I came across Cioran late one Thursday night.

During that period, my calendar was arranged like a game of Tetris—every time slot had a purpose, every gap stuffed with a to-do item. On my Notion board, the projects in progress were neatly arranged, each card with a deadline, sorted by color labels. From the outside, I was a well-functioning system.

But the person inside the system hadn’t felt anything in a long time.

Not sadness. Sadness, at least, is a feeling. It was something vaguer—like driving too long on the highway, your eyes open but seeing nothing. You know you’re moving, but you’re not sure why.

Then I opened On the Heights of Despair.

A Bucket of Cold Water

Cioran’s words have no warmth—or rather, their temperature is below freezing.

He doesn’t comfort you. He doesn’t encourage you. He doesn’t tell you tomorrow will be better. He doesn’t even tell you what to do. He just describes, with an almost cruel precision, the things you’ve been avoiding all along: life may genuinely be meaningless. Your busyness may merely be a more sophisticated form of escape. All your plans and goals may simply be filling a hole that can never be filled.

The first reaction to reading something like this is anger. At the time I thought: is this guy sick? The whole world is trying to live better, and here you are writing nihilistic nonsense?

But when I woke up the next morning, I found myself thinking about his words. Not “thinking through” them—thinking about them, in that involuntary way, like a stone sinking to the bottom of the water.

Then I realized: I hadn’t had that kind of involuntary thinking in a long time. All my thinking had a purpose—to solve a problem, to plan the next step, to produce content. The reason Cioran’s words struck me was that they triggered a capacity I had nearly forgotten: thinking without purpose.

When Suffering Becomes a System Error

In our age, pain is treated as a bug.

Anxious? Go meditate. Depressed? Go exercise. Lost? Take a course. Can’t sleep? Adjust your sleep hygiene. Every negative state has a corresponding solution, just like a troubleshooting manual: encounter problem A, execute step B, restore to normal state C.

I myself was a faithful practitioner of this mindset. When my startup hit a wall, I didn’t allow myself to stay discouraged for long—quickly analyze the cause, adjust the strategy, start over. When the team had conflicts, I didn’t allow emotions to ferment—quickly call a meeting, clear up the misunderstanding, set down rules. Even the low points of my personal life were handled with the same method: write down three things to be grateful for, do ten minutes of deep breathing, then keep pushing through the to-do list.

Efficiency. Efficiency. Efficiency.

Cioran showed me the blind spot of this system: if all pain must be repaired, then we lose the ability to understand pain.

There are things inside pain that you can’t see when you’re rushing to fix it. It’s like taking a film negative out of the darkroom and rushing to expose it—the image is ruined. Some things need to develop slowly in the dark.

The Clarity of Despair

Cioran writes about despair not because he worships it.

His logic goes like this: most people live within a set of default answers—life has meaning, effort will be rewarded, good is repaid with good, tomorrow will be better. These answers aren’t wrong, but they are defaults. You haven’t genuinely tested them. You merely inherited them, then built your life on top of them.

And despair—the moment of truly facing “life may be meaningless”—does the work of tearing down all those default answers. You stand on a field of ruins, with nothing.

And then?

And then you begin to truly choose. Not because “everyone does it this way,” not because “you should.” But because, after seeing clearly that everything may be meaningless, you still decide: this is how I want to live.

This kind of choice—one made after passing through despair—has a completely different texture from a choice made by someone who has never experienced despair. The former is lucid; the latter is inertia.

My theological training gives me a deep resonance with this point. There is a tradition in the Christian faith called “the dark night of the soul”—the kind of experience St. John of the Cross described: God seems to have vanished entirely, prayer goes unanswered, faith becomes a desert. Many saints have passed through this dark night. And the theological tradition tells us: the dark night is not a failure of faith, but a deepening of it. Because only after all the familiar supports have disappeared do you discover what you truly believe.

Cioran was not a Christian. But the “clarity at the heights of despair” he describes runs in striking parallel with the logic of the dark night of the soul.

The Inner Deficit of the Efficiency Age

Let me bring this discussion back to a more everyday level.

We live in an age of extraordinarily developed external order. Technology can optimize your time, AI can automate your decisions, apps can quantify your health. Everything can be tracked, measured, improved.

But what about inner order?

Observing myself and the entrepreneurs and operators around me, I’ve noticed a widespread phenomenon: the more efficient the external, the more chaotic the internal. The fuller the calendar, the deeper the question of “why am I doing all this” gets pushed down. The higher the productivity, the lower the sense of existence.

This is what I call the “inner deficit.” Your external system runs smoothly, but the person inside has racked up a huge debt—a need for meaning, a need for quiet, a need for “simply existing without doing anything.”

The reason Cioran’s book continues to be read in an age that worships efficiency is precisely that it strikes at this deficit. It offers no action plan that can be dropped into Notion. It only says: your pain is real. Your emptiness is sending a signal—it is not a bug to be cleared away.

Suffering as a Developing Agent

Suffering lets you see what you are truly attached to.

In good times, you feel independent, strong, capable of handling anything. But that may only be because nothing has truly been taken from you yet.

I went through several very painful failures in my entrepreneurial journey. Once, when I was almost ready to give up, I discovered that my anxiety wasn’t coming from “the company might fold,” but from “if I’m not a successful entrepreneur, who am I?”

That question stopped me cold. Because it revealed something I didn’t want to admit: I had tied my self-worth to business achievement. Not consciously—I had tied it without realizing. And suffering—the pain of failure—was the only thing that could let me see that rope.

Cioran would say: exactly. The meaning of pain comes from its reality, regardless of whether it’s good or bad. It is the developing agent of existence. The things that are blurry in good times—what you truly fear, what you truly rely on, where your values actually stand—surface clearly only in the chemical reaction of pain.

In Faith Gives You No Immunity, I discussed a similar experience: faith won’t spare you from suffering, but it can keep you from losing your direction within it. Cioran believed in no religion, but his observations on suffering overlap with theology’s understanding of it—both refuse to reduce suffering to a problem that needs to be eliminated.

The Courage to Dwell in the Low Point

Many people ask: how do I get out of a slump?

Cioran might counter: why are you in such a hurry to get out?

A low point has something of its own to tell you. If you rush to flee, single-mindedly bent on returning to normal, you may miss the scenery that can only be seen in the valley.

I later developed a habit: when I hit a low point, I give myself a stretch of time “in no hurry to repair.” It might be an afternoon, it might be a whole day. No analyzing causes, no drawing up plans, no seeking someone to confide in. Just letting the feeling be there. Watching how it wants to move on its own.

Sometimes it leaves on its own. Sometimes it brings out a thought I hadn’t expected. Sometimes it does nothing at all, just keeps me company for an afternoon. But even if nothing happens, that stillness itself has value. Because in an age when every blank is filled in, the blank itself is a form of resistance.

Don’t Rush to Light a False Lamp

I wouldn’t recommend Cioran to everyone. His words are too dense, too heavy, too unforgiving. For some people, they might be a wound rather than a help.

But he taught me one thing: in the darkness, don’t rush to light a false lamp.

What is a false lamp? It’s the things used to quickly dispel discomfort—inspirational quotes, positive-energy slogans, the hollow assurance that “everything will be okay.” These things can sometimes get you through the moment, but more often what they do is make you pretend the darkness doesn’t exist—rather than actually illuminate it.

True light is what you begin to see after staying in the dark long enough, when your eyes slowly adjust and faint outlines emerge. Those outlines may be your true longings, your suppressed questions, the choices you’ve been avoiding. They are dim, far from clear, but they are real.

We’ve put enormous effort into building external systems—technology, institutions, industries. But without a stable interior, these are just buildings suspended in midair. Where is the foundation? Inside the person who makes the decisions.

To open your eyes at the heights of despair is so that, on the way back down, you can walk more steadily and see more clearly. Because you already know what darkness looks like. It’s not as terrifying as you imagined.