Moving On: 26-Year-Old Reddit Co-Founder Aaron Swartz Has Died

I copy-pasted the news below from one of the wall postings I saw on my Facebook profile, which instantly caught my roving eye as I would go about my daily tasks for the day. I haven't really heard nor met Swartz who's being mentioned in the news. But I've encountered thru online means the Reddit website he co-created with some fellows. At such a relatively young age, he decided to end his life for reasons only known to him. My reading of the news got me recalling terrible memories of a very close friend who committted suicide when he turned 50 more than 2 years ago. I'm totally touched by the unspeakable thoughts being brought about by all these suicides that continue to take place in our midst, which happen just the same despite best efforts of some to stop the next one. I had been talking with another friend who was telling me on the phone about his suicidal thoughts and I had to garner all my best to distract him. Thankfully, he's kept away from pursuing those plans.

Who would really know the reasons why these individuals, some of whom were the most awesome fellows you'd ever meet in your life, committed suicide? Those who are left to continue living suffer the most, I suppose. And we would attempt to take baby steps in moving on from the overwhelming effects of these deaths, especially those who were really close to our hearts. Their memories would always be cherished with certain fondness and remembered for the way their kindred spirits have moved us when they were still around.

We note how these individuals who have committed suicides must have lived the last moments of their lives in pain, the kind of which we would not even bother to imagine because we'd rather run away from pain than bear it. It's interesting that Swartz wrote out his thoughts on coping with pain, the endurance of which, he believed and advocated, would make the individual undergoing pain to become stronger and better in due time. Regretfully, he didn't live long enough to test much longer the more practical applications of his pain-management theories that he must have been wanting to share to and be discussed by his captive readers.

In September, Swartz wrote one of the final posts on his blog titled Lean Into The Pain. It's an inspiring article about how to deal with both mental and phsyical hardships. Here's an excerpt:

When you first begin to exercise, it’s somewhat painful. Not wildly painful, like touching a hot stove, but enough that if your only goal was to avoid pain, you certainly would stop doing it. But if you keep exercising… well, it just keeps getting more painful. When you’re done, if you’ve really pushed yourself, you often feel exhausted and sore. And the next morning it’s even worse.

If that was all that happened, you’d probably never do it. It’s not that much fun being sore. Yet we do it anyway — because we know that, in the long run, the pain will make us stronger. Next time we’ll be able to run harder and lift more before the pain starts.

And knowing this makes all the difference. Indeed, we come to see the pain as a sort of pleasure — it feels good to really push yourself, to fight through the pain and make yourself stronger. Feel the burn! It’s fun to wake up sore the next morning, because you know that’s just a sign that you’re getting stronger.

Few people realize it, but psychological pain works the same way. Most people treat psychological pain like the hot stove — if starting to think about something scares them or stresses them out, they quickly stop thinking about it and change the subject.

The problem is that the topics that are most painful also tend to be the topics that are most important for us: they’re the projects we most want to do, the relationships we care most about, the decisions that have the biggest consequences for our future, the most dangerous risks that we run. We’re scared of them because we know the stakes are so high. But if we never think about them, then we can never do anything about them.

Ray Dalio writes:

It is a fundamental law of nature that to evolve one has to push one’s limits, which is painful, in order to gain strength—whether it’s in the form of lifting weights, facing problems head-on, or in any other way. Nature gave us pain as a messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we have exceeded, our limits in some way. At the same time, nature made the process of getting stronger require us to push our limits. Gaining strength is the adaptation process of the body and the mind to encountering one’s limits, which is painful. In other words, both pain and strength typically result from encountering one’s barriers. When we encounter pain, we are at an important juncture in our decision-making process.¹

Yes it’s painful, but the trick is to make that mental shift. To realize that the pain isn’t something awful to be postponed and avoided, but a signal that you’re getting stronger — something to savor and enjoy. It’s what makes you better.

Pretty soon, when you start noticing something that causes you psychic pain, you’ll get excited about it, not afraid. Ooh, another chance to get stronger. You’ll seek out things you’re scared of and intentionally confront them, because it’s an easy way to get the great rewards of self-improvement. Dalio suggests thinking of each one as a puzzle, inside of which is embedded a beautiful gem. If you fight through the pain to solve the puzzle, you unlock it and get to keep the gem.

The trick is: when you start feeling that psychological pain coming on, don’t draw back from it and cower — lean into it. Lean into the pain.

For more on Aaron's life and thoughts, here's his blog.


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/26-year-old-reddit-co-founder-aaron-swartz-has-died-2013-1#ixzz2HmeE2Pjg