In Fight Club, Ed Norton plays the unnamed insomniac white-collar narrator who is fed up with his comfortable Ikea-i-fied life. Feeling emasculated by modern norms, he and devil-may-care soapmaker Tyler Durden form an underground fight club for men. This club is primal; the men fight each other to reclaim the masculinity they feel like they’ve been stripped of in society.
Tyler speaks these words when he pours a chemical burn onto the narrator’s hands. The narrator tries to escape mentally, but Tyler forces him to stay present. This is the wake-up call the narrator needs to ditch the comfortable life he’s been trained to want and actually start living. After Tyler shows the narrator a similar burn on his own hand, he congratulates him on “being one step closer to hitting bottom” and being set free.
It’s a painful scene to watch, but it’s one worth noting. Here, the things are the narrator’s sense of identity, his masculinity, his freedom, his vitality – all of which he was missing in his former life. The sacrifice here is his physical comfort, and his pain here is growth.
In other words, you can’t achieve the things you truly value in life (i.e., a great relationship, an impressive career, an enviable body) without doing something different, stretching yourself outside of your comfort zone, going against the norms, or raising the stakes. Because Western culture has solved so many of the problems our ancestors had, an average life today may be chock full of convenience and comfort, but it’s often unfulfilling. You have to give of yourself, or sacrifice, first to receive because when you achieve that difficult goal or milestone (that so many people don’t bother to pursue), it will be earned. And that sweat equity means more than any external buyable reward or circumstance.
We all know this to be true. If this process were easy, we wouldn’t value the outcomes as much.
That’s not to say we humans want everything in life to be difficult. Going to Starbucks to grab a Venti Whatever should be easy. Ditto for going to the grocery store and buying fresh food. In fact, we as first-world citizens should be so lucky as to consider these things to be conveniences. Many people in underdeveloped countries do not have those luxuries, or even necessities.
So, for the reader who is in the throes of achieving something great and is doubting the process at all, open your eyes and feel the burn.
No pain, no gain.
