hell do I know that what I’ve earnt is actually valuable?

How can you experience comfort if it becomes the norm? You need some form of discomfort.

An interesting question - would you rather:

a) live a life which has an objectively lower material quality of living, say, living as a Buddhist monk (who are spiritually and emotionally much happier than all of us)

or

b) live idealistically with high ambitions, an objectively strong life financially, but ultimately falling short of your dreams, and feeling like a piece of shit?

It’s an interesting question - and I might be making some generalisations; life is also never one or the other (unless they are complements of each other… thank you 4U Maths).

But the question is - is it better to be financially healthy but spiritually unhealthy, or financially unhealthy and spiritually healthy? I leave this question to you; again, life is never one or the other.

Again, the great Naval said that “IMHO the three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order but their importance is in the reverse.”

I actually recently read Lawrence Yeo’s blog here. And one of his articles on “What Makes Death Bad?” answered this question really well.

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Let’s say that there was a highly intelligent adult who received a terrible brain injury, reducing his mental state to that of an infant. This man doesn’t feel any suffering because he’s in a contented state; he’s perfectly happy as long as he’s fed and his diaper is clean.

But no one would say that he is “in a better place now.” No, everyone would view this as a clear tragedy, a misfortune of epic proportions.

This is because the brain injury created two highly divergent storylines: one where the intelligent man continued to live his life and accomplish great things, and one where he has now become an oversized infant.

Being an infant itself is not bad, but the fact that this man’s mental state was reduced to that of an infant’s certainly is. Even though we see a contented man-baby in front of us, the reality is that he was deprived of all the hopes and possibilities that he had as an intelligent adult.