While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

by Yeonmi Park

Happiness is not material success or recognition or even comfort. It’s becoming a parent, being a good daughter, being a good friend, and lending a helping hand to anyone less fortunate.

My mother once told me that without gratitude, happiness is impossible. “When I ask God for happiness,” she said, “he tells me instead to learn to be grateful.” She (and He) was right.

If suffering is experienced in the brain only (as opposed to physical forms of suffering, like torture or disease), then by definition, that suffering is a decision. That’s why I strongly believe that the great majority of the suffering we experience is actually caused by ourselves and the decisions we make (or don’t make). In other words, feelings of devastation mostly come from the way we think about “the problem,” rarely from the problem itself.

First, the core reason behind human suffering is that we are all deemed insufficient in the eyes of society. But because a society’s value system is often pretty arbitrary, it could be argued that we as individuals are not in fact insufficient, but rather that society itself is judgmental and often tyrannical, and should be modified to reduce its authoritarian tendencies.

A certain degree of suffering is natural, even essential, to human life—but the only way through, the only path for righting the ship, is to be completely, entirely at one with yourself: to be authentically you. Until then, it’s impossible to achieve the responsibility and find the meaning required to do away with unnecessary suffering.

Along these lines, “wokeness” now appears to be just an obnoxious rhetorical style that helps cover for something else: a coercive system administered by governing elites that demands adherence to an ever-expanding corpus of basically random sets of laws and regulations designed to keep the lower classes in check.

we must take the path of resistance. Like the pilgrims, we must take the road that makes us uncomfortable, that is uncertain and frightening, if that’s what the truth demands. Because that is the only road to freedom.

Spend a month, or even just a week, forgetting about what happens in Washington and concentrating on the happiness and improvement of your own family and community, and I promise you will suddenly feel differently about America. You will feel more hopeful, more optimistic, more compassionate, more disciplined, and more determined to improve the future than ever before.