The Key to Enduring Hardship

There is a lesson in every challenging period of our lives, parallel to our lives themselves.

Stephen Reza
3 min readFeb 2, 2022
Photo by Charlie Hammond on Unsplash

The key is identifying what that lesson is, learning and absorbing the lesson as quickly and completely as possible, and ultimately moving forward with that increased knowledge.

That’s all fairly straightforward, and in most cases, easier said than done.

Recently I have experienced some financial setbacks.

This has illustrated to me how much of my self-esteem I have allowed to based on finances and monetary success. While I didn’t consciously think that this was the case, or at least not aware of it, in fact, I’ve tried hard to not do so. And yet, the situation I find myself in has brought to my attention that I am, in fact, still doing it.

Now that I have become aware of this, now I have to deal with it as quickly as possible.

We identify ourselves by what we do for a living. I think it’s a mistake — a fallacy — to try to pigeonhole yourself. Earning a living is a necessity, but it seems like a missed opportunity to hinge so much of our identities and self-esteem on how much money we earn.

It’s one of the great crimes of capitalism to reduce human life to a dollar value and we have been…

--

--

Stephen Reza

A multifaceted author whose work explores the realms of weird, speculative fiction—blending cosmic horror, occult mystery, and sci-fi.