The best thing you can do in life is to give up without quitting. It might seem like a paradox, however giving up and quitting are two different concepts.
Giving up means to stop making an effort, or to admit to yourself that you are defeated, while quitting means to leave a place usually permanently. To quit life when it gets hard means to die or kill yourself, to give up on life means to stop trying to control and micromanage things.
Failure, pain and death are unavoidable for everybody at the end of the day what choice does a human being has other than play the game being fully aware that it all leads to nothing, and his inevitable demise.
However if you are aware of this facts how can you enjoy life and ever be contempt, so far we found all kind of ways to deny reality to soften the blow of life with fiction. One of the most efficient way we used in the past was religion.
By introducing the idea of a miracle which is a way to deny failure and pain, or the concept of life after death in another dimension which is a way to deny death.
Pain is like hunger, it is a very strong impulse almost impossible to resist, if you are hungry but you have food available you are not going to resist for to long without eating. If you are in pain you can maybe endure it a little bit but you will eventually deny it somehow with whatever tools you have available.
The only way to stop the denial is to don't be in pain, but if you don't deny reality you have to look at it for what it really is, and that is painful.
Being completely out of denial is a characteristic of a God not a human being, the same way honesty it is impossible to fully accomplish by a human.
The root of sufferance is not desire it is life itself, if you are alive you are going to suffer. Desire is just the necessary drive that push us to accomplish and acquire things. Even choosing to live a simple and spiritual life or to become enlightened, you are still motivated by desire, you desire to acquire knowledge and achieve bliss. It is impossible to live without desire, so it is impossible to live life without pain.
Pain comes from loss, the more you have the more you have to lose, so the more anxiety you have. We are really design to live with scarcity like all the other animals, without to much certainty, when you don't have nothing the only thing you can lose is your life, so there is not much anxiety about losing anything else.
If you want a happy life, a life in which you are happy while functional, you have to give up on everything. Things like relationships or comfort etc. but not quit them.
