The subtle act of not giving a fuck

something, they were able to endure it, or perhaps even enjoy it.
If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable,
then the question we should be asking is not “ How do I stop
suffering?” but “ Why am I suffering—for what purpose?”
Hiroo Onoda returned to Japan in 1974 and became a kind of
celebrity in his home country. He was shuttled around from talk show
to radio station; politicians clamored to shake his hand; he published
a book and was even offered a large sum of money by the government.
But what he found when he returned to Japan horrified him: a
consumerist, capitalist, superficial culture that had lost all of the
traditions of honor and sacrifice upon which his generation had been
raised.
Onoda tried to use his sudden celebrity to espouse the values of
Old Japan, but he was tone-deaf to this new society. He was seen more
as a showpiece than as a serious cultural thinker—a Japanese man who
had emerged from a time capsule for all to marvel at, like a relic in a
museum.
And in the irony of ironies, Onoda became far more depressed than
he’d ever been in the jungle for all those years. At least in the jungle
his life had stood for something; it had meant something. That had
made his suffering endurable, indeed even a little bit desirable. But
back in Japan, in what he considered to be a vacuous nation full of
hippies and loose women in Western clothing, he was confronted with
the unavoidable truth: that his fighting had meant nothing. The Japan
he had lived and fought for no longer existed. And the weight of this
realization pierced him in a way that no bullet ever had. Because his
suffering had meant nothing, it suddenly became realized and true:
thirty years wasted.
And so, in 1980, Onoda packed up and moved to Brazil, where he
remained until he died.