What a difference a week makes. Last week, I was a-bluster with sunshine and anticipation, fresh off a productive week and a weekend of new friends and really good pizza. This week, I couldn’t seem to get myself to do anything of note. The highlights include: starting the Bachelorette (with overwhelming encouragement from two girlfriends); baking and eating a dozen chocolate chip cookies; taking long walks; canceling pilates and boxing for other priorities (doing nothing); and spending a lot of time sitting on the couch with two pups on either side of me.
Among the many beliefs that I’ve had to unlearn is the belief that anything worth doing is, and should be, hard — or that, if something is hard, then it’s worth doing. In a recent conversation, my friend, Emily, referenced a Chinese concept, 吃苦, or “eat bitterness” — the belief that (part of) the meaning of life is pain; that a journey through pain is necessary to any end worth arriving at. Working hard, and solemnly, dutifully swallowing pain in the process, is a matter of pride, a symbol of strength.
But why?
More and more, I’m realizing that this belief is no more than an old wives’ tale passed around cavefires, like stories of a boy in a manger, to make meaning out of mayhem.
Yet it seems that science agrees with the spirit of eating bitterness. In the oft-cited Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, young children were presented with one marshmallow each and told that they’d receive a second one if they didn’t eat the first in the fifteen minutes that the researcher left the room for. The minority of children who resisted eating the first marshmallow did so through distraction — covering their eyes, tugging on their hair, swinging their legs, kicking the table. Longitudinal observation of these subjects went on to demonstrate that the children who waited for a second marshmallow amassed more “achievements.” The conclusion was that the ability to delay gratification — to sacrifice joy in the moment; to withstand discomfort for the time being; to choose suffering over satisfaction — is correlated with long-term success.
Underlying this study was the assumption that success is the right goal — that more success == better. The experiment’s premise is worth questioning: is long-term success the right thing to optimize for? For whom? Is the suffering worth the success? After all, we never found out if the children with the second marshmallow ended up with long-term happiness (or love or art or adventures), along with their success.
There’s something to be said about the children who ate their one and only marshmallow, enjoyed it, took out a crayon, and drew for the next fourteen minutes. Or the children who licked the sticky sugar on their lips and stared at the clouds and daydreamed. Or the children who shrugged and went home to their parents. Maybe these kids were really livin — instead of sitting in a classroom with a random grad student waiting for a measly marshmallow.
When I first began to feel the undulations — imperceptible at first; eventually, unmistakable — of my “adjustment disorder,” I had been going to therapy haphazardly at best; but my therapist said two things that resonated with me, and that I keep going back to now:
The greatest cause of human suffering is resistance to reality. Let yourself “give in” to the ebbs and flows of this journey.
There needs to be space for both joy and mastery.
Mastery refers to activities we do with a goal in mind, to make progress, to achieve — whether it’s running faster or winning a chess tournament against fourteen-year-olds or getting published — the steps of some ladder to some semblance of achievement. Joy refers to the things we do because we want to — because they make us happy, regardless of the transience of this happiness. Eating a marshmallow, I think, is supposed to be joyful.
Sacrificing the things we do purely for joy eventually leads to suppressing our real desires until they feel estranged. For so long, I did the things that I was told to do — memorize the multiplication table, recite classical Chinese poetry, practice an hour of piano (or pretend to), follow a homegrown summer school schedule — and never the things that I wanted to do, unless it was in stolen time, in secret. A former colleague and current friend once mused that he was impressed with how much I accomplished outside of work: it must be because you don’t “spend your time fucking around,” he said. But why didn’t I? Part of the luxury of being an adult is having the sovereignty to choose “fucking around” whenever you please.
I’d delayed gratification for so long that now, in the heart of adulthood, I was still living my life according to the schedule I was brought up faithfully following: work, and then work some more, and, when you want to watch The Secret World of Alex Mack, work more instead. My best friend and my partner frequently ask me, sometimes in exasperation, “what do you want? But what do you actually want?” — I’m still trying to figure that one out.
And it seems that I’m not the only one. I met someone this weekend who coaches “high-achieving” founders and executives. She said that underneath the bravado and the ambition, every one of them harbors trauma, rooted in their childhoods, embedded subcutaneously.
In therapy, there’s this concept of the “inner child,” living inside every individual (more on this later). A requisite of long-term happiness is healing, soothing, and nourishing that inner child. While the exact needs and wants of each person’s inner child differs, the point of convergence is — always — joy.
There is purpose, even virtue, in letting the fields lie fallow. But most importantly, there’s joy. Eat the marshmallow. Better yet, eat a dozen chocolate chip cookies, cancel your plans, fuck around, luxuriate — and savor every moment of it.