Steadily, for the long haul, without burning out

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Many factors are involved in finding the cause, but we don’t recognize them. We obsess over a definite cause, stick to a once-built mental frame, and can’t let go of the expectation that there must be a clear answer not just for what actually happened but also in our relationships. The world that people deeply absorbed in religion or politics see is exactly like that.
Looking at it this way, complex problems like the human heart, relationships, and life decisions are hard to pin to a single definite cause or a clear-cut diagnosis. The deeper you dig for the cause, the more you sink into a swamp of thought, and the more often you flail your foot and end up stepping into danger. So it might be better to ponder what to do rather than to figure out the reason.
Many people don’t want to admit it, but when difficulty hits in life, it’s usually hard to find a definite cause. More often than not, the whole situation ends without our really knowing. So if a clear answer or cause pops into your head too quickly, in fact it’s usually not the right answer but rather a possibility you simply want to believe. That’s why you have to be even more careful. People often say life is a complex equation. It’s a fine metaphor, but I disagree. The word ‘equation’ suggests it’s a problem you can solve, and that you’re only failing to solve it because you lack ability. It’s more appropriate to just say ‘I don’t really know.’ And that kind of thinking makes you humble.
Here’s a story from my intern days, in the operating room of a stomach-cancer surgery. When the surgical professor opened the patient’s abdomen, he found cancer cells widely spread.
In a case like this, surgery is meaningless. The best you can do is chemotherapy or adjuvant radiation; there’s no other way to save the patient. It was a heartbreaking situation, and the surgery should have been stopped, but the professor suddenly began the operation. With the words, “We’ve got to at least let him eat.” Whatever the cause, no matter how bad the situation got, the judgment of a surgeon with long clinical experience was to do the best we could.
Yes. When you hit a complex, blocked situation, instead of just shutting things down or sitting down in defeat, you need an attitude like “we’ve got to at least let him eat.” You focus on problems that are currently solvable. Not the mindset of perfectly identifying the cause and perfectly solving the problem, but the attitude of doing something, anything, and as you work through it, you can also better grasp the cause of the problem. It’s changing the priority of your thoughts. Rather than solving a problem cleanly and perfectly, the attitude of working hard to bring it down to a level you can respond to and accept is more important when you’re working. Doing your best within what you can do right now is the realistic best, and the ideal next-best.
The problems of life don’t have a single answer, nor a single cause. The worries of life may not be a higher-order equation that can ultimately be solved, but more like a Zen koan that has no answer to begin with. From that angle, holding the mindset that there is no perfect answer and choosing one of several “not bad” options is in fact the better way to make a better choice.


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Jin-soo had always been described by everyone around him as a nice person. Even if someone stepped on his foot or spilled coffee on his new clothes, he didn’t get angry; he’d smile and say it was fine. He’d been raised since childhood with the lesson that getting angry at others is what petty people do. He’d never raised his voice at a clerk in a restaurant or department store, and even when a business partner made a ridiculous mistake he’d hold it in and respond gently. It was thanks to a strong belief that he should not be a petty person but a good one.
As I listened to his story, I was reminded of Mark Twain’s words: “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.” If acid sits long enough, it dissolves the vessel. Anger is the same. Jin-soo’s problem stemmed from excessive guilt about getting angry, and the value system that told him he must not.
As living creatures, our own survival has to come first, and getting angry is, on an instinctive level, a necessary response. Even a small dog out for a walk, when a stranger reaches to pet it because it’s “cute,” will bark loudly and bare its teeth. Humans are far bigger and stronger than the dog. But if it barks first like that, the human won’t pet it. To the dog, the stranger’s touch is a danger signal, and to protect itself it barks loudly, bares its teeth, and shows aggression. The aim is not to fight to the death.
Likewise, aggression—that is, anger—is an animal instinct and serves the function of defense to protect the self. To eat and live, to keep one’s rank in the group or to climb to a higher rank for greater safety, to gain advantage in mating, to protect one’s territory—expressing aggression operates in survival terms.
Freud described two instinctual drives in humans: the sexual energy he called libido, and aggression. That’s how deeply aggression is built into us. Even so, the reason we fear expressing aggression is the overwhelming worry that once we start letting anger out, we may not be able to control ourselves, and in worse cases, we may run all the way to the end and destroy everything. This is explained as the suppression of an excessive superego. The superego, which plays the role of an internal police officer, ends up over-functioning, and at some point, the basic value system “I must never get angry under any circumstance” or “I’m not that kind of person” takes over.

And so, expressing legitimate anger comes to feel un-like-yourself. The aggression that naturally arises within is strongly suppressed by the superego, and the arrow gets turned around toward your own core. In the end, you define yourself as “a worthless me, a pushover who can’t even handle this one thing,” and that wounds you even more inside. Freud described depression as “aggression turned inward.” It’s a situation where, unable to fire the gun outward, you fire it into yourself, and in the end your inner self gets shredded.
Jin-soo’s symptoms of difficulty breathing and heartburn were the result of unexpressed anger scratching away inside. To people like Jin-soo, who fear getting angry, the first thing I’d like to tell them is that it’s natural for a person to feel anger. And that’s simply an animal instinct—feeling angry doesn’t mean you’ll lose control of yourself and run wild.
One thing to clearly distinguish is that “feeling angry” and “getting angry” are completely different. Just because anger is bubbling up inside doesn’t mean you’ll immediately blow up and run wild. Of course, when you’re young, you might. A five-year-old in a store, when their parents won’t buy a toy, may lie down on the floor and cry. But as you grow older, you develop the ability to regulate your own energy, and you don’t go ballistic over most things. In fact, putting too tight a muzzle on yourself out of fear of losing control—and sealing things off entirely—may be more dangerous.
If you feel that you’re about to explode with anger, first picture a traffic light. When you’re driving and the red light comes on, you have to step on the brakes and stop. You wait for about a minute and think.
Should I keep going forward, or turn? We’re not living in a jungle. Instinctive anger pops out in situations where a predator or competitor is coming at you. But in real life, situations where you have to flee or fight back within a single second, like an animal in the jungle, are almost nonexistent. A danger light has merely come on. Imagine you’re hugely angry from animal instinct, but you’re inside a car, on a road and not in the jungle. With the red light on, take a moment to think about where you are now and which direction is best to go. You just watch, for less than a minute, until the light changes color. Then when the yellow light comes on and turns green, you slowly accelerate and head where you’re going.
At that point you can drive, like the other cars, on the road you need to be on, at your own speed. Two words to recall at this timing: ‘moderately’ and ‘appropriately.’
If it’s a situation where you really must get angry, then yes, get angry. But change ‘getting angry’ to ‘expressing anger.’ Getting angry is easily seen as letting an emotion show or doing something physical. But ‘expressing’ means using language to organize and present your emotion. “I think this is unfair,” “I don’t want to do this work”—you grasp the reason for your anger yourself and put the problem points into words. It’s not a sharing-feelings kind of speech, but a way of conveying your stance and request to the other party regarding the issue that triggered the feeling.
Refusing or saying “no” is both a right and a duty for protecting yourself. If, after holding everything in, you suddenly burst into tears or scream and quit your job, you might think the others will go “ah, you must have been having a hard time.” But in general, it’s far more likely you’ll just hear, “What’s wrong with that person?” People aren’t that interested in others. Most only know your usual attitude and reactions; few have actually empathized with how hard you’ve had it. So expressing your feelings little by little in normal times, and pointing out unfairness, is the way to protect yourself.
Feeling anger is a human instinct, and you can only protect yourself if you adopt the attitude of expressing it at appropriate, moderate levels in normal times. That doesn’t mean an ‘overall pretty decent person’ will flip 180 degrees into ‘the lunatic of the neighborhood.’ You don’t need to worry about that.

Rather than letting just anyone touch you, then biting their hand off when you can’t take it anymore, like the dog—wouldn’t it be better to subtly back away when they approach, or bark to let them know you don’t want to be touched? Drawing the line about what you like and dislike, and how far you can endure, is something you have to do yourself; no one else can do it for you. The function that does this is the anger response. Anger functions as your protector; if you suppress it because dealing with it scares you, and bury it deep down, in the end it corrodes you from the inside.
Both getting angry and suppressing anger require a lot of energy. We unconsciously perceive that if anger explodes, it carries energy strong enough not just to destroy yourself but also to ruin relationships and shatter the world. We exhaust our energy suppressing that imagined fear, and end up feeling we have no strength left to live. Now we have to redirect that energy elsewhere. To something productive and helpful for ourselves. Recognizing the feeling of anger as a natural phenomenon, expressing it moderately and appropriately, and using the energy we used to spend on suppression on things that help us—that is the best way to protect yourself while you work.