Peace Is a Stepping Stone, Not The Destination

For a very long time, peace was one of my ultimate goals.

The stoic ideal, the calm life, zen, want less, need less, don’t let anything get to you, sit still and be content whatever happens. I thought that was the top of the mountain.

After all, everyone knows Buddhism is an extremely wise practice, and “eastern philosophy” is highly regarded for this peaceful ideal. Stoicism is the western version, today everywhere on social media.

So… why WAS? Who doesn’t want peace?

I don’t.

I gave it up because once I saw what it really was, I realized it was never the destination, it was a step on the way, and I had spent a long time treating the step like it was the whole thing.

To explain why I arrived to that conclusion, I have to start with pain.

There’s a kind of pain that has no point.

The anxiety that shows up over nothing, the overthinking at 2am about things that don’t matter, the low background ache that comes along with consciousness.

There’s a reason most cultures independently invented ways to stop consciousness from circling downwards: meditation, drinking alcohol, drugs, creating problems/rituals (boredom is hard, being busy prevents that.)

That suffering is useless, it doesn’t build anything, it just sits on you. And eastern philosophy, stoicism, a lot of what I call therapy culture, they are genuinely good at cutting that pain down.

I leaned on this hard when I was in a bad spot and it got me out. That’s why these traditions survived thousands of years, they work, they surface every time people are drowning and need a way to stop the bleeding.

But there’s a second kind of pain, and this is the one they get wrong.

The pain that comes bolted onto anything worth doing. The stress of committing to something before you know it’ll work. The risk of it blowing up in your face. The discomfort of wanting a thing you don’t have yet and might not get.

You can’t build anything real without that pain, it’s the price on the thing, it’s welded to it and you can’t select it out.

Here’s where I part ways with all of them, and I mean all of them, eastern philosophy, stoicism, the therapy stuff, at the root and not just the watered down instagram versions.

They all start from the same move: suffering is the core problem of being alive, so the whole game is to reduce how much life can hurt you.

Buddhism does it by loosening your craving. Stoicism does it by pulling you back from everything you can’t control. Therapy does it by managing your inner state until the spikes flatten out. Different methods, same aim: get the pain down.

And it works, that’s the trap. It does get the pain down. But follow that logic all the way and look where it takes you. The biggest sources of suffering in life are all tied to the most meaningful things: love, pursuing a mission, caring deeply about an outcome…

So a philosophy built to minimize suffering, run honestly to its end, has to talk you out of wanting badly, because the wanting is where the pain lives.

Lower the wanting, lower the risk, lower the exposure, and yeah, you suffer less. You also do less, build less, become less. The flat life isn’t these philosophies failing. It’s them working exactly as designed, on a foundation that was rotten to begin with, because it treated the toll for a real life as a bug to be removed instead of the price of admission.

That’s the part nobody sees. You learn to back away from the pointless 2am suffering, good, but the same move teaches you to flinch from the pain that’s bolted to anything worth doing, and you can’t tell the two apart anymore because the point is to reduce suffering.

Watch a kid. He’s running around like an idiot, full speed, goes down and scrapes his knee. He could break an arm the way he’s going. He gets up and keeps running. He’s not tougher than an adult, he feels it, the knee hurts, but the hurt doesn’t matter against whatever he’s chasing. The pain is real, it’s just irrelevant because the want is stronger.

That’s the whole thing right there, wanting something so bad that the pain riding along with it stops mattering.

Now what would the anti-pain philosophies do with a kid like that? They would tell him to want less, to stop chasing so hard after something because pain will come as a result. The scrapes won’t get to you, because you won’t want anything badly enough to chase it into a fall. Kill the wanting and you kill the pain that comes with it.

They’re right that it works. You’ll hurt less. But you just switched off the exact thing that made the kid run, the wanting that was bigger than his fear of getting hurt. That’s the setting these philosophies turn off in you, and once it’s off you stop running at anything at all.

So these traditions surge for a reason, and it’s always the same reason.

They show up when people have lost the thread, when there’s no meaning around and everyone’s anxious and stuck, and they hand you a way to stop the bleeding.

I wrote about this before with stoicism specifically, how it was born out of a world falling apart and it comes back strong every time the world feels that way again. Right now is one of those times, which is why the stoic accounts and the detach content and all of it is everywhere. It’s the same thing that’s always happened, people reaching for a painkiller in a meaning drought.

But a painkiller is a thing you take to get across the bad stretch, it was never meant to be the whole life.

Peace is where you build from, you need a stable base, you can’t build anything out of chaos and your mental health isn’t a joke, a calm steady life is something you pull from.

There’s a big gap between the two and the traditions blurred it. Desire for whatever scrolls past you, desire you picked up off other people, desire for ten things at once, yeah that scatters you and makes you miserable, the buddhists were right about that one.

But deep desire pointed at the right thing is the best thing a person can have, it’s the whole reason anything good got built, it’s the thing you feel when you can’t stop thinking about what you’re making.

When they told you to kill desire they threw the baby out with the bathwater. And the people who take it all the way don’t come out enlightened, they come out flat, you slowly become a ghost in your own life.

Deep desire for the right thing is amazing, you WANT it.

Is it going to put you in uncomfortable spots, is it going to risk failure, is it going to drag you through stress and not knowing how it ends? Yeah. But you don’t get to select those out, they come with the thing, that’s the deal, and it’s worth it. That’s the part the detach crowd never grasped.

You can’t turn down one side without turning down the other.

The same wiring that makes you feel pain makes you feel the good stuff. You train yourself to feel less of the bad and you feel less of everything, you wanted to stop hurting so you turned the whole thing down and now the highs went out with the lows. That’s why nothing lands anymore. You optimized for not feeling bad and you ended up not feeling much at all.

The worst version of this is the advice to not even get excited, because excitement might set you up for disappointment later. People actually tell you that. Keep it level, don’t get too high so you don’t get too low. That’s not wisdom, that’s just agreeing to be half dead so nothing can hurt you.

Recently I got a DM from a paid subscriber (which is what sparked to write about this!):

He has attained the life he wanted all this time, and he’s standing in the middle of it going something’s missing, it’s time to build the next thing.

That’s where the gurus jump in and tell him the missing thing means he hasn’t arrived yet. He’s still too attached, still has too much desire running him, if he’d just detach a little harder he’d finally find the peace.

It’s never ending. You did the thing, you wanted less, it left you empty, and the cure they’re selling for the empty is to want even less. It’s the disease sold back to you as the medicine. And when it doesn’t work you don’t blame the advice, you blame yourself, you figure you weren’t disciplined enough about your peace.

But he doesn’t need less. He’s already good at less, he mastered less, that’s how he got here. What he’s missing is the thing worth wanting, the thing to point all of it at, and nobody in the peace world has an answer for that because their whole toolkit is built for turning wanting down, not aiming it.

The reason I relate to it and decided to write about it is because I was that guy.

I’d gotten to the peace I told you about at the beginning, the calm I figured was the whole point, and there I was sitting in it feeling that same flat nothing, something missing I couldn’t put a name on, the same place he’s in now.

Fortunately, I got out, and I know what the thing was I’d been missing.

So if that’s you, if the life’s mostly handled and nothing gets you out of bed with that fire anymore, keep reading.

I solved this for myself, and the rest of this is how.

If you are not a paid subscriber, I think you had enough proof up until now to know whether or not what is coming will be good. If you want to push beyond the theory, the what and the why and get to the HOW (the practical side), you can become a paid subscriber and get access to the rest of this article, as well as 25 other exclusive ones (including multiple long-form guides about things like purpose, focus, productivity, etc.)

Let’s become that kid running again: ignoring exhaustion, ignoring thirst, ignoring scratches. Waking up springing out of the bed because we’re so excited to take on the day.