This post fits the category of: lessons from the trail with relevance to normal life. Today, the topic is ’embrace the suck,’ a ubiquitous trail aphorism with relevance for this day. In ordinary circumstances, rain poses little nuisance. I’ve gotten a lot of rain on this trail and never much minded it. But constant soaking is an example of suck.
The day’s review
Yesterday’s tent flooding episode truly sucked. Though less severe, today was another opportunity to practice positivity instead of complaint (this is indeed the point of this post lest you grow bored of reading and switch to a different tab. Our attention spans have become tragically short.) Anyways, the rain started as I left camp, pouring off my nose and soaking my clothes that were not dry anyways – the consensus of those of the shelter is the nighttime fog made everyone’s clothes wetter. Once the rain stopped, it was warm enough that sweat took the place of rain, dripping from my face. My pack was heavy from the dampness of everything in it. At low elevations, the trail was a swamp swarming with mosquitoes. Most of the trail was running or filled with standing water from weeks of major rain. Where there was rock, it could not be trusted for its slipperiness. Objectively, all of this kind of sucked.
Consistent with all my writing, I wish not overdramatize or dwell on the challenges. But I will make clear the difficulty of a thru-hike. A weekend backpacking trip is basically just fun. Even if something goes wrong, it’s a short walk back to the car. It is a relaxing escape from regular life. On a thru-hike, regular life becomes the backpacking, while towns are the escape.
Why embracing the suck works
On this day, having just escaped to town for 11 days, I felt excited to face trail adversity again. One thing about ’embrace the suck’ is that as a mantra, it sets lower expectations. There’s relevant research I can’t easily cite right now that describes happiness as largely a function of expectation versus reality. If you expect a drenching and a swarming by mosquitoes, these become minor nuisances if experienced. Yet if you always expect transcendence, when transcendence comes, it is little appreciated, and ordinary challenges become entrenched woe.
Perhaps even better, ’embrace the suck’ rejects any unneeded pressure to cheer up or be happy. We all like to be happy but do not always live in a conducive circumstance. On the May 23 episode of The Ezra Klein Show, Lisa Damour spoke about the societal tendency to over-pathologize anxiety and sadness. Lisa argued that anxiety and sadness are normal, even beneficial when experienced in their proper context. There seem to be a lot of people now who get anxious over feeling anxious or sad at all. Lisa found this quite unhealthy. At the same time, there is a pathology of anxiety and depression that is real and treatable.
Others prevalent cultural elements do not help. People suppress tears at the funeral of a loved one and then head back to work, never submitting to lamentation. Companies sell products to eliminate pain points, and we buy them up, buying also the idea that any pain point is a problem to be fixed rather than a challenge we are tough enough to face.
So l embrace the implicit reminder in ’embrace the suck’ that suckiness exists, both on the trail and in real life, and counterintuitively makes life more vibrant and worthwhile. As stated at the beginning, I usually write little about challenges because I try to avoid complaint. Being on trail is a privilege. But it can also suck. The ’embrace the suck’ mindset helped make objectively sucky events into challenges I legitimately enjoyed.
This feels broadly true about the state of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania’s section of the Appalachian trail in one word, sucks. But I feel a gratitude about it now I didn’t feel in the moment. Thus, I also posted my Pennsylvania reflection today, beginning the process of catching up on middle state journaling.
