Over the last ten days I spent over 100 hours with legs crossed and eyes closed. No speaking, no reading, no writing, no technology, no distractions. Wake up at 4AM, sleep at 9PM. Two meals a day: one at 6:30AM and another at 11:00AM. Do your best to remain aware of bodily experience at all times.

More than half of these hours were spent sitting alone in a meditation cell. A meditation cell — if you’re unfamiliar — is a more charming way of saying ‘small, pitch black closet’. How small? 3 feet by 3 feet, give or take: barely enough room for a bum and a cushion. Besides a blanket to comfort yourself with, the most exciting thing about the space was a speaker on the ceiling corner from which an old Indian man with a thick accent repeated instructions for how to practice Vipassana meditation:

“Start again.” “Sweep your attention from head to toes; toes to head.” “Begin with the truth of annica — this, too, shall change.” “Observe reality as it is, not as you wish it to be.” “No me, no mine.”

If you are currently picturing a miserable young man sitting in the dark, legs tucked in an upright fetal position, you have the right idea. This was effectively solitary confinement — our justice system’s most malevolent idea for criminal retribution. God forbid anyone be truly alone with themselves for any significant amount of time.

Granted, this was voluntary and thus can’t technically be described as punishment. But when you spend that much time being tricked by your own mind, it doesn’t take much to convince you of damnation. That these 10 days are retribution for your accumulated sins. That somehow, someway, God really is punishing you.

Why would anyone do this to themselves? A lot of reasons, honestly: curiosity, desperation, maybe a little bit of masochism. The main one, though (for me at least), would be to find out why one suffers. How does unhappiness work? What are the mechanics of misery?

And why would it be helpful to know that? Because if you truly understand the root cause of your suffering, then you are just one step closer to its solution: stop the cause, stop the effect. How elegant and simple it appears on this page. But how painful and arduous it is to put into practice.

But that’s why this particular experiment can be so illuminating! Take away almost all pleasures and distractions for 240 hours straight, gather as much raw unhappiness data as possible, objectively analyze the information for patterns, and then triangulate on an explanation for your misery.

Luckily, I wasn’t starting these tests from scratch. I had some (a lot) of help. Seekers have been exploring the nature of suffering for millennia, perhaps longer. And some of them — most notably Siddhartha Gotama, the Buddha — have had the compassion to freely share their findings with the world.

Unfortunately, just reading their lab report is not enough. As you will soon find out, it’s impossible to intellectualize your way to peace, happiness and enlightenment. You must put in the work. The best these brave and wise trailblazers can do is to provide you with hypotheses. The rest is up to you: run the experiments; find out what’s true; dump the rest.

With that, allow me to share some of their hypotheses with you. Welcome to this Train of Thought.