Why is life so Hard?

One summer as a kid, maybe 8 or 9 years old, I spent months trying to beat Zelda. The whole game was built around progression. You wandered through dungeons and forests, and every boss you defeated, every secret you found, made Link a little harder to kill. Heart containers extended how much damage you could survive. Hidden locations rewarded you with better swords. New items opened up parts of the world that had been completely inaccessible before. To get anywhere, you had to earn it.

Then one morning, I hit some combination of buttons and unlocked a cheat code. I have no idea what I pressed. I could never recreate it.

My sword was unbeatable. I moved faster. Enemies couldn't hurt me. I tore through areas that had taken weeks to survive. It felt like my childhood fantasy had come true.

I blew through the final dungeon in a single sitting. Ganon, who had terrified me for months, barely registered as a fight. I hit him a few times, fired the Silver Arrow, watched him burst into ashes, and rescued Princess Zelda. The screen flashed: “Thanks Link, You're the Hero of Hyrule.”

And then it was over.

I felt disappointed.

I remember going outside, climbing up into a mulberry tree, and sitting with that feeling.

I felt like my accidental discovery of the cheat code ruined my summer. Now I knew how the game ended and it was hard to imagine starting the game over without the ability to easily speed run the game. But I also had no interest in starting it over with the cheat code on if somehow I was able to replicate the sequence of button presses again. 

This was my first run in with the existential question that I discuss with clients so often. 

Why is life so hard?

And why does the absence of struggle feel less like peace and more like numbness?

Alan Watts once described a thought experiment. Suppose that every night you could dream any life you wanted to dream. And you could dream seventy-five years of experience in a single night.

At first, naturally, you would fulfill every wish. You would design lives filled with pleasure, adventure, beauty, love, power. Every fantasy available on demand.

And after many nights like that, Watts says, you would eventually think: well, that was pretty great. But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream that isn't under control. A dream where something happens that I don't know is coming.

And you would enjoy that too. You would wake up saying, “Wow. That was a close shave, wasn't it?”

Then, little by little, you would become more adventurous. You would take greater risks. Introduce more uncertainty. More difficulty. More stakes.

And eventually, Watts says, you would dream the life you are living right now.

Because somewhere deep down, we seem to understand something that we spend most of our waking lives resisting: a completely controlled existence stops feeling alive.

But understanding that intellectually doesn't suddenly make difficulty pleasant when it arrives in your actual life.

When uncertainty stops being philosophical and starts becoming personal, our instinct is still to resist it. To label it unfair. To demand that reality explain itself before we agree to participate in it.

You don't have to be grateful for the challenge in front of you. You don't have to romanticize it or do mental gymnastics to convince yourself hardship is wonderful. Acceptance is not the same thing as approval.

You can believe the situation is unfair, exhausting, and not what you wanted, while still accepting life on life's terms. Because if you look honestly at the hardest periods from three or five years ago, you'll probably notice that the meaning of those experiences changed as you changed.

Most of those problems, if they showed up in your life today, would barely register. You'd handle them on a Tuesday. The problem didn't get smaller. You got bigger, and the only reason you got bigger is that you had to.

There are people who will never know what they're capable of because they've arranged their lives carefully enough that nothing ever demands it from them. From the outside, it probably looks ideal. Less stress. Fewer demands. Smoother days.

But they never get to experience the version of themselves that only appears when something real is at stake.

What if the struggles that feel unbearable right now are shaping you into someone who, five years from now, will barely recognize the weight you're currently carrying?

Somewhere in you, there's a version that, given the choice, would have written this exact difficulty into the story of your life. Not because you'd enjoy it, but because some part of you already understands that the struggle is not separate from the becoming.

And what you are becoming is needed.

I don’t know exactly for what, or when, or why.

But I have faith that the universe knew exactly what it was doing when it built this thing we call reality. This life you are living. The challenges in front of you. The adventure of facing them.

I hope that someday, that same faith feels true to you too.