Why can life feel so unbearably difficult?
The question I put to you is: why wouldn’t life be unbearably difficult and hard?
We are all born with physical bodies that succumb to pain.
We all deal with mentally distressing problems in our lives.
Life is meant to be this way, so we shouldn’t resist it.
Just like when you use your hands as hands and your feet as feet, you’ll occasionally feel pain and fatigue.
The same is true with your mind when you experience challenging moments in life.
In fact, I would say it’s better to face the difficulties and challenges life offers than to choose the easy life.
If you’re pushing yourself in your vocation and life, you will face challenges and hardships.
Instead of getting bogged down, embrace your challenges.
Have you ever worked out?
If you have, you’ll know that when you lift weights, you feel the burn in your muscles.
If you’re new to working out, you might get worried about feeling the burning pain.
But if you’re a more experienced gym-goer, you’ll know that the burning feeling causes small tears in your muscles.
And in fact, because of these tears, your muscles grow back even stronger.
Many of us can understand that subjecting our bodies to stressors helps our muscles grow stronger.
But many of us struggle to apply this concept to our lives.
Great discoveries and innovations are usually a byproduct of difficulty, strife, and sometimes disaster.
Nassim Taleb said, “Difficulty is what wakes up the genius.”
For example, after every plane crash, the aviation industry reevaluates its safety protocols and strengthens them, leading to fewer fatalities in the future.
An author will write book after book until one does well, then will use the feedback and the complaints to make that book better.
Hardships and difficulties force us to grow
We live in an era where humans have overcome most hardships and difficulties.
For example, medicine is at its best ever, and people are living longer.
Health and safety are at an all-time high.
Most of us live at a similar level of comfort to the kings and queens of times gone by (probably even better with the technology we have).
Even when we face the event that causes the most suffering, death, modern medicine has enough painkillers so we don’t have to feel pain.
We live in a world with fewer hardships and problems than ever
This is a net good as a whole, but when we live lives devoid of challenges and hardships, we avoid the stressors that enable us to grow.
My story
In 2021, I was diagnosed with health anxiety because I kept thinking I had a lung disease and other illnesses.
The reason I got health anxiety, I believe, was because I was working a desk job, and I worked from home, which resulted in a lot of idle time searching my symptoms via doctor Google. (Idle hands are the devil’s workshop).
Because I was doing nothing with my free time, the vacuum in my life was filled with the wrong things, i.e., googling my symptoms online and getting anxious.
I cured my health anxiety by first getting the all clear from the doctor regarding my health and then being deliberate on how I filled that vacuum/void in my life.
So I started writing and reading, then going on more walks and lifting weights.
Filling the vacuum by doing difficult things helped my mental health massively.
And that’s one of the reasons I still read/ write daily and consistently work out.
The bottom line
Life is hard because it’s meant to be. As Nietzsche said, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” And in the sense of fatal plane crashes, “That which kills me makes others stronger.” Via improved safety protocols. Challenges and hardships are part of evolution. They force us to evolve. Embrace them. Be more concerned if your life is devoid of hardships and challenges.
Credit for the picture goes to Dan Steffen from the Asphalt Jungle.
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