One perfect day of happiness makes life’s suffering worth it

Every human being with any intelligence goes through a stage in his life when he questions if… Every human being with any intelligence goes through a stage in his life when he questions if life is worth living. Whether it’s the injustice of the world, the apparent futility of action or the scorn of a love unrequited, everyone seems to reach a point where he or she gets depressed.

At the end of my sophomore year, a series of things in my life brought me to this point. The newness and excitement of college had worn off, and classes lost my interest. My disinterest led to poor grades. I broke up with my girlfriend. By this time, my pocketbook had been empty for a while.

Life seemed to be working out to be nothing but pain and strife, and each year, as I got older, there seemed to be less time for enjoying myself and being content and more time dedicated to working and putting up with things I hated.

I did some serious soul searching. I put the rest of my life on the back burner and settled on grappling with the question of the meaning of our existence, a pretty hefty task for a 20-year-old, and not one easily solved but I decided this would have to be my top priority.

My father has worked at a job he has probably quite often hated for the last 25 years, seeing co-workers and friends laid off by the thousands and putting up with heavier workloads so that my brother, sister and I could live in a town with a good school system and not have to move away from the friends we’d grown close to.

I figured he must have some insight, some higher meaning, a reason why he goes through it. He told me that doing things you don’t want to do is just part of being an adult. Everyone has to grow up sometime, and it’s not all fun and games. He works so he can take care of his wife, and for the possibility that his kids can have a better life than he did.

This was somewhat heartening to hear and made me appreciate my parents more. But he basically confirmed my suspicions that life just gets harder as you go along. What if our lives don’t turn out to be any better than his? What if there is a cycle based on an illusion that your children will be better off than you are?

When I talked to my mother, she told me that you have to keep going through the bad times, because maybe in the future there will be something better. What if that better never comes?

I asked one of the ministers at a church in Oakland why life is painful. He told me that humans deserve eternal damnation, and that we are burdened with original sin, and the fact that we are saved through the grace of Jesus is the reason for why we can have something more than suffering.

I hated this message. I thought that humans were inherently good people. I looked at all the people who I love and thought, “There is no way these people deserve hellfire and damnation. There must be a better answer.”

I came home after the semester was over, still grappling with the question. I spent the day and night with a few of my good friends. We played some Ultimate Frisbee, discussed school and politics over some “trash plates” at the local dive, drank some Honey Brown beer and spent the night jumping off cliffs of sand at the rock quarry near our home.

I drove my friend Adam home and asked him the same questions I’d been asking everyone lately. “Why do you go on living? What do you live for?”

He told me that he lives for days like that day, and nights like that night, for trash plates and beers, and the finer things in life, for the ideas that we stand for and the things we can achieve, for the lovers who we love, but most of all, for friends like we have.

And this, more than anything, was what struck me as true, and I realized what I had known all along: that the pain is worth suffering, and that the emptiness is filled by the people we meet and the relationships we build. Life is made so much more bearable by being able to share it with each other.

Nobody enjoys what they do all the time. You’re also not going to get to spend every day with the people you love. It is possible to do something for work that you enjoy, at least some of the time, and it is possible to enjoy the parts you don’t like if you’re able to do them with people you do.

E-mail messages of hope and trash plates to Daniel at DMasny@gmail.com.