Thank you for your kind and encouraging words Antoine! From birth most of us are taught not to look within ourselves, but to find meaning in everything outside of ourselves. A significant other, a career, material goods… We continuously feed off our peers and solidify this belief; this notion that the meaning of life can be found in the external world, that it is waiting for you somewhere waiting to be discovered.

But no one specifically is to blame. If we are to point fingers, we should all point it at ourselves — what we call society, what we call culture, is made up of us, individuals, and we all perpetuated by ourselves and the people around us. A positive feedback loop that everyone buys into and makes stronger. Individually, we give it the power and influence that we grow to despise.

You’re right Antoine — we must all recognize that struggle is part of the process that makes us stronger, more resilient, more courageous. The things we pour our hearts into, the things we put hours of painstaking dedication into, will be imbued with meaning as we spend more time struggling with them. Maybe meaning and suffering are two sides of a coin. Maybe you need to suffer to find meaning in life. We need to identify what we are struggling with, what we are avoiding, and tackle it with reckless abandon.

How much better could your life be if you let go of your fears and pursued the things that interested you most? How much better could your life be if you were willing to suffer pain in the short term to gain the treasures of the world in the long term? We’ll never know until you try I guess.

Keep struggling and continue to endure Antoine! Gonna quote Nietzsche for the billionth time here :)

“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities… I have no pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether one is worth anything or not — that one endures.”