All Suffering Is Imaginary.

Most of what is hurting you is not real.

Not the hunger. Not the wound. Not the grief over somebody you actually lost. Those are real. But the thing most adults you know are actually drowning in, day after day, is none of that. It is the loop in their head. And almost nobody is taught how to see it for what it is.

Last weekend I drove three hours east of where I live and ended up in a Balinese village a tourist will never set foot in. Among the barefoot kids running between market stalls was a six-year-old with an injury on his leg that an emergency room would have been all over. He spent twenty minutes pointing his fingers at me like a gun and laughing every single time he scored a hit. He has almost nothing. He is one of the freest humans I have ever stood next to.

Two days earlier I had been thinking about the people who raised me. They live in clean homes. They eat three meals. They have phones full of grandchildren. By every measurable definition they have escaped the conditions they were born into. And they still wake up every morning with the same tightness behind their eyes that their parents had, and their grandparents had, all the way back to a Silk Road that vanished from the map a thousand years ago.

The kid with almost nothing was free. The people I love most, who have almost everything, are not.

This is the central fact of being a human being, and most people will live their entire life without anyone telling it to them directly. So I am going to.

Almost all of the suffering you carry around is imaginary. Not fake. Real to you, in the moment, in your body. But generated entirely by you, without your permission, by a machine inside your skull that you have never been taught to supervise.

The grudge from ten years ago that nobody else remembers. The replay of what you should have said in 2019. The forecast of a conversation tomorrow that will never happen. The comparison to a stranger you have never met. A future that does not exist, being suffered for, in advance, on a Tuesday afternoon.

The kid in the market had a real wound and an imaginary cartoon, and he was living in the cartoon. The people who raised me have a real life and an imaginary war, and they are living in the war. Almost everyone you know is doing one of the two. Almost nobody notices which one.

If you take one thing from this letter, take this. High intelligence is not how fast you think. It is how long you can wait. Anything you want badly enough becomes inevitable on a long enough timeline. Anything you are suffering through also passes on a long enough timeline. The mind does not have either calendar. It has the next sixty seconds, and it will tell you anything to fill them.

Here is what I want you to do this week.

Sit somewhere quiet for ten minutes. No phone. No music. No book. Just you and what is actually in your head when you stop feeding it. Watch the loop run. Notice how little of what is in there is actually happening in the world outside your skull.

If that idea makes you uncomfortable, you already have your answer.

The people who have everything and still suffer are not unlucky. They are unsupervised. The kid in the market is not naive. He just never confused the script for the truth.

You have access to the same operating system. You always have. The rest of your life depends on whether you start to use it.

— Shoh.