Not to get too Rapunzel on a Wednesday morning, but for a moment imagine you are trapped inside a castle.

The key that would allow you to unlock the door and walk right out of the castle is inside a safe. The safe requires an eight-digit code to be opened.

That means there are just over 43 million possible combinations. Assuming it takes 10 seconds to try each one, it would take you just over 13.5 years to try every possible combination. That means if you had a son right before you were taken prisoner in the castle, you would potentially have to miss his bar mitzvah.

Plot twist #1, there is a billboard 100 hundred yards away with the safe-opening, eight-digit combination printed in bold red letters.

Plot twist #2, you are profoundly nearsighted and don’t have glasses with you.

Plot twist #3, there is a detailed manual and ample tooling + raw materials providing the blueprint for you to engineer the perfect pair of glasses that would ultimately allow you to see the combination written on the billboard, open the safe, retrieve the key, unlock the door, and escape to freedom.

It would take several weeks of hard work to construct said spectacles, but we can assume in this scenario that you are perfectly capable if you are willing to put in the time.

So, what would you do?

Now I can’t say what you (specifically) would actually do, but I studied economics in college, so I feel entitled to assume that a hypothetical person in this scenario is “rational.” I feel equally entitled to assume that said rational individual would choose the option of a certain escape in a few weeks rather than the potential for decades of near-certain incarceration (accounting for time spent sleeping to punctuate the days of failed safe opening attempts).

So why does any of this matter?

I would argue that all of us are faced with a version of this hypothetical every day of our lives. I would also argue that most of us opt to leave the glasses manual in the corner, curse the universe for our misfortune, and hope that we might instead simply stumble our way to success (the correct safe combination).

In this hypothetical scenario, we are trapped within the castle. Our suboptimal eyesight is the gating factor preventing a successful escape to freedom.

In reality, we are trapped within patterns of suffering. Suboptimal habits of perception and thought are the gating factors preventing a successful escape into a joyful and peaceful existence.

One potentially controversial implication of this line of thinking is that suffering is a choice.

I have met too many people in what many would consider to be “dire” circumstances who manage to salvage joy and peace for me to think otherwise.

I believe in the objectivity of stimuli. I don’t believe in the objectivity of perception of those stimuli.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

The reason that miserable people are miserable does not lie in their circumstances but rather in their perception of those circumstances.