There is a lot of suffering in life, there's no denying that.

You ever play "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy?", it's an interesting game and one of my favorites to talk about. See, you play as a man with his bottom half in a cauldron who's only means of locomotion is swinging a sledgehammer. Your goal is to climb a mountain of random garbage. It's an intentionally difficult game.

You're constantly faced with frustration. You'll spend long periods of time trying to work your way just a few more feet up the mountain, then fall and find yourself back near the beginning of the game. Again. You repeat this over and over, with Bennett's narration helpfully reminding you that he'll save all of your progress for you, including your mistakes. Speaking of Bennett, he'll provide you with some interesting thoughts about culture and our relationship with frustration along the way, but also he spends time subtly ribbing you whenever you fall. It took me 11 hours to climb that damn mountain. The average for people who don't quit is 5.

I think it is very illuminating on the nature of suffering and life. The mountaintop is your goal. No one is making you do it, you chose it by playing the game, and no one worth speaking of will judge you for quitting. It will probably seem impossible, and in fact it may even be impossible for any given player. Every setback, every failure, every time you drop and end up back in The Pit of Despair will hurt. You'll rage, you'll sigh, you'll swear the death of Bennett Foddy, and you might even cry a little. You'll certainly think about quitting. A lot. But if you keep playing you'll notice the strangest thing: every time you fall, you get a little better at getting back up.

When you're young, you kinda hate your parents, and you probably think they hate you too. They're the ones who make you go to bed early, do your homework and chores, eat your vegetables, etc. And they're the ones who punish you when they feel your behavior needs correction. Later on in life, you'll probably come to realize that all those things were good for you and made you a better person. Well ideally anyway, nobody is perfect, not even parents. The point is that even though you thought they made you suffer because they hated you, it turns out that the opposite is true.

Bennett made the game to hurt you, but not because he hates you.

And it is kinda the same with life. Suffering is an inescapable part of the process of growing. That life is full of suffering doesn't mean that it hates you.

A funny thing happened when I finally reached the top of Bennett's mountain. First there was the immense relief, then the surprising reward for my efforts, and of course a celebratory beer. Then I started the game up again to see if I could do it faster. Over months I eventually got my time down to about 7 minutes and climbed that mountain 200 times. Why did I do that? I think of all the players who quit, and how they must think they'd be happy just to reach the top. It turns out happiness doesn't work that way. There are always new challenges, new goals that we drive ourselves towards, more frustration, more suffering, more growth. Would we really want it any other way?

I am not speaking as a man of great successes, who's perspective may be skewed by that. I'm speaking as a man who has never found love and no longer expects to, who never shipped a product he was proud of, who doesn't make six figures, isn't the boss of anyone, hasn't traveled the world, and isn't recognized as an expert in any field. I don't need my whole hand to count my friends. I am a failure by many common metrics, but maybe success isn't really what we're about anyway?

Now, you're probably wondering why I'm talking about a computer game, and the truth is it's because I'm not the guy who's going to tell you that you shouldn't kill yourself, or that life is really great, or any of that stuff we both know is crap. I've taken the drugs, talked to the psychologists, cried in the shower, begged to just die in my sleep, spent long periods of time doing and feeling nothing, and mentally tallied all the ways I could end myself with just what was around me. I'm not going to tell you that I can help you, or even that I know what you're going though.

But I can tell you a story about a game, and the meaning I found in it, and maybe somebody reading this can find some meaning too.