David Goggins is No Role Model

Life Isn’t Suffering

David Goggins was lazy, overweight, and going nowhere, so he decided to become a Navy SEAL. Goggins shed 100 pounds and made it through the notoriously difficult BUD/S selection process on his third grueling attempt. He would go on to make a name for himself conquering dozens of ultramarathons and ultra-triathlons, cataloging his journey in two bestselling books.

Goggins is an inspiration. Listening to his books and interviews helped me reestablish a long abandoned exercise habit, and when I’m working on a challenging project and need an extra boost, I can hear him shouting, “I don’t stop when I’m tired, I stop when I’m done.”

But while Goggins is an inspiration, he is no role model. His outlook on life is corrosive, encouraging us to build our life around suffering.

• “The Buddha famously said that life is suffering. I’m not a Buddhist, but I know what he meant and so do you. To exist in this world, we must contend with humiliation, broken dreams, sadness, and loss.”

• “If you’re willing to suffer, and I mean suffer, your brain and body once connected together, can do anything.”

• “It’s a lot more than mind over matter. It takes relentless self discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day.”

• “If you can get through doing things that you hate to do, on the other side is greatness.”

• “You have to build calluses on your brain just like how you build calluses on your hands. Calluses your mind through pain and suffering.”

• “Life is the most brutal endurance sport of all time!”

• “Suffering is a test. That’s all it is. Suffering is the true test of life.”

Suffering, says Goggins, is the essence of life, and our basic choice is whether we “get hard” by voluntarily subjecting ourselves to pain—or whether we become soft and lazy by futilely trying to avoid pain.

You can find a similar view advocated by Jordan Peterson. In Peterson’s view, pain is a “fundamental reality.” Nothing is “more real” than pain—except “that which dispels pain.” This, he concludes, is what virtue achieves. “And I would say that many of the things we regard as cardinal virtues are virtues, in fact, because if you have them on your side, you can in fact contend with and perhaps dispel or triumph over or transcend the inevitable pain and suffering of existence.”

Neither Goggins nor Peterson are outright pessimists. They do not hold that human beings are utterly doomed to defeat, which has been the view of many religious thinkers and philosophers throughout history. But they nevertheless see our lives as revolving around pain and suffering. Life is about facing it, fighting it, and perhaps in some way overcoming it.

This attitude toward life is toxic. If happiness is your goal, you can’t build your life around suffering. You have to build it around values—and a conviction that you live in a universe where values are achievable. A universe where suffering is unimportant.

The Unimportance of Suffering

Shortly after finishing Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand made notes for a novel she never wrote. It was to be about “a woman who is totally motivated by love for values—and how one maintains such a state when alone in an enemy world.” (The Journals of Ayn Rand, 706)

In contrast to the hero’s earthly idealism, Rand considered several forms of misguided idealism, including what she called “The ‘Bryronic’ idealist.” This was someone who “builds pain into his ‘despair-universe’ and ends up with the premise that ‘if no pain is involved, it is not a value nor an ideal; if it’s cheerful, it’s vulgar, superficial and inconsequential.’ He ends up as a real ‘pain-worshipper.’” (The Journals of Ayn Rand, 710)

At the time she made these notes, Rand was reflecting on a striking incident in which she had shared one of her early short stories with friends without revealing the author. Some of the readers were astonished to discover Rand had written the story. They protested: “It doesn’t deal with big issues like your novels; it has no profound passions, no immortal struggles, no philosophic meaning.”

Rand replied: “It deals with only one ‘big issue,’ the biggest of all: can man live on earth or not?”

According to her student, Leonard Peikoff:

She went on to explain that malevolence—the feeling that man by nature is doomed to suffering and defeat—is all-pervasive in our era; that even those who claim to reject such a viewpoint tend to feel, today, that the pursuit of values must be a painful, teeth-clenched crusade, a holy but grim struggle against evil. This attitude, she said, ascribes far too much power to evil. Evil, she held, is essentially impotent (see Atlas Shrugged); the universe is not set against man, but is “benevolent.” This means that man’s values (if based on reason) are achievable here and in this life; and therefore happiness is not to be regarded as a freak accident, but, metaphysically, as the normal, the natural, the to-be-expected.

Philosophically, in short, the deepest essence of man’s life is not grave, crisis-ridden solemnity, but lighthearted cheerfulness. (The Early Ayn Rand, 57)

Earthly idealism involves more than forming and pursuing ideals—it involves a perspective on ideals that is highly unusual. A view that says that life is about values. What’s important, what’s possible, what’s to be expected in life is the achievement of rational ideals that add up to happiness.

The “benevolent universe premise” does not deny the existence of pain, suffering, or evil. Rand herself grew up in Russia during the Communist Revolution and went through periods of near starvation before fleeing to the United States. She understood suffering and evil. Indeed, immediately after describing the “Byronic” idealist, she reflects on the “’glamorizer’ who dares not admit to himself the existence of pain or evil in the world, who goes on pretending to himself that everything is good, because he wants the good so desperately—and ends up by letting the good perish rather than discover that evil is evil.” (The Journals of Ayn Rand, 710)

An earthly idealist understands that pain, suffering, and evil exist. What he denies is that they deserve a central place in one’s view of life. As a character puts it in Atlas Shrugged:

[W]e do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction. We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have a specific reason to expect it—and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.

An earthly idealist forms his desires from reality and so expects them to be achievable in reality. He knows that values have to be achieved through effort, that success is never guaranteed, and that failure, suffering, and evil are possible, but they are only obstacles to be fought, overcome, and forgotten. They aren’t what matters in life.

For a long time, I did not understand why Rand made such a big deal about this issue. But over the years, I’ve found out just how common it is for people to lose out on happiness because they fail to build this attitude into their souls.

I’ve met people who don’t set ambitious goals because, in their heart of hearts, they don’t believe success is possible. I’ve seen people who can find the bad in the best situation. I’ve seen people who, the moment they get what they most want in life, do not experience joy but fear: the very fact they’ve achieved their goal causes them to expect disaster to follow. I’ve even seen people achieve great things and self-sabotage to restore their sense of how the world is supposed to work.

To become an earthly idealist, you have to dedicate yourself to values, focus on values, and form a deep conviction that the universe is hospitable to values.

How an Earthly Idealist Deals with Struggle

One reason it’s so rare to adopt and maintain a benevolent universe perspective is because, even in the best cases, the pursuit of values is hard. Earthly idealism is about seeking the best possible in life—and the best possible does not come easy. It requires relentless dedication and effort in the face of obstacles.

Remaining dedicated to your ideals in the face of challenges and setbacks is a rare achievement. And often the story you tell yourself when you give up on your ideals is that it’s idealism itself that’s to blame. To be realistic and practical means settling. Wisdom means lowering your sights and finding contentment in eking out a “can’t complain life.” Reality is indicted as the enemy of ambitious values.

But the earthly idealist doesn’t indict reality. He chooses values that are achievable and embraces the means to achieve them. As a disciple of causality, he adopts goals with an open-eyed commitment to the actions required to achieve them.

Sometimes the means to achieve our values suck. If I want to visit my best friends in Texas, I have to endure the unpleasantness of flying. Even here, I do what I can to make the trip pleasurable. I download my favorite shows, bring a good book, and try to use the time to think about my most important projects. But if I could teleport to Austin, I would.

But for our most important goals, the pursuits that make up our life, happiness requires loving the doing. The alternative is to commit the “magic thread” error. In the story of the magic thread, a boy named Peter is given the power to fast forward his life by pulling on a magic thread. Bored with school? He pulls the thread and he’s graduated. Impatient to get married? He pulls the thread and his wedding day has arrived. The baby is keeping him up? He pulls the thread and his child is grown. Peter is able to go from achievement to achievement to achievement in a matter of seconds. The problem is that he misses out on the living of his life. But happiness just is loving the living of your life.

The pursuit of values always requires effort, but that effort should be experienced as a positive. For the earthly idealist, the effortful pursuit of values is itself a value. Goggins trains us to think that the pursuit of worthy goals must entail relentless suffering. If you aren’t suffering, you aren’t growing. The opposite is true: if the pursuit of your most important goals is not a source of joy, you should question your goals or the path you’ve chosen to achieve them.

That said, if you do pursue ambitious goals, there will be times when you’ll face genuine struggle, harrowing obstacles, and painful setbacks. And it’s here that I do think some of the advice offered by Goggins can be helpful. What Goggins provides is a toolkit that helps ensure you have mental resources you can draw upon to keep your long-term values real to yourself in the face of obstacles.

One of these is to find your Why. You have to know, before the shit hits the fan, what your purpose is. Why are you subjecting yourself to a military bootcamp? Or a strenuous training regiment? Or a restrictive diet? You have to be fully convinced of your why and it has to be branded into your soul so that, when it’s go time, you don’t have to reconstruct the reasons your goal is important to you—you only have to remind yourself of the reasons.

Another tool is to fill your cookie jar. Your cookie jar contains memories of times when you’ve overcome pain and discomfort to achieve something great. By spending time beforehand thinking of those examples, you’re in a position to take cookies from the cookie jar in the moments when you need motivation.

Finally, you have to work over time to build a calloused mind. This means learning to be comfortable being uncomfortable. You mentally reframe discomfort so that it’s no longer something to be avoided, but a signal that you’re moving in the direction of what you want.

There’s a danger in these tools. In most contexts, pursuing values shouldn’t feel like a struggle. Pain and discomfort are signals that need to rethink your goals or your approach to your goals. Pursuing big, bold goals should mostly be experienced as fun. Nevertheless, there will be times when it’s not fun, and it’s vital to be able to draw on strategies to keep yourself moving forward.

How an Earthly Idealist Deals with Suffering

The problem with happiness, insists Jordan Peterson, is that it is fleeting:

It’s all very well to think the meaning of life is happiness, but what happens when you’re unhappy? Happiness is a great side effect. When it comes, accept it gratefully. But it’s fleeting and unpredictable. It’s not something to aim at—because it’s not an aim. And if happiness is the purpose of life, what happens when you’re unhappy? Then you’re a failure. And perhaps a suicidal failure. Happiness is like cotton candy. It’s just not going to do the job.

This is deeply wrong. Happiness is not weather—it is climate. It is the emotional undertone of a life well-lived. Happiness is not something you lose when life gets difficult: happiness, and the promise of it, is what sustains you in choppy waters.

The big lie that people like Peterson and Goggins tell is that suffering strengthens us and happiness weakens us. But who is better poised to withstand a crisis? The proud, serene, confident man who loves his life—or someone resigned to the conviction that life is pain and failure is inevitable? But for happiness to sustain us, we can’t view it as an accidental “side effect.” We have to see it as our normal state.

Holding on to this conviction in the face of suffering is an achievement. My God, is it an achievement. One of the features of certain kinds of physical and emotional pain is that they feel metaphysical. When you lose someone you love or a deadly illness forces you to confront your mortality, it’s experienced as your universe imploding—as reality turning against you.

In the worst cases, your ability to go on seeking happiness is impossible. But even there, in the face of tragedy, you can hold on to the conviction that this is a universe where happiness is possible—that, even if you’ve encountered tragedy, life isn’t tragic. Rand makes this point in one of the most powerful scenes in literature I’ve ever read.

She smiled. She knew she was dying. But it did not matter any longer. She had known something which no human words could ever tell and she knew it now. She had been awaiting it and she felt it, as if it had been, as if she had lived it. Life had been, if only because she had known it could be, and she felt it now as a hymn without sound, deep under the little hole that dripped red drops into the snow, deeper than that from which the red drops came. A moment or an eternity—did it matter? Life, undefeated, existed and could exist.

She smiled, her last smile, to so much that been possible.

An earthly idealist builds his life around values. When he faces obstacles, he works to overcome them, and if he can’t overcome them, what he retains is the knowledge that this is a world where happiness, grandeur, and joy are not only possible—they are what truly matter.

Elevating Joy

I’ve been picking on Robert Ringer the last few weeks, but one line of his has always stuck with me. “Problems are an integral, ongoing part of the living experience.” (Million Dollar Habits, 45)

Even during the best periods of my life, I’ve never lacked for problems. If you view happiness as a state where everything is smooth sailing, then you’re guaranteed to never experience it. Rather, happiness requires achieving your most important values—and then keeping them front and center in your thinking. You need to keep your problems in perspective by elevating joy.

• You elevate joy when focus on what you want, not what you fear

• You elevate joy by consuming soul-nourishing art

• You elevate joy by building a life where the path to your values is one you love walking down

• You elevate joy by guiltlessly taking time to do things for sheer pleasure, not because they are a means to some achievement down the road

• You elevate joy by appreciating what’s good in your life, and not waiting for the day when nothing will be bad

• You elevate joy by practicing “the Hidden Art of Happiness”

But to elevate joy, you must first achieve it. And that takes a full dedication to a morality of happiness.

Effective Egoism 101

The conception of earthly idealism I champion was defined by Ayn Rand. Here are three key works that summarize her perspective:

• Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World by Ayn Rand

• Causality vs. Duty by Ayn Rand

• The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand

And if want the full case for egoism, you can buy my book Effective Egoism: An Individualist’s Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness.