The Madness of Carrying On
What drives us forward when everything tells us to stop?
Most stories hinge on a single obstacle—a dragon to slay, a storm to weather, a truth to uncover. There’s comfort in that structure. Progress. Resolution. But what if the story begins already broken? What if the hero knows the dragon can’t be slain, the storm never passes, the truth remains forever just out of reach?
Imagine preparing for the greatest journey of your life—tracing the source of the White Nile, the last great mystery of geography—and realizing early on that the mission is already a failure. Not metaphorically. Not privately. A literal failure, witnessed by others. The supplies are vanishing, men are dying, months have been lost to drought and monsoon. Your partner is resentful, your crew sick or hopeless. Still, you march forward.
Why?
In River of the Gods, Candice Millard writes of a moment when explorer Richard Burton stood alone in a church, his closest companion abandoning the expedition. His spirit, he said, “went with him.” Already the mission had endured every imaginable hardship: starvation, betrayal, malaria, unbearable heat, dysentery, despair. “In the solitude and the silence of the dark,” Burton wrote, “I felt myself the plaything of misfortune.”
And still, he refused to stop.
On good days, they marched late. On bad days, they couldn’t move at all—sick with fever, hallucinating under canvas tents, listening to flies buzz over the dying. “We were wretched,” Burton admitted. “Each morning dawned with a fresh load of care and trouble, and each evening we knew that another miserable morrow was to dawn.”
Yet the next day, he rose again.
What does it take to keep moving under those conditions? When each step is both pointless and punishing?
We live in a world where the phrase “self-care” is stitched into pillows. Our hardships are real—but different. Most of us are not clawing through the jungle with dysentery, dragging corpses of plans we once believed in. Most of us are not risking death by continuing on. The stakes of failure feel different now. Softer. More internal. But maybe that’s what makes them harder to see.
Back then, to fail was to return in shame. Not just to admit defeat, but to become it. You were sent by kings and countries, entrusted with gold, fame, the dreams of empire. The expectations were crushing. Your failure could be your family’s disgrace. Your retreat would be interpreted as weakness, cowardice, betrayal. In that world, it was often easier to die than to return.
And perhaps we think we’re better off for it. Maybe we are.
But something was lost too. Some edge. Some endurance. Some ability to suffer long and deeply without needing the suffering to be seen. They endured for months what would now break most of us in days.
It’s hard to imagine the psychological terrain they crossed. The silence of an African night after another crewmate dies. The thick air of a tent where fever dreams melt the difference between real and unreal. The rot of your own skin, the stench of infected wounds, the drumming anxiety that you’re already too far in to turn back but too broken to keep going. And still—you move. One more mile. One more river. One more lie to yourself that you can still finish this thing.
Is that courage? Or is that insanity?
Modern culture often confuses quitting with wisdom. And sometimes, it is wise. But sometimes quitting is just repackaged fear—polished up, intellectualized, made respectable. We rarely face the kind of consequences Burton faced, so we no longer understand what it means to press on without hope. We say we want purpose, but few of us are willing to crawl for it.
Burton’s journey is painful to read not just because of the suffering—but because of what it reveals in us. We are softer now. We make decisions based on whether they bring joy. We stop when the discomfort outweighs the return. We speak often of dreams, but rarely of devotion. We have the language of self-actualization but lack the grit of self-sacrifice.
But still—somehow—there’s something beautiful about Burton’s madness.
There’s something exquisite in risking everything after you know it won’t matter. That kind of perseverance isn’t rational. It’s existential. It says: I am not doing this to win. I am doing this because I said I would.
Maybe that’s what gives a journey its soul—not its ending, but its refusal to end when it should. The willingness to walk headfirst into failure, because something deep in you refuses to accept that effort must always be rewarded.
What was Burton chasing? The Nile? Or his own edge?
What are we chasing?
And when our own supplies run low, when our hopes go silent, when even reason begs us to stop—what story do we tell ourselves then?
Maybe the heroic part isn’t in reaching the source. Maybe it’s in knowing you won’t—and walking anyway.