Tell me, in this era of fast convenience, have we become allergic to discomfort?
Modern technology makes life so easy – a meal, a ride, or even a date is just a swipe of a screen away. Advertisers constantly sell comfort, exploiting negative feelings to push products for relief.
But in the goal for a friction- free life, we erode our resilience to life’s ups and downs. Minor inconveniences become issues, while raw stress and struggle are treated like existential crises.
Setbacks become traumas to recover from, rather than lessons to learn. A challenging project is deemed not worth the effort, a boss giving hard feedback is labelled “toxic”, while “self-care” is cited to justify abandoning a partner in a crisis.
Youth today have been called the “strawberry generation” for bruising easily under pressure, but perhaps overprotective parents are to blame for shielding them from struggle and risk.
Cushioned comfort doesn’t build character. Just as muscles atrophy when unused, psychological resilience weakens without friction. Like forging steel, character requires both fire to force growth and tempering to prevent us from breaking.
I thought about this after watching The Odyssey recently. The Hollywood hit, based on Homer’s epic poem, isn’t just a heroic adventure – it’s a timeless blueprint of how character is forged in struggle.
Odysseus, a war hero, faces endless catastrophes on his journey home: shipwrecks, the loss of his crew, terrifying beasts, and seductive temptresses. Navigating profound grief, failure, and agonising choices strips him of his warrior pride and hubris.
When a nymph offers him comfort and immortality, he refuses, choosing his mortal wife, ageing, and risk to board a fragile raft home. He knows a life without purpose, love, and struggle is meaningless.
He eventually returns home, disguised as a beggar – hardly a glorious homecoming. But he is transformed, and in the original epic, lives out his days as a wise and restrained king.
I believe The Odyssey resonates so deeply with many because it reminds us that the struggle isn’t a detour from life – the struggle IS life.
Joseph Campbell, the renow-ned mythologist, mapped this in myths and legends across cultures in a detailed template called the “Hero’s Journey”. It goes something like this: A naïve person is pulled from their comfort zone to take on a dangerous challenge, and along the way faces various tests, even monsters, but gets help from divine or supernatural sources to eventually return home transformed, with a new wisdom or power.
The Hero’s Journey is a blueprint for Hollywood screenwriting and video game design. George Lucas explicitly said that Campbell’s framework provided a checklist for the narrative arc in Star Wars.
These stories resonate because although we don’t encounter monsters in the real world, we do face failure, heartbreak, social rejection, financial strain, and loss. Such challenges force us to shed our comfortable adolescence and evoke who we are at our core.
The Hero’s Journey is not just about struggle, but about shaping our authentic selves – and making us heroes in our own lives.
Look around, and you’ll see that some among us have lived their own personal odysseys, enduring catastrophic setbacks and resisting easy exits to succeed and lead a life of purpose.
I actually thought of my father when I saw The Odyssey. His life was a sequence of severe trials. As a boy, he became head of the family when his father was arrested by the Japanese during World War II. He fought hard for an education, even turning to self-study in wartime. When he finally earned a spot to study medicine, his sponsor died. He persevered, won a British scholarship, and became a surgeon.
Stationed at Seremban General Hospital, he faced high-risk cases that others refused. Horrified by seeing car crash victims bleeding to death from liver trauma – then a medical “no man’s land” – he mapped the liver’s blood vessels by injecting a cadaver with a local material: latex. He went on to pioneer liver surgery.
During the May 13 crisis in 1969, as head surgeon at the Kuala Lumpur General Hospital, he bore the heavy weight of leading triage, making split-second choices on incoming bloody casualties.
Decades later, facing kidney failure, his strict daily discipline sustained him through a quarter century on dialysis, a rare record.
My father showed me that grit and purpose are not innate, but forged through enduring struggle. Now, I wonder, how do I help my teenaged kids have more purpose in life? I encourage them to embrace varied, challenging experiences, hoping it will help.
Hard as it may be to accept, they cannot truly grow and find their own strengths under the parental wing. Even Odysseus’s son had to leave the safety of home and face the open sea to become his own man.
Ultimately, I have to step back to allow my children, like Odysseus, to chart their own way forward in their journey through rough seas to find their way “home”, wherever that may be.
