We live in an era of reducing friction.
Everything is about reducing pain and difficulty. About making things easier.
You can have dinner delivered without leaving the sofa. Find entertainment without enduring a moment of boredom. Fill every silence before you have to hear what’s going on inside you.
It’s common for people to say that they want an easier life.
But do they really?
If they took an honest look at their life, is ease really what they are optimizing for?
How many people do you know who repeat the same mistakes over and over?
Who struggle with the same issues, have the same arguments, and make the same promises every time things become unbearable?
Is there any shred of evidence, besides the word of these people, that they do in fact want an easy life?
On the contrary, it often seems like they go out of their way to make life more difficult for themselves.
Maybe you are one of these people.
That is not a bad thing.
Nothing is good or bad.
Those concepts won’t help you here. They will only make things more complicated.
But if you often find yourself struggling with the same things, maybe you are asking the wrong question.
Maybe the question is not:
How do I manage this struggle?
Maybe the question is:
What do I get from it?
or
What does it give me?
There can be a lot of identity in struggle.
Take the hardworking person who constantly complains about their hours while staying in the same job for decades.
Or the person who complains that every partner they meet is emotionally unavailable, while somehow continuing to choose exactly that kind of person.
Or the person who is permanently overwhelmed, always behind, always putting out fires, yet never changes the habits that create the chaos.
These examples are so common that they barely sound strange.
Almost trivial.
But why?
Why is struggle so compelling?
For some people, it may simply protect them from boredom.
If there is always a crisis to solve, a deadline to chase, a relationship to repair or a problem to complain about, there is never much empty space.
And empty space can be uncomfortable.
When nothing is wrong, there is nothing demanding your attention.
Then you are left with yourself.
For others, struggle provides an identity.
If you have spent years being the person who works harder than everyone else, what happens when the work becomes easy?
If you have always been the person who has to fight for love, what happens when someone simply loves you?
If your entire story is built around overcoming adversity, what are you without something to overcome?
We tend to think of problems as things we want to remove from our lives.
But sometimes a problem is also holding something together.
Your self-image.
Your relationships.
Your excuses.
Your sense of importance.
Your explanation for why your life looks the way it does.
Remove the problem and you may have to confront whatever it was protecting you from.
The struggle gives you an explanation.
And explanations can be incredibly comforting.
As long as there is something in the way, you never have to discover what would happen if there wasn’t.
This is why simply telling someone how to solve their problem often doesn’t work.
They may already know.
Most people know they should sleep more.
Spend less.
Drink less.
Leave the relationship.
Have the conversation.
Start earlier.
Say no.
The information is not missing.
If a person has been repeating the same pattern for ten years, another productivity system or piece of advice is unlikely to be the thing that finally changes it.
Because perhaps the problem is doing something for them.
Something they have not yet been willing to lose.
This does not mean people consciously create misery for themselves.
No one wakes up thinking:
I would like to make my life unnecessarily painful today.
But our stated desires and our actual behavior are not always aligned.
You can say you want peace while repeatedly creating conflict.
Say you want freedom while building a life full of obligations.
Say you want intimacy while choosing people you can never become close to.
Say you want simplicity while filling every available space with more.
At some point, your behavior becomes more revealing than your words.
If something keeps happening, it is worth becoming curious about why.
Not judgmental.
Curious.
What does this struggle allow you to avoid?
What identity does it reinforce?
What does it let you believe about yourself?
Who would you have to become without it?
Maybe the question is not how to make the problem disappear.
Maybe the better question is why some part of you keeps bringing it back.
Because there may come a point where the thing standing between you and an easier life is not a lack of knowledge.
It is that the struggle has become useful.
And until you understand what it gives you, one part of you will keep trying to remove a problem that another part of you is busy preserving.'
I work privately with a small number of individuals who are serious about change.
Sincerely,
Milo Morrison