Hard is Easy and Easy is Hard

You don’t need me to tell you that life can be overwhelming more often than not. Even when we’re doing the best we can, sometimes it feels like it isn’t enough. And even if things are going well, life has a knack for throwing curve balls when we least expect them.

Even though we’re living in the 21st century, our brains are still very old hardware. The complexity of the waking world is enough to deal with; add in the digital layer and all its algorithms, doom scrolling, and manufactured ragebait and it’s a wonder any of us maintain any level of sanity. While I could go on, you already get the picture.

To deal with the dread, most of us self-soothe in ways that aren’t helpful in the long run. Our various vices and distractions that give us a steady (though unsatisfactory) drip of dopamine, leaving us as nothing more than abused, overworked mammals stuck in a gilded cage illuminated by blue light and daydreams.

And I know, I know. You’re tired of hearing about it, you’re tired of thinking about it.

You’re tired.

Me too, twin.

I share this existential malaise with you. But there is a way past it. It’s the paradox you already know from the headline: that, when you feel stuck, it’s the hard choices that make life easier and the easy choices that make it harder. And while that feels daunting just reading that, what’s nice about this paradox is that it works even when you’re tired. Arguably, it works especially well when you are.

These more difficult choices are the better, more energy-efficient ones to make. As you practice making them, they actually become the easier choices once you get past the upfront investment cost of time and emotional fortitude.

It’s kinda like going up a new ski hill for the first time and you’re the one who’s tasked with getting the lift up and running. The first hike up might suck, but getting back down is fun enough that you want to go back up again… and again… and again. And each time, you find better ways to get to the top; if you get bored of this hill, you now have the experience to go stake and develop a new one.

After all, isn’t life about these calls to adventure? If you’re going to have to take on challenges to get to where you want to be, wouldn’t you rather do those than feeling stuck grinding and hustling just to survive?

You can. And today, you’ll learn how.

Before I continue, I can’t stress enough how aware I am of how overwhelmed many of us are. In a time of record inflation, sociopolitical chaos, and a never-ending list of things to do and people to please, the last thing you probably want to hear is, “it’s okay, there is a way out but things have to get worse before they get better.” Luckily, that’s not the answer to the problem.

Difficulty (how easy or hard something is) and quality (how good or bad something is) are two different things. In relation to this “Hard is Easy” paradox, the difficult choice is also the better one, not because it’s better to seek difficulty for its own sake, but because what you’re looking for can only be obtained by virtue of choosing to take the more difficult path. And the difficult path involves learning to love the process (the easy path, by comparison, is only seeking the outcome, which is unsustainable and why you feel stuck).

Let’s break this down more practically.

After a long day at the job-you-hate-that-barely-pays-the-bills factory, the last thing you want to do is expend more effort on much else. So you settle in for the evening, choosing your favorite easy source of dopamine. Assuming you remain perpetually tired, those choices might look like scrolling mindlessly on social media, eating junk food, and making comparisons with other people whether in video game lobbies or short-form videos. And despite how exhausted you feel, all these little things add up to a deficit between consuming and producing creative energy.

That isn’t to say you’re not trying hard enough. It’s just not optimal if you’re unhappy (and as an aside, if we’re honest, if you are aware of this and still choose to continue this way, it’s a conscious, strategic choice you’ve made which might suck if that’s not what you really want… but it’s still within your power to choose otherwise).

The trap is that these sources of honeyed dopamine come easy, yet they sap you of your energy. Hijacking your brain’s ability to imagine and dream, you’re content in fantasizing about how your life could be different, how your work and salary could be different, how you could be different. But in this exhausted state, fantasy is enough and you rationalize that there’s not enough time or energy to make those dreams a reality.

After all, it’s easier to hope than it is to act. And it’s easier to act once than to act consistently, day in and day out, no matter how boring or repetitive the hike is up that metaphorical ski hill the first couple of times.

Mind you, if this resonates, I’m not judging you. On my worst days, I struggle with the same issues, the same loop of wishing and hoping but not doing as consistently as I should. Admittedly (and while I’m not proud of it), my inconsistency with creating written and video content is one way this struggle manifests itself for me.

Every decision we make, every goal we name has a cost to it; barriers to entry that can be overwhelming but ultimately help move us through life, not necessarily by what we want, but by how we act and show up.

Once you know how to overcome them, you’ll quickly build momentum and have your energy compound as you make those dreams reality. And no, that’s not wishful thinking (we’ve established that doing only that is the problem). That’s just how this universe works.

Barriers to entry are exactly as they sound. They’re the price of admission to get to the outcome you’re looking for on the other side of a decision.

Sometimes they’re a literal financial cost. For instance, the money you need to buy a meal at your favorite restaurant. Oftentimes, there’s a kinetic component that requires you to perform an action of some sort — in the case of the restaurant, you need to either go get the food yourself or get the food delivered to you. But always, there’s an energy cost to overcome the initial friction and any obstacles in between you and your outcome, whether it’s getting in your car and driving or opening up the delivery app and waiting.

Going back to the difficulty vs. quality comparison, decisions with very easy barriers to entry by default (by default is going to be an important part of this statement we’ll come back to) are often lower quality. Using getting food as an example, here are a few decisions with barriers to entry that seem to get more difficult:

All of these choices are valid and can be justified as good ones depending on context. For instance, if you’re an ER nurse just getting home from a very exhausting day and forgot to get groceries, ordering delivery is a fair choice. However, that same choice becomes less useful if you constantly order delivery multiple times a day, multiple days a week solely because you don’t want to cook.

If you have the money for it, great; if you don’t, not so great. In both cases, that’s still a lot of money for the “easy” option assuming money is something you care about, no matter how much of it you have.

But what if you’re not good at cooking or meal prep? Sure, there are financial benefits of cooking from home, but if you’re bad at cooking to the point you’re wasting food through so many botched attempts or that it takes too long and too much effort to get a subpar result, the barrier might be too high to make this your preferred choice. Remember though: the “Hard is Easy” paradox is about learning to love the process, not the outcome.

While choices 1-3 on the list have others preparing the food for you (and the extra costs depending on how many parties are involved in getting you your meal), choices 4-8 have an additional barrier to entry: skills. If you don’t know how to cook, learning how will make choices 4-7 easier; learning how to garden on top of that will make choice 8 easier too. Both cooking and gardening require time and energy investment to learn and get good at, not to mention the financial costs of supplies and however you go about learning (some might choose to take classes, others might prefer being self-taught through books or free videos).

And sure, not everyone wants to learn how to cook or grow their own herbs, fruits, and vegetables. But my point is that, on a scale from choice 1 to choice 8, there’s definitely a difference in the level of passion, involvement, interest, and benefits from this one decision of “how am I going to eat today?”

But this is just a single example in a vacuum. Every day, we need to make hundreds of decisions whose outcomes compound over time, affecting how we make decisions in the near- and far-future. Ordering delivery daily might be what’s easy today, but learning how to cook very basic food might make groceries the quicker, easier, more advantageous choice in the long-term despite being the more difficult choice at first.

You might think this is all well and good but that doesn’t change the fact that you remain tired. So how do you get through these barriers when the mind is willing yet the body is so very, very sleepy?

Barriers to entry are nothing more than a mechanic of the Great Game that help filter everyone along their trajectory, whether or not that trajectory is a conscious choice. Your choice to overcome these barriers is you starting a new adventure that, depending on your starting conditions, can be easier or harder compared to others (this is often talked about in terms of socioeconomic privilege which we might explore in a later article).

While we like to think of ourselves as such complex creatures with our power to think and reflect and be self-aware, we follow another universal law: the path of least resistance. By default, whether it’s human motivation or water finding its way downhill, the object in motion will often follow the path of least resistance. Going back to food, ordering a meal by delivery is (seemingly) much easier than learning how to cook and garden and acting upon that knowledge. That’s why there are so many delivery drivers and comparatively so few home gardeners.

However, action erodes the barrier. Water trickling down a wall will start to carve grooves into it, making the pathway easier. Some of the most majestic landscapes in the world (the Grand Canyon being one of the most obvious) were carved in a similar fashion.

Our brains, habits, and neuroplasticity all follow the path of least resistance as well. Once you form a channel between synapses and continue to strengthen that channel, future actions become easier and eventually form habits, which, in turn make these actions fluid and unconscious. When you see someone do very cool things effortlessly, this is a product of that.

Case in point: the reason why showers are self-reflection chambers is because your hygiene habits are so subconscious that you can spend your mental energy thinking about all the scenarios you want without dedicating much energy to whether or not you used the right amount of shampoo in the correct sequence as everything else.

That is the core of the “Hard is Easy” paradox. Expanded into a framework, it looks like this:

That last part is the hardest. Everyone loves a good self-help book or a motivational short on Instagram from their favorite coach. But planning isn’t even the battle. It’s showing up to do what’s outlined in the plan. And when you’re doing something new, it’s awkward and difficult and you might hate how uncomfortable you feel.

That discomfort is the barrier to entry, a nudge to either keep going and pushing past it if you want the outcome that badly and pay the cost through the process… or to give up and be filtered out because it turns out you didn’t want the outcome badly enough. And sometimes barriers to entry are manufactured to be needlessly difficult by the elite few who pulled up the ladder behind them; the barrier then is finding an entirely new way of achieving the outcome that’s easier and more accessible (we call this scalable innovation).

But the key is to show up every day. Not once, not twice. Every day until you get the outcome you want.

And while that process is probably going to be boring, if you ground yourself in being curious about the process, streamlining it, finding ways to make it more enjoyable and in line with your personality and strategies, it gets easier. You start getting dopamine from the process itself, not just the outcome or fantasizing about it.

Before you know it, you’ll obtain what you set out to look for, yet you may find yourself hungry for more. If you do decide to set off for a new adventure, at least you’re now better equipped for the journey.

Everything about the human experience stems from storytelling. Our favorite media, our philosophies and politics, our dreams and fears, how we choose to live our lives. It’s all just different stories we either create, adopt, or adapt. And every good story has challenges to face and obstacles to overcome. Otherwise, you wouldn’t care. You’d just be bored because the plot remains flat.

It’s that same flatness that keeps you stagnating and stuck, resigning yourself to a job you hate, with coworkers you barely tolerate, in a living situation you rather not thinking about. And even if everything was sunshine, kittens, and rainbows, you still might hunger for change. That’s natural as we are creatures of change and adaptability. We’re not meant to be stuck in place.

But just as our brains love novelty, they also love patterns and familiarity. The devil you know — all the bleh things I listed above — is better than the fear of failure, the unknown, and all the what ifs. Just as we love our stories that climax with the warmth of victory, these anxieties are stories all their own of realities that haven’t come to pass yet we already believe them as if they did.

Sometimes we fool ourselves into choosing difficulty for its own sake. But again, difficulty and quality are two separate factors; we think that the harder path just because it’s harder justifies the struggle. In reality, we’re just bad at picking our battles and write it off as righteous martyrdom.

But you deserve better than that.

Choosing the more difficult, higher quality option in pursuit of learning to love the process of whatever outcome you’re looking for doesn’t have to be difficult all its own. If you’re feeling stuck, the first step is acknowledging you don’t want to be. The next is doing something small in the right direction.

For instance, going back to food, instead of ordering delivery, make yourself a little snack. Just pouring yourself a bowl of cereal is your first-drop-of-water-down-the-wall-that-becomes-the-Grand-Canyon moment. Instead of scrolling on social media and being jealous of different fitness influencers’ physiques, go for a walk or do some calisthenics. Instead of envying your friends whose finances might be more stable than yours, make a list of all the jobs you’d rather have.

And if you’re still tired, that’s fine. It’s your life and you can start when you’re ready. As long as you know that it’s your choice to make. But between you and I, it’s better to make the choice while it remains yours before someone or something else makes it for you.

Who knows? Maybe the confidence that’s earned through these small choices becomes the better dopamine; hard fought but so much easier in the long run.

Game in thumbnail: Pentiment (Obsidian Entertainment)