This is why we’re here. To fight through the pain and, when possible, to relieve the pain of others. So simple. So hard to see.

To keep up this “standard” most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family … and so ad infinitum.

I live, which is the main point.

There will come a time when everybody will know why, for what purpose, there is all this suffering, and there will be no more mysteries. But now we must live ... we must work, just work!

Here’s how to live: Pursue pain.

The work that hurts you less than it hurts others is the work you were made to do.

I live in my suffering and that makes me happy.

Anything that keeps me from living in my suffering is unbearable to me.

Give me, for my life,
all lives,
give me all the pain
of everyone,
I'm going to turn it into hope.
Give me
all the joys,
even the most secret,
because otherwise
how will these things be known?
I have to tell them,
give me
the labors
of everyday,
for that's what I sing.

And must I then, indeed, Pain, live with you
All through my life? — sharing my fire, my bed,
Sharing — oh, worst of all things! — the same head? — And, when I feed myself, feeding you, too?

I suppose I have a really loose interpretation of 'work,' because I think that just being alive is so much work at something you don't always want to do.

Even Pain pricks to livelier living.

Whoever is spared personal pain must feel himself called to help in diminishing the pain of others. We must all carry our share of the misery which lies upon the world.

To make an individual uncomfortable, that is my task.

Here I am alive, and it's not my fault, so I have to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over.