We tend to think suffering comes from how hard things are. This is partially true—no one lives a pain‑free life, and frankly, who would want to?
But more often than not, our deepest suffering doesn’t come from events themselves. It comes from our resistance when reality refuses to cooperate with our attachments, desires, and expectations.
For many high‑achievers—whether in corporate, athletic, or creative domains—early success is grounded in effort. We learn a simple equation: effort produces outcomes. And for a long time, that equation works.
But as life grows more complex, obstacles become less concrete and more nebulous. Effort remains necessary, but it stops being sufficient. And the learned instinct to try harder begins to backfire:
Pull harder, push longer, and double down on the plan may look like resilience, but it develops consequences more akin to resistance.
The band The War on Drugs captures this experience perfectly in their song “Pain”:
I’ve been pulling on a wire, but it just won’t break
I’ve been turning up the dial, but I hear no sound
I resist what I cannot change
And I wanna find what can’t be found
That lyric distills suffering in its essential form: effort and attention applied where they don’t work.
Pain, resistance, and misplaced effort
The idea that misapplied effort doesn’t just fail—but actively creates suffering—appears across the major wisdom traditions. Buddhism and Stoicism arrive at this insight from different directions, but they describe the same inner mechanics.
Buddhism: suffering as resistance
In Buddhism, this understanding comes from the Second Noble Truth and the Arrow Sutta.
The Second Noble Truth (Samudaya) teaches that suffering (dukkha) arises not from events themselves, but from craving, clinging, and aversion—the demand that reality be other than it is. Whether we crave pleasure, becoming something, or the removal of discomfort, the root is the same: resistance to what’s here.
The Arrow Sutta sharpens this distinction. Life delivers the first arrow—pain—to everyone. But our mental reactions fire the second arrow, multiplying the pain.
A modern but faithful distillation of this teaching is often expressed as:
Suffering = Pain × Resistance
Pain is unavoidable. Loss, pressure, disappointment, and uncertainty are part of being alive. Suffering enters when pain is met with resistance:
- This shouldn’t be happening.
- I need this to be different.
- I can’t accept this.
The more we resist, the more pain multiplies. The less we resist what is, the less we suffer.
Stoicism: suffering as a misplaced locus of control
Stoicism arrives at the same conclusion from a different direction.
Epictetus divided choice into two categories—a distinction modernized in the idea of the Dichotomy of Control:
What is up to us: Our judgments, values, intentions, choices, and responses—how we interpret events and how we act.
What is not up to us: Outcomes, other people’s behavior, reputation, timing, immutable aspects of our body, genetics, market forces, and most external events.
For the Stoics, peace (and effectiveness) hinge on one core skill: the ability to accurately discern which category everything we experience belongs to.
Suffering occurs when we treat outcomes as if they were choices, or other people’s reactions as if they were extensions of our will.
In Stoic terms, suffering isn’t pain. It’s a category error.
Epictetus was uncompromising on this point. Disturbance doesn’t come from events themselves, but from investing our sense of control, identity, or worth in things that were never ours to command. As Seneca put it:
“We suffer more in imagination than in reality.”
Different language. Same pattern. Same consequence.
Forms of Resistance
Read the lyric again:
I resist what I cannot change.
That single line bridges both the Stoic and Buddhist traditions.
Resistance isn’t just emotional—it’s a form of action, whether conscious or mindless. Attention and/or effort aimed at a target that is indifferent to our protest.
It takes shape in where we place our effort and what we give our attention to. Sometimes it looks like applying force to an immutable condition—arguing with timing, biology, markets, other people’s autonomy, or irreversible loss. Other times it looks quieter but just as costly: endless mental rehearsal, rumination, bargaining with reality, or compulsive problem-solving where no solution exists. And sometimes resistance disguises itself as pursuit—seeking relief, certainty, or happiness as if they were objects to be found rather than experiences that emerge from how we relate to what’s here. In every case, the pattern is the same: energy/attention aimed at something that cannot yield. Effort doesn’t just fail to help—it is a knot that tightens itself.
Pulling on the wire
I’ve been pulling on a wire, but it just won’t break
We keep pulling on the wire because effort has worked before. In earlier chapters of life, persistence was rewarded. So when something doesn’t respond, the instinct isn’t to reassess—it’s to intensify. More force. More control. More insistence.
We keep pulling because part of us believes:
- If I pull harder, it will give.
- If I stay rigid, reality will yield.
- If I refuse to adjust, this will eventually break.
Pulling harder doesn’t resolve; it hijacks attention that might otherwise bring clarity. At that point, effort becomes self-harm disguised as discipline. The tragedy isn’t that the wire won’t break—it’s that all the strength being applied there is no longer available elsewhere.
Stoicism would call this a failure of discernment. Buddhism would call it clinging. In practice, it’s the same mistake: confusing commitment with rigidity. Commitment adapts. Rigidity insists.
The moment you stop pulling, you don’t give up—you regain leverage to apply elsewhere.
Seeking what can’t be found
Not all resistance looks like pulling or pushing against reality. Some of it looks like chasing.
We assume that if we search hard enough, we’ll eventually arrive at the thing that will finally settle us:
- happiness
- fulfillment
- peace
- confidence
- certainty
- love
But seeking is another way we refuse to accept how experience actually works.
The most common seeking error: Happiness
For example, both Stoicism and modern psychology converge on an uncomfortable truth: happiness is not something you find. It’s not an object waiting to be discovered, achieved, or unlocked.
The Stoics were clear on this. A good life doesn’t come from acquiring the right outcomes or conditions. It comes from cultivating virtue—clear judgment, aligned action, and a right relationship to what is and isn’t in our control.
Positive psychology echoes the same conclusion. Enduring wellbeing, what science refers to as flourishing, emerges from practices and patterns of thought: meaning, agency, connection, and gratitude—not from finally “getting” the thing we believe will complete us.
Seeking becomes resistance when it implies:
- I am not okay until I arrive somewhere else.
- This moment is insufficient.
- Happiness is always one step ahead.
That’s why the lyric lands so hard:
I wanna find what can’t be found.
We suffer not because happiness, love, confidence, etc. are unavailable, but because we keep treating them like a destination rather than a way of being. Action precedes experience, not the other way around.
From philosophy to application
Ok. So we’re on board with the idea that resistance is futile and a major source of suffering. But telling ourselves—or someone else—“don’t resist” is like saying “don’t think of a pink elephant.” The instruction itself creates the problem.
Stoicism offers us a way to actualize the practice of avoiding resistance through the Dichotomy of Control.
A common misperception of Stoicism is that its indifference to outcome is passive, even fateful. Quite the contrary, the Dichotomy of Control lives in the paradigm of action. It invites us to consciously sort experience into what we can influence and what we can’t—and to invest our energy and attention accordingly. In the process of sorting experience into the categories of what is and isn’t in our control, we are consciously making a discernment that is the precursor to right-directed action.
Determine if the experience or circumstance is or isn’t in your control.
If it is, direct your attention elsewhere. If it is, act; OR choose not to act.
Either way, be at peace with the consequence of your action/inaction and don’t complain about the consequence of your choice.
“Be water”
Avoiding the pitfalls of resistance to reality won’t ever remove pain from our lives, but it does reframe how we relate to painful obstacles, which invariably occur in life. But this is where acceptance meets its limit, and we are invited to take the last step to harness that acceptance into conscious choices about our next action.
Closely related is the Stoic idea—later summarized as The Obstacle Is the Way. Stoicism doesn’t teach us to eliminate obstacles before acting.
It teaches us to use them.
Constraints aren’t interruptions to the path.
They reveal the path.
Bruce Lee’s full reflection on how to “be” in life captures the concept in an analogy:
“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless—like water.
You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup.
You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle.
You put it into a teapot, it becomes the teapot.
Now water can flow or it can crash.
Be water, my friend.”
In Stoic terms, water doesn’t argue with the rock in a stream; it doesn’t resist what it can’t control about the rock’s form.
It accepts it, discerns its shape, finds the cracks, and adapts to its form.
Cracks exist because the rock exists. Opportunities exist because obstacles exist.
No rock, no channel. No obstacle, no opportunity.
Together, The Obstacle Is the Way and Bruce’s analogy teach us:
- The obstacle doesn’t block progress.
- Rigidity does.
Accepting reality isn’t passivity. Water isn’t weak.
It adapts without losing force. It yields to the rock’s form without giving up its own direction.
Become what moves through the cracks
This is the throughline:
- Suffering increases with resistance.
- Peace and effectiveness increase with adaptability.
If pulling on the wire doesn’t break it, or turning up the dial produces no sound, it’s not because you aren’t trying hard enough.
It’s because you’re applying force where there is no leverage.
Reality doesn’t reward insistence.
It rewards flexibility and discernment.
Not flexibility of values—but of approach.
Not abandonment of standards—but release of rigid forms.
The obstacle becomes the way the moment you stop resisting it.
Pain is inevitable.
Suffering is optional.
It begins when we demand that reality be different.
It ends when we ask a better question:
So when you are confronted with an obstacle that is causing you pain, ask this question before your instincts to try harder kick in:
What shape does this require of me now?
Stop pulling on the wire.
Stop turning up the dial.
Stop trying to find what can’t be found.
Become what moves through the cracks.
