We chase experiences we think will make us happy. A perfect vacation, a dream job, a relationship that feels easy from the start. And when things go wrong—when the trip is a disaster, the job crushes us, or the relationship requires more work than we imagined—we feel cheated, as if we’ve been sold something defective.
But there’s a category of experiences that operate under entirely different logic. Their value isn’t in the pleasure they provide while you’re having them. It’s in what they do to you afterward.
Think about the worst job you ever had. Maybe it was the one where your boss micromanaged every decision, where you felt trapped and undervalued, where Sunday nights filled you with dread. You probably fantasized about quitting daily. And yet, years later, you might find yourself grateful for it in a way that surprises you. Not because the experience itself was good—it wasn’t—but because it taught you what you won’t tolerate, what you’re capable of enduring, and what you actually need to thrive. It gave you a kind of knowledge that no amount of reading or advice could have provided.
The same pattern shows up everywhere. The injury that forces you to rebuild your fitness from scratch teaches you more about your body than a decade of smooth training ever could. The friendship that ends badly shows you which red flags you’d been ignoring and why. The project that fails spectacularly reveals gaps in your thinking that success would have left hidden. The breakup that devastates you eventually becomes the thing that taught you who you actually are when everything comfortable gets stripped away.
These experiences have no value while they’re happening. That’s what makes them different from challenges we choose—the marathon we train for, the difficult book we struggle through, the skill we work to master. Those challenges are hard, but we can usually sense their value even in the middle of the difficulty. We feel ourselves improving. We can imagine the finish line.
But the experiences I’m talking about offer no such consolation in the moment. They just hurt. They feel like pure loss, pure waste, pure suffering with no compensating insight. You’re not getting stronger while you’re in them. You’re just surviving.
The strengthening happens later, often so gradually you don’t notice it. You find yourself in a new difficult situation and realize you’re not as frightened as you would have been before. You face a setback and discover you know how to keep going in a way you didn’t used to. You encounter someone manipulative and recognize the patterns instantly, where once you would have been confused for months. The difficult experience didn’t give you anything at the time. It gave you something to carry forward.
This doesn’t mean we should seek out suffering or romanticize hardship. The Instagram culture of “growth mindset” and “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” can be its own kind of toxic, suggesting that if you’re not grateful for your trauma, you’re doing recovery wrong. That’s not what I’m arguing for. Some experiences are just bad, period. Some cause damage that doesn’t make you stronger, just damaged. And even the difficult experiences that do eventually strengthen you are still experiences you would have been justified in wishing you could avoid.
But once you’re on the other side of something hard, once enough time has passed that you can think about it without flinching, it’s worth asking what you’re carrying forward from it. Not because you owe the experience gratitude, but because you owe yourself the fullest possible use of what you’ve survived.The strange thing is that this kind of value—the value that comes from being made stronger—is often invisible until you need it. You don’t feel particularly transformed by the difficult year until you’re in a new difficult situation and realize you know how to endure it. You don’t realize how much the bad relationship taught you until you’re in a good one and can recognize the difference. The strengthening sits dormant, waiting for circumstances that call on it.
This is why it’s so hard to believe, in the middle of something terrible, that it might eventually have value. Because that value isn’t there yet. It can’t be there yet. It only comes into existence through time and distance and the test of new circumstances. You can’t speed it up or force it. You can only get through the experience and then, later, pay attention to what you’ve become.Some experiences give you joy, insight, pleasure, or peace while you’re having them. Those are the experiences we seek out, and rightly so. But some experiences only give you their value on the far side, in the form of a stronger, wiser, more resilient version of yourself. You can’t love them while they’re happening. You can only, eventually, recognize what they made possible.
