Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life

by Eric Greitens

The deepest questions can also provoke the deepest discomfort, the deepest fear, the deepest rage. That often means they’re working. If philosophy doesn’t make you uncomfortable sometimes, it’s not doing its job. When we take a hard, honest look in the mirror, it’s natural to be disturbed. When we discover things we don’t like about ourselves—small ways we’ve been lying to ourselves, bad habits we’ve fallen into—it’s natural to be angry. Today, we don’t burn people at the stake for asking uncomfortable questions. Usually we ignore them. Sometimes we ridicule them. But the impulse to run away from the hard questions hasn’t really changed. We have to learn to replace that impulse with a new one. Just as we can train ourselves to endure and even to seek the pain that sometimes comes from physical exercise, we can train ourselves to endure and to welcome the discomfort and fear that come when we do philosophy. Those feelings of discomfort are often proof that we’re making progress.