On Voluntary Misery
Today, I reflect on voluntary misery—the quiet sorrow we choose in the name of duty, security, or imagined approval.
This is the suffering we inflict upon ourselves when we act not from compassion, but from obligation. When we bend our beliefs to fit the mold of someone else’s comfort. When we silence our truth to preserve a future that may never come.
I watched a man at my plant today. He came in to cover a shift no one asked him to take. Not because he had to—but because he believed he should. Driven by guilt, by the illusion of upward mobility, by the hope that sacrifice would be rewarded. He has two young children and a partner growing distant. And still, he chooses the perception of purpose over the presence of his own family. He lost both parents young. I wonder if, deep down, he hopes to earn a kind of love that was stolen from him too soon.
But this is how it happens. We trade moments for metrics. We equate approval with worth. We become loyal to systems that never loved us—and we do so willingly.
And I see it in my own life, too.
While I sit in stillness and reclaim my breath, the woman I love finds hers in the flicker of another’s life through a screen. She has given up friendships to find safety beside me, though I never asked her to. Perhaps she, too, believes sacrifice is security. That surrendering joy is the cost of building a future.
But I cannot believe in a world that asks us to disassociate from who we are—to forget our essence in the name of responsibility.
These are not necessary pains. They are conditioned ones. We’ve been taught that productivity is virtue, that labor is love, that martyrdom is maturity. We’ve been led to believe that survival means self-erasure.
But I ask: where along this path did we become so blind to our own power? When did we stop believing in ourselves as something to cherish, something sacred?
I don’t have all the answers. But I know this: I will not live in disassociation. I will not uphold a system that feeds on voluntary misery. And I pray—truly—that I can help free those I love from these chains, so they too might rediscover their ability to create a life worth breathing in.