Why does your life suck? To make you better!

Life is difficult. With these three words, Dr. M. Scott Peck begins his book, The Road Less Traveled. I generally scoff at self-help books – and this book doesn’t entirely escape my pervasive cynicism, particularly when it lauds psychotherapy to excess – but I found this book to contain some intriguing insights that help put life in a new light.

Below are extracts from the opening pages of The Road Less Traveled. It provides Peck’s manifesto on life and what we need to do in order to makes something of our lives. First, we need to understand that difficulties are what develop us. Second, we need to cultivate discipline, particularly self-discipline to draw benefit from the obstacles thrown at us.

Here is Peck...

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Life is difficult...

Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been specially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. I know about this moaning because I have done my share.

Life is a series of problems. Do we want to moan about them or solve them? Do we want to teach our children to solve them?

Discipline is the basic set of tools we require to solve life's problems. Without discipline we can solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With total discipline we can solve all problems.

What makes life difficult is that the process of confronting and solving problems is a painful one....Yet it is in this whole process of meeting and solving problems that life has its meaning...As Benjamin Franklin said, “Those things that hurt, instruct.” It is for this reason that wise people learn not to dread but actually to welcome problems and actually to welcome the pain of problems.

Most of us are not so wise. Fearing the pain involved, almost all of us, to a greater or lesser degree attempt to avoid problems. We procrastinate, hoping that they will go away. We ignore them, forget them, pretend they do not exist. We even take drugs to assist us in ignoring them, so that by deadening ourselves to the pain we can forget the problems that cause the pain....

This tendency to avoid problems and the emotional suffering inherent in them is the primary basis of all human mental illness. Since most of us have this tendency to a greater or lesser degree, most of us are mentally ill to a greater or lesser degree, lacking complete mental health. Some of us will go to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid our problems and the suffering they cause, proceeding far afield from all that is clearly good and sensible in order to try to find an easy way out, building the most elaborate fantasies in which to live, sometimes to the total exclusion of reality. In the succinctly elegant words of Carl Jung, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”

But the substitute itself ultimately becomes more painful than the legitimate suffering it was designed to avoid....And without healing, the human spirit begins to shrivel.

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So, there you have it: the goal for each of us is to develop ourselves into spiritually mature beings before we die, but we’re faced with human characteristics that keep us from achieving this. The sins we face aren’t anything that haven’t been named before. They include laziness; lack of discipline; avoidance of responsibility; emotional immaturity; confusion over the true nature of love; poor parenting; and a culture that generally accepts and nurtures the victimization mentality. None of this is novel to us, heck we could write a book on them…only so many other people already have, so don’t bother.

Is this completely new to you? Probably not. Still, Peck has managed to distill the thoughts and ideas of others to a somewhat succinct description of not only the travails of life, but the reason for those travails: to forge your soul/mind/spirit/self into something greater than it was when it first arrived as a naked and goopy hominid.

For an even more succinct look at how struggles are the key to our advancement, there’s this anecdote about the girl and the butterfly:

A young girl noticed a cocoon with a small hole in it. The cocoon was wiggling, so she sat and watched it. After a while, to her delight, she saw a butterfly struggling to squeeze through that little hole. The butterfly worked and worked for hours trying to get out until it was too tired to try any more. The sympathetic girl thought she’d be a friend and help the butterfly out, so she cut away the rest of the cocoon. The butterfly was bloated with shriveled wings. She watched the butterfly for a long time, waiting for its wings to straighten so it could fly away -- but it never did. The rest of the butterfly’s life was spent crawling around the garden, lugging its fat body along and dragging its useless wings.

The butterfly’s struggle through the restricted egress of the cocoon is designed to force fluid from the butterfly’s body and into its wings. Without this struggle, it cannot fly or thrive, and it is forced into despair and a life of writing bad poetry in blogs until its existence is blissfully terminated, either by a bird fortunate enough to find the lumbering prey, or perhaps by just fading away after a meaningless existence in corporate America.

Peck doesn’t relate this fable, which probably would detract from the intellectual image he’d want to convey with his work, but it would have been more enjoyable to read this than the Tales of Psychotherapy he decides to share later in his book. Nevertheless, Peck does make a good case for the benefits of strife...a benefit that one can even accept regardless of religious preference.

Knowing all of this can make one feel better about life and the sucker punches it occasionally throws, but how does this help in dealing with the sucker punches? It doesn't, at least not too much -- but later in the book Peck describes the tools for turning your troubles into food for development. I’ll address these later. Until then, revel in your troubles. Or do what I do and sigh about them.