Far too often we’re never really in the moment. Maybe we’re stuck ruminating in the past over what we wished would have happened, or projecting out into the future our hope of what will happen. Maybe we distract ourselves with our phones, with entertainment, or alcohol or drugs. Anything that can relieve boredom or the discomfort of our present reality. But what if you leaned into that boredom? What if embracing discomfort is the key to really experiencing your life?

In this episode I want to about the importance of being present in your own life by working with reality, rather than against it.

“Caretake this moment. Immerse yourself in its particulars. Respond to this person, this challenge, this deed. Quit evasions. Stop giving yourself needless trouble. It is time to really live; to fully inhabit the situation you happen to be in now.” — Epictetus

Sitting With Discomfort

The other day I was listening to a conversation on the Ezra Klein Show. He was interviewing Pema Chödrön, a Buddhist nun who has spent decades writing and teaching about how to actually live with uncertainty, discomfort, and pain. If you haven't come across her work, I'd encourage you to look her up.

The conversation moved through a lot of territory, but one theme kept surfacing, and it's been sitting with me ever since.

Sitting with discomfort. Both emotion and physical discomfort. Not trying to change them. Not trying to fix them or think your way out of them. Just being aware of them, and letting them be part of your experience.

Now I know that can sound passive, like you're supposed to suffer quietly and call it wisdom. But that's not what they were talking about.

What they were getting at is something more precise: when we resist how we're feeling, we don't reduce the pain. We add to it. We take whatever discomfort is already present and we pile on — the worry, the frustration that we feel this way at all, the disappointment that reality isn't matching what we wanted. We make it worse.

Pema talked about how one of here mentors used a phrase that I think is one of the best framings I've heard: collaborating with reality.

Collaborating with reality. Not fighting it. Not wishing it were different. Not white-knuckling your way through it while secretly hoping it changes.

Collaborating with it.

And the moment I heard that, I thought — that's exactly what the Stoics meant when they said we should live according to nature. Same insight, two and a half thousand years apart, from completely different traditions.

But here's the dimension I want to explore today, because I think it goes deeper than most conversations about presence and acceptance actually go.

We don't just resist painful emotions. We disconnect from them entirely. We go numb to them. And we do the same thing with physical pain. We get so caught up in the noise of our daily lives that we stop receiving the signals our own bodies and our own hearts are sending us, even when those signals are urgent.

I know this firsthand. And I’ll tell you a story about that in a minute.

The Philosophy

The Stoics had a concept called the hegemonikon — the ruling faculty. It's the part of us that perceives, judges, and assigns meaning to everything that happens to us.

In an ideal state, this faculty governs us well. It sees clearly. It distinguishes between what's in our control and what isn't. It responds to reality rather than reacting to it.

But here's what Marcus Aurelius kept noticing about himself and what he wrote about in repeatedly in his Meditations:

“Don’t let your imagination be crushed by life as a whole. Don’t try to picture everything bad that could possibly happen. Stick with the situation at hand, and ask, “Why is this so unbearable? Why can’t I endure it?” You’ll be embarrassed to answer. Then remind yourself that past and future have no power over you. Only the present—and even that can be minimized.”

— Marcus Aurelius

The mind wanders and the ruling faculty, left undisciplined, reaches backward into regret and forward into anxiety. It is almost never simply in the present.

What I love about Marcus is that he wasn't writing from a place of mastery. He was writing to himself, often about his own failures. He kept having to drag himself back to the present.

Epictetus put it even more plainly:

“Some things are up to us. Some things are not.”

When we expend energy on the things that are not up to us, including resisting what is simply happening, we suffer. Not because those things are bad, but because we are fighting a battle we cannot win.

This is what collaborating with reality means in Stoic terms. It's not apathy. It's not indifference. It's an active choice to stop expending energy on resistance to what is and redirect that energy toward how you actually respond.

The Stoics weren't saying don't feel. That's the misreading that turns this philosophy into emotional flatness. They were saying: feel what's actually happening. Not what you've constructed around it. Not the story on top of it. The thing itself.

The acceptance of what is leads to a richer, fuller experience. Life isn’t meant to be about comfort. It’s meant to be experienced. All of it. If we ignore or avoid the painful things, we’re ignoring reality and cutting off our lived experience.

Which raises the harder question. If this is clearly the wiser path — and the Stoics knew it, Buddhist teachers know it, most of us sense it intuitively — why is it so hard? Why do we keep disconnecting?

I think the answer has to do with something we don't talk about enough.

The Ego Problem

During the conversation between Ezra and Pema, they mentioned the work of Jon Cabot Zinn who works with people with chronic pain and using meditation to deal with it. And what’s interesting is that the approach is not to ignore the pain, but to become even more aware of it. By become aware of it and not resisting it, they found it actually reduces pain. It changes the relationship with it because they learned to accept it and live with it and no longer resist.

And that part of the discussion reminded me of an experience I had with pain.

When I was around 30, I started having numbness in my feet. I went to a podiatrist to figure out what was going on, and he told me it was most likely a back issue, because it was bilateral, on both feet, which pointed to the spine rather than to the feet themselves.

He referred me to a physical therapist.

In our first session, my physical therapist asked me if I had any pain in my lower back. I thought about it and said, “a little, maybe, but nothing significant”. He asked what I did for work. I told him I was a software engineer. He smiled and said that was one of the worst jobs for back health. Hours of sitting, forward-bent posture, the whole thing. And he said: start paying attention to your lower back at work. Notice what you're actually feeling.

The next day, just before lunch, I remembered what he said. So I stopped and I actually checked in with my body. Really checked in.

I couldn't believe how much pain I was in.

It wasn't mild. It was significant. And it had been there for I don't know how long. Long enough to have stopped registering it. I had been living in real pain, every day, and I had gotten so good at tuning it out that I genuinely didn't know it was there until someone told me to stop and look.

That stopped me. Because if I could be that disconnected from something as concrete and physical as pain, something my own nervous system was actively generating, what else was I not receiving? What other pain was I tuning out?

Here's what I think was happening, and why I think it matters.

A psychologist named Dan McAdams developed what's called narrative identity theory. The idea is that we construct who we are through story. We take the raw material of our lives and we edit it into a coherent autobiography: themes, patterns, a sense of where we've been and where we're going. We create a story about ourselves and out lives.

That's not a flaw. It's actually how human identity works. But the story requires past and future to function. You can't have a narrative about the present moment. The present is just happening. It has no arc yet.

Which means when we're deep in the story of our lives — the job, the responsibilities, the mental to-do list — we stop receiving what's actually occurring. We're so immersed in the narration that the experience itself gets crowded out.

Daniel Kahneman named this distinction precisely. He separated the experiencing self, what's actually happening to you right now, from the narrating self — the one constructing and remembering the story of what happened.

And here's the uncomfortable part: the narrating self is dominant. It's the one we primarily identify with. It's the one that decides how we feel about our lives. Not what we're actually experiencing, but the story we tell ourselves about it.

So we're almost never fully in our experience. We're in our interpretation of it.

My lower back was sending a clear signal. My narrating self was too busy running its story to receive it. The signal was there the whole time. I just wasn't home.

And I think we do the exact same thing with emotional pain.

When something hurts emotionally, like grief, loneliness, fear, or shame, the narrating self kicks in immediately. It starts explaining. It starts planning. It starts building a story that makes the feeling manageable, or it builds a story that justifies avoiding the feeling altogether. We get busy. We fill the silence...