Why most of your suffering is unnecessary

and everyone is drowning.

Craig Perry

Sep 07, 2025

The video version of this newsletter:

Ever since my mam died of cancer when I was 12, I've been obsessed with one question:

Why do we suffer so much more than we have to?

There are two types of suffering in life.

The kind you can’t control, and the kind that's completely preventable.

Most people are drowning in the second type without realizing it.

Death, sickness, war, and tragedy.

Massively out of your control as an individual.

But what about yourself?

How you respond.

How you act.

How you aim upwards despite all the suffering in the world?

What if most people lack the 4 foundational skills that minimize unnecessary suffering in their lives?

If you want the stop suffering pointlessly after reading this newsletter, here’s the foundational skillset you need to develop.

This skillset will be your ark for when the floods inevitably come your way.

You're not everything you could be

Your problems don’t exist. You do.

Think of yourself like a car, with four essential parts:

Your mind (the GPS)
Your body (the engine)
Your soul (the fuel)
Your purpose (the destination)

When any part is broken, the whole car struggles.

This is unnecessary suffering feels like.

Most people want to be happy (I'd fucking hope).

And happy mean different thing to different people.

But we all want the same fundamental things:

Wake up excited to get out of bed
No aches and pains
Control over our thoughts, emotions, beliefs, our internal world

Most people experience the opposite.

You can’t get out of bed in the morning when you’re slapped by your annoying iPhone alarm sound.

For 3-5 seconds after waking, your mind is peaceful.

Then, chaos hits. Anxious thoughts. Overwhelming emotions.

You’re out of breath after walking down one flight of stairs.

Everything hurts, not just your body.

You blame your job. The education system. Your past. Your parents. Your government. Your kids. Your ex. The cards you're being dealt.

The universe is against you!

But you never look at yourself. The only thing you do have direct control over.

It's like building an ark (skillset) before the flood (necessary suffering) comes.

If you're too busy dealing with preventable problems, the first wave will wipe you out.

What you're missing is the abilities to fight back against the tide.

The foundational skillset

What skillset are we talking about?

1. Training Your Mind - If you're not exposing your mind to new ideas and challenging what you believe to be true, you'll have the same mind at 50 as you did at 18. You'll go insane trying to solve new problems with old solutions.
2. Strengthening Your Body - If you're not exercising your body, every physical task will feel like it's beating you down to the bone.
3. Actualizing Your Soul - If you don't work on fulfilling your potential, you have nothing to excite you to jump out of bed each morning, because you've nothing to work towards that you genuinely care about.
4. Creating Your Purpose - Your purpose comes from helping others build up this same skillset (like this newsletter hehe)

Here's a profound idea:

Most people are living life backwards.

They try to control everything they can't (other people, circumstances, the past) while neglecting things in their direct control (responses, daily choices, their internal world).

This creates a pointless (but vicious) cycle:

External problems hit (necessary suffering)
Poor internal foundation makes you fragile (unnecessary suffering multiplies)
You blame external circumstances for your pain
You ignore building internal strength as a result
Next external problem hits even fucking harder

When you take responsibility of your life, you gives yourself permission to build up your foundational skillset.

Playing the blame-game. Identifying as innocent. Both make you powerless at changing your situation.

How it saved me

Here’s one situation I couldn’t change.

My mam's passing caused me necessary suffering.

There was always a lot going on, generally speaking. Emotions, thoughts, pain, all that crap. Grief is shit. But it's a part of the human experience.

And it’s an excellent teacher, and since then I’ve had an invincible fire within me for becoming better. I don’t know why. But I do. So I’ve tried to leverage this fact as much as I can.

But the thing it taught me was this: I learned to distinguish necessary suffering (mother’s passing) from unnecessary suffering (my habits).

I first realized this when I started lifting weights at 16. I stopped playing video games and changed my eating habits instantly.

Why?

My sense of identity changed.

The person I thought I was changed, because what I valued had shifted after learning something profound:

Sitting on my ass playing Xbox until 4am every night made me feel far worse than doing 4 hours of lifting per week.

From the Jungian perspective, I wasn't a brand new person. I had become more whole, I had self-actualized a new part of myself.

Strengthening my body was the catalyst that started it all. But my mind was still an enemy.

So I started reading books on topics I couldn't shut the fuck up about.

Philosophy.

Psychology.

Carl Jung.

Plato and Aristotle.

1984 and Animal Farm.

Then came How to Win Friends and Influence People.

I finally felt good in social settings. I was confident in my body from lifting and doing jiu-jitsu. I knew social principles in my mind. My soul started enjoying socializing for the first time ever.

No more locking myself in my room playing Minecraft by myself alone.

My life only improved once I decided to improve it myself.

Once I placed down one piece (body), every other piece (mind and soul) revealed itself. They all formed a strong picture.

And I wish I had this laid out for me back when I was 12 years old.

So that's why I started this newsletter. And it gives me a feeling of purpose. It motivates me to get out of bed every morning.

The antidote to unnecessary suffering

Responsibility is the antidote to unnecessary suffering.

When you’re building internal strength across all four domains, external problems become easier to overcome because you have the capabilities to deal with them.

And each domain amplifies the others as they grow:

Mind > Body - learning about nutrition and exercise science makes physical improvement easier and more effective
Body > Soul - physical strength gives you energy for creative work and confidence to express yourself authentically
Soul > Purpose - following what genuinely excites you naturally leads to helping others with similar interests.
Purpose > Mind - teaching others forces you to deepen your own understanding and keep learning.

This is what make discipline feel effortless. Everything starts to builds everything else up.

And discipline should feel easy.

Doing what's good for you becomes what you want to do, not what you force yourself to do.

The more you focus on reducing your own unnecessary suffering, the more capable you become of handling necessary suffering, for the betterment of yourself and the entire world.

This is why purpose naturally emerges from personal development. Why self improvement become such a popular "buzz word."

You can't help others escape a prison you're still trapped in yourself.

But once you've found the keys to your own cell, sharing them becomes your purpose.

Most people think:

First fix the world, then you'll be happy
First help others, then focus on yourself
First find your purpose, then build your foundation

What you actually need:

First build your foundation, then you can meaningfully help fix the world
First become the person you want to be, then teach others how to do the same
First reduce your own unnecessary suffering, then your purpose will reveal itself

If we want to make the world a better place we must start with at level if the individual.

How to self-actualize through forging

(1) Discovering

Write down 3 things that drain your energy daily (these 3 things can be specific to each day if you have a set routine).

Identify which are necessary (grief, loss, tragedy) vs unnecessary (poor sleep, bad diet, negative thoughts).

Rate your current state in each domain (mind, body, soul, purpose) on a scale of 1-10.

Then, ask yourself these questions:

What made you lose track of time as a kid?
What do you do that feels effortless but others find difficult?
What topic could you talk about for hours without getting bored?
When do you feel most "yourself"?

This is for getting your mind brainstorming a bit.

Now you can choose your first four pillar activities for each domain.

Pick one activity for each domain that you genuinely enjoy:

Mind - philosophy videos, psychology books, watching lectures, how-to guides and tutorials
Body - lifting weights, running, BJJ, martial arts, competitive team sports (good for soul), walking (good for mind)
Soul - writing, music, art, relationships, creating your solutions to common problems
Purpose - teaching your skills, educating others on how to solve problem's you've overcome, starting a newsletter (to teach and educate online), creating content

(2) Laying the foundation

Start as low as possible to make success inevitable.

Start with weekly targets you can schedule in when you have the time. Daily tasks can feel daunting at first. Thinking in terms of a week gives you more wiggle room.

Across 7 days, forge the following foundation:

Body - 2 sessions minimum for 30 minutes each (may be longer if doing a class or martial arts session)
Mind - 60 minutes of learning (I like two 30 minute sessions spread throughout my week)
Soul - Spend 90 minutes with one person you haven't seen in a while (like going for breakfast, trust me, it's class)
Purpose - 60 minutes of being creative across the week (write your first Substack post in this time; it doesn't need to be perfect it just needs to exist)

(3) Forging

Increase.

Body - add another session, or increase the time spent training per session?
Mind - add in more time for reading a book or learning a new skill?
Soul - make a weekly or monthly target for catching up with lot's of certain people in your life?
Purpose - start a weekly newsletter and create a digital product that solves one of your past problems with your own solution?

If you add to one area, and other areas start to suffer, stop.

You need to maintain balance across all areas.

Specialization is for bugs.

You're not a bug (well I hope not; poor Gregor Samsa…)

If you can set aside 60-90 minutes each morning to complete these activities, jumping out of bed will be your only option.

(4) Minimizing suffering

Reflect and build on what's working. Build a routine that feels natural and easy, with minimal friction.

What time do you naturally want to wake up? (10am is fine if that's what you love right now)
When is your energy highest for each type of work?
What sequence feels most natural?

If you've a busy week, a sickness, a holiday coming up. Fall back. Reduce the volume and take an easier week.

Real progress doesn't have to improve massively upon each week. It just needs to improve somewhat.

Every 3 months, retake your domain ratings and see what's changed. Go again and repeat the process.

The Stoics believed you always had a choice.

Keep living backwards.

Trying to control what you can't, and neglecting what you can. Blaming external circumstances while your internal world drowns in chaos.

In doing so, maximizing how much you’re going to suffer stupidly for the rest of your life.

Or, you can do what a select few take on voluntarily.

Become the person who builds an ark before the flood comes.

3 things are guaranteed in life:

Death
Taxes
Uncertainty

Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow. How your story looks when the last page is written.

But we can use the present to build. We can use the past to learn. And we can increase the chances of building a better future for everyone regardless.

The most generous thing you can do for the world is become the strongest, clearest, most purposeful version of yourself.

Start with 10 minutes today. Pick one domain. Do something you actually enjoy in that area.

Leave a comment below telling me what your plan looks like.

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