I don't know if enough attention is given to how hard life is.
Life is hard in several ways:
It’s hard like a game is hard - it’s difficult - it requires a lot of skill, it’s easy to get lost, lose lives or get knocked down a level - it takes years to learn how to play it well and even then you are constantly being tested. It’s hard if you choose to play, and it's hard if you don’t. You have no choice but to get your act together.
It's hard like a concrete surface is; unyielding. There’s an infallible concreteness to life that means you ultimately have to adapt or die, lose, fail.
And it's hard like a tough and unsentimental old woman: Kind, but tough, looking you straight in the eyes and waiting for you to be honest for once.
If you can get your head around its hardness, life can be kind.
This is true everywhere, and work is no exception.
The happy ending of this - or the inevitable, annoying and problem-creating byproduct of it (depending on which way you look at things) - is that we are constantly looking for ways to make life easier. Some of these hacks make our lives better, some worse; but all of them seem to have unintended consequences (qv Yuval Harari in Sapiens).
So here’s my question: is there a hack that has no negative consequences? Being an obsessive on ways of making life easier I naturally have an idea (clue: it’s in the inner, psychological or spiritual dimension). But I’m going to give it some time to steep before pouring…
To be continued!