Dealing with Suffering

In The Subtle Art of not Giving a F***, Mark Manson talks of a Japanese Second Lieutenant from World War II, Hiroo Onoda, who was told to defend Philippines, to “never surrender”. The Americans landed with “overwhelming force”, and  most of the Japanese soldiers got killed or surrendered. But Onoda and 3 of his men retreated into the jungle and continued the fight. For over 3o years.

 

He never got to know that Japan had surrendered! He disbelieved the pamphlets that the Americans, the Japanese and the Filipinos dropped over the years as lies and propaganda. Sound too crazy to be true? That’s exactly why Onoda became an urban legend in Japan:

“The war hero who sounded too insane to actually exist.”

Another Japanese, Norio Suzuki, went in search of Onoda, found him and convinced him the war was over. Onoda had no regrets: he had fought for a cause, he had followed orders. And so he returned to Japan. And boy, was he disappointed:

“A consumerist, capitalist, superficial culture that had lost all of the traditions of honour and sacrifice upon which his generation had been raised.”

 

Manson’s point of this weird story?

“If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not, “How do I avoid suffering?” but “Why am I suffering – for what purpose?””

Onoda had assigned an ideal of Japan in his mind, the one for which he had fought, the one for which he didn’t mind spending decades of his life. But the Japan he returned to was like hitting a brick wall:

“Back in Japan, in what he considered to be a vacuous nation full of hippies and loose women in Western clothing, he was confronted with the unavoidable truth: that his fighting had meant nothing.”

 

How we deal with such disappointments is on us, writes Manson. We can dig our heels in, continue fighting over a lost cause and make ourselves miserable. Or we can curse everyone and everything around us for selling out. Or we can move on with our lives. Manson describes the last option nicely:

“This is something called maturity. It’s nice: you should try it sometime.”

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