lot of people notice that by mentally embracing pain they can nullify the suffering they experience from it. Rather than suffering, which is the pain resisted and projected into the past and future, they experience mere pain.

This is the central idea behind religious solutions to suffering, it's how you can walk on coals comfortably and how Buddhists are chill with having their monk-bros kick their nuts over and over again; it's useful, essential even, but a lot of people who discover this use it only to make themselves more comfortable with their helplessness.

Instead of living a better life they wallow in mental illness, or make a cavalcade of excuses for their behaviour, or get way too into emo music, or imagine themselves as some Nietzschean hero standing up against the cruel endless tsunamis of fate. It turns out it's much easier to wade through an endless shallow sea of pointless suffering than it is to navigate your way to land.

Internal orientation is insufficient without external action. Certainly it's far more cowardly to retreat from pain, to distract yourself from it endlessly, but there's little courage in submitting to it again and again without changing anything. It is an inevitable part of life, but life does not need to be a painful ordeal. Pain is so essential because pain is your body and brain's voice of wisdom, and wisdom is only worthwhile insofar as it's listened to and obeyed. If you simply wallow and identify with suffering, you are a coward who chooses to torment yourself for no reason.

When the waves of life wash over you, let them shape and erode you as water erodes stone, and when the tide retreats, you will remain standing, transmuted into something stronger.