Why suffering alone isn’t wisdom, and what turns it into one
The car was a Mercury Topaz we called the Blue Bomber. The bumper was duct-taped on and wood-screwed to the body. The radio didn’t work. This was before modern cell phones, so there was no workaround, no Bluetooth, no podcast, no Spotify queue to fill the silence.
I was in my twenties, and I drove that car ninety minutes each way between my place and my parents’ house. An hour and a half of nothing but the windshield, the road, and whatever was in my head.
I didn’t choose that silence. I couldn’t afford a better car. There was no option to avoid it. So I sat with it. And over hundreds of hours of forced quiet, something got built in me that I wouldn’t recognize for almost twenty years: the ability to be alone with my own thoughts and not flinch.
My uncle and I call it “windshield time.” I didn’t know it had a name until he gave it one.
If Everything Is Bold, Nothing Is Bold
A friend has a design principle I keep borrowing for things that have nothing to do with design: when you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing.
It’s a statement about contrast. In design, bold only works because most of the page isn’t. The emphasis depends on the de-emphasis. Take the contrast away and the whole thing goes flat.
Life works the same way.
I was driving to a speaking engagement when I called a close friend. The call was supposed to be a check-in. It turned into hours.
At some point, we landed on something I’ve been thinking about since at least September 2025, when I wrote it on a thought card after listening to Jimmy Carr and Chris Williamson on the Modern Wisdom podcast:
“If you’re happy with you today you’ve got to be happy w/ everything that’s happened to this point because this is what makes me today, me.”
I’d added a note underneath: “You truly need the downs. They create the full story.”
We were circling the same idea from a different angle. The valleys in life aren’t just things you survive. They’re what give the peaks their altitude. Without contrast, there’s no height. Without the downs, the ups are just a flat line.
If everything is a peak, nothing is a peak.
The Highlight Reel Problem
We talked about social media, the way everyone projects their peak moments. Curated snapshots of the highs. Nobody posts the valleys.
The paradox is that this makes everyone feel more isolated, not less. When all you see are other people’s highlights, you start comparing your behind-the-scenes to their showreel. The contrast between your real life and their projected life creates a gap that feels personal but is actually structural. Everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s feeling it. Nobody’s talking about it.
What we kept coming back to was this: the more people know about your down moments, the more relatable you become. Empathy doesn’t grow from admiring someone’s peaks. It grows from recognizing their valleys, and seeing your own reflected in them.
My best today is an accumulation of everything that’s come before me. The bad decisions. The crazy years. The valleys. All of it. If you’re happy with who I am as a person today, you need to be willing and comfortable accepting all of the bad and crazy things I did in my younger years, because all of those things shaped who I am.
The question is whether you’re willing to let people see the full picture.
Willingness and Ability
I used to think the bottleneck was willingness, that people simply chose not to be vulnerable. But it’s more nuanced than that.
My wife sometimes says, “You can’t share the reality because then people will judge us or think differently of us.” She’s not wrong. She’s been divorced. In her previous marriage, what she thought was mutual trust was weaponized against her. Her vulnerability was used as ammunition. That’s not an irrational fear. It’s a learned lesson from a real valley.
Her valley taught her to protect herself. My valleys taught me to sit with myself. Same mechanism, different lessons. And if I’m going to hold the principle that who we are today is shaped by everything that came before, including the bad, then I have to extend that grace to her too. Her caution isn’t a flaw. It’s the product of her experience, just as my openness is the product of mine.
But there’s another category entirely. We talked about people who’ve lived sheltered lives, people who haven’t experienced real lows because they were insulated from them. The “Karens” of the world aren’t always mean-spirited. Sometimes they simply lack exposure to valleys. They’ve never been in the depths, so they can’t recognize them in others. Empathy requires a reference point, and they don’t have one.
So the bottleneck isn’t just willingness. It’s sometimes ability, a capacity that was never built because the raw material was never provided.
Teaching Is Not Learning
Here’s the distinction that keeps sharpening for me: you can teach someone that silence and self-reflection are valuable. You can explain the concept, share the framework, make the case. But they don’t learn it until they experience it.
I can teach you about windshield time. But until you’ve sat in a car with no radio for ninety minutes and discovered what your mind does when there’s nowhere to hide, you haven’t learned it. The valley is where learning happens. Not because suffering is inherently educational (it’s not) but because forced constraint strips away your ability to avoid yourself.
The Blue Bomber didn’t teach me self-reflection because it was a good teacher. It taught me because I had no alternative. The radio was broken. The phone didn’t exist yet. There was nothing between me and my own thoughts.
I wrote in a previous essay that “application will be messy” and “that’s where the actual learning happens” (Understanding vs. Doing). Same principle, different frame. You can understand vulnerability intellectually. You can agree that authenticity matters. But you don’t learn it until you’re in the valley with no way out except through.
Could someone develop this capacity through intentional practice, Path 3, the adult path of gradually choosing silence? I think so. But it requires a self-discipline most people don’t have, especially for something with no visible payoff for years. I’m 48. It wasn’t until five to ten years ago that I started to realize how valuable those windshield moments were. That’s a twenty-year delay between the experience and the insight.
The valleys sharpen you faster because you can’t opt out. Intentional practice is slower because you can always quit.
Two Ingredients
So here’s what this conversation crystallized. A valley alone isn’t enough. Suffering alone doesn’t become wisdom. It becomes trauma, or bitterness, or just a bad memory you’d rather not revisit.
Two ingredients are required for a valley to become something generative:
The valley itself, a forced constraint you didn’t choose and can’t avoid. The Blue Bomber. The broken radio. The difficult season you couldn’t fast-forward through. The valley provides the raw experience of sitting with yourself.
The namer, someone who helps you see what the valley built in you. My uncle named windshield time. He didn’t just let me have the experience. He reflected it back to me. He said, in effect, “That thing you’ve been doing in that beat-up car? That’s not just driving. That’s something valuable.”
Without the valley, there’s nothing to name. But without the namer, the valley is just suffering you survived. It doesn’t become wisdom until someone helps you see what it built.
My friend is a namer. Hours on the phone isn’t just conversation. It’s two people naming each other’s valleys and saying, “Yeah, that thing you went through? That’s part of what makes you who you are.” The valleys are where the teaching happens. Not the peaks.
The Namer Needs a Namer
Here’s where the principle turns recursive.
I’ve been playing the namer role without fully recognizing it. In speaking. In deep conversations. In the way I show up with close friends. I look at someone’s valley and try to name what it built in them.
But I didn’t name that role for myself. It took this conversation, this dialogue, working through these threads, for someone to say back to me, “That thing you’re doing? That’s important. There’s a name for it.”
Even the namer needs a namer.
I wrote about the Watchman Principle, Ezekiel’s commission to speak what he sees, regardless of whether anyone listens (The Watchman Principle). The watchman watches and warns. That’s a form of naming. You see something clearly and you say it out loud so others can see it too.
But Ezekiel sat in silence for seven days after his commission, “overwhelmed among them.” Even with a direct call, he needed time to process before he spoke. Maybe he needed someone to name his role for him too.
The namer’s role isn’t self-evident. You can live it for years without seeing it. The person who helps others recognize what their valleys built still needs someone to reflect that pattern back.
Honoring Accountability
There’s one more piece to this, and it has to do with how valleys get processed, or don’t.
When you’re wrong as a child, the adults around you respond in one of two ways:
Honoring accountability: “You’re wrong, and I care about you enough to tell you, and you’re still safe here.” This teaches that being wrong is survivable. Even valuable. The correction builds trust.
Tearing-down accountability: “You’re wrong, and now I have leverage over you.” This teaches that being wrong is dangerous. The correction builds walls.
Whichever lesson you learn early becomes the lens through which you see vulnerability for the rest of your life. My wife learned the tearing-down version, not from childhood, but from a marriage where trust was weaponized. The sheltered “Karens” may have never been held accountable at all, which is its own kind of damage.
I wrote in Opening the Filters that the whole prerequisite chain for seeing clearly starts with self-confidence, “secure enough to be wrong without feeling diminished.” That security isn’t a personality trait. It’s built. You build it in Blue Bombers and windshield time and valleys you didn’t choose, but only if the people around you, at some point, named what those experiences were building instead of using them against you.
The namer doesn’t just name the valley. The namer names what the valley built. And that act of naming is itself a form of honoring accountability, saying, “You went through something hard, and here’s what it made you capable of.”
The Chain
So here’s the full sequence, as clearly as I can articulate it:
Forced constraint (the valley) → Windshield time (sitting with yourself) → Self-knowledge (discovering what’s actually in there) → Security (being okay with what you found) → Authenticity (sharing it without armor) → Deep connection (the kind that takes hours and doesn’t feel like enough)
Break any link and the chain fails. Skip the valley and there’s nothing to sit with. Skip the windshield time and you never meet yourself. Skip the security and vulnerability feels like exposure rather than connection. Skip the namer and you never realize what got built.
Most people break the chain early. Not because they’re weak. Because they never had a Blue Bomber. Or because the namers in their life were tearing down instead of honoring. Or because they learned, reasonably, that vulnerability gets weaponized.
The default in our culture is zero authenticity. I think the default should be more than zero. Not naive openness, not casting your valleys before people who will use them against you. But more than the curated highlight reel. More than the peak-only projection. More than the flatline of false completeness.
You’re never as good as your best games. You’re never as bad as your worst. Reality lives in the middle (Opening the Filters). And the middle is where the real connections happen, if you’re willing to let someone see it.
What valley are you sitting on that you haven’t let anyone name for you? And who in your life is waiting for you to name theirs?