We don’t want to suffer — we hate it, in fact. Yet it is suffering that often brings personal improvement. Not all pain is beneficial, obviously. But researchers have consistently found that most survivors of illness and loss experience “post-traumatic growth.” Not only do many people find a greater emotional maturity after suffering; they are even better prepared to help others deal with their pain. That is why after a loss we turn for comfort to those who have endured a similar loss.

Sages throughout history have relished the enigma that pleasure is undefined without suffering. In the words of Carl Jung: “There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” The Tao Te Ching extends the metaphor: “Difficult and easy accomplish each other, long and short form each other, high and low distinguish each other.”

At the extreme, it is the fearsome specter of death that helps us understand life. A dear friend of mine was told he would not survive more than a year after a late-stage cancer diagnosis. This was a fairly morose guy by nature, and this prognosis might logically have sunk him further into his natural melancholia. Instead, he vowed to remember that every day might be his last, and live whatever life he had left to the fullest. By some miracle, he survived a year, then another, and then 18 more. His doctor still says the cancer will ultimately be back at some point — the wolf is always at the door — but he is happy and grateful for waking up when he did, and living for decades as if he was enjoying his last few months.

My friend achieved greater consciousness by staring down his death. He did so by necessity, however, and not by choice. Indeed, most people who find the benefits of fear and pain do so against their will. In contrast, a true individualist — a nonconformist to his or her own natural impulses — consciously accepts suffering for the benefit it brings. How?

I have met Buddhist monks in Thailand who purposely confront the fear of their inevitable deaths through daily contemplation of photos of corpses in various stages of decay. Some young Mormon men and women voluntarily suffer through separation from their beloved families for up to two years during their missions to test their own mettle and cement their commitment to God. And in this season of Lent, hundreds of millions of Catholics are pondering their own inadequacies and inviting discomfort through abstinence and fasting. In a postmodern era, where death is taboo, pain is pointless, and sin is a cultural anachronism, what could be more rebellious?