An easy life is a boring life. We’re told through consumerism that the easier you make your life, the happier and more satisfied you’ll be. Just buy this product to make your life easier, and you’ll be happier and more satisfied. However, that’s not really true. In fact, it’s a distortion of what happiness and satisfaction are.
Of course, no one wants to be struggling indefinitely or suffering excessively. That doesn’t make for a satisfying life either. But people are built for challenges. We thrive when we have goals ahead of us, and we feel good when we meet those goals. However, there’s no sense of satisfaction to be had when everything is easy or by always taking the easy road.
Why is that?
1. You lose the satisfaction of working hard and learning something.
Challenges in life help shape your character and ability to handle problems. You may not be good at something, but you still decide to dive into it to try to accomplish a goal. It’s a wonderful feeling when you figure out the problem, learn what you need to learn, and then overcome it. That’s a measure of competency that many people take pride in.
However, when everything is easy or you avoid the difficult path, you never have that opportunity to succeed. Unfortunately, you never have the opportunity to fail, either. Failure is an important part of life because it teaches you emotional resilience and how to handle life when things don’t go as planned.
That’s an important skill to develop, because failure is often one step on the way to success, but only if you view it that way.
2. Discomfort often equals growth (and being too comfortable often equals stagnation).
Sure, we all want to be comfortable in life. But it’s often the uncomfortable, unpredictable moments where we learn and grow the most.
I can give you a personal example. My technical writing ability is not great. I didn’t go to college. The way I got into writing articles was through a website that connected high-quality technical writers with clients. I have a well-developed writing voice because I’ve been writing for decades, even though I didn’t have that formal education.
Things were going well until my ability to earn dropped significantly because that particular site decided to change its approach and grade its writers through a more traditional lens that favored high technical proficiency. And yes, I was angry about that.
However, that also caused me to pivot into looking for other avenues to find work because I love to write. And now you’re sitting here reading my words because the path I was on didn’t work out. In fact, it was a new beginning to something much bigger and better. It forced me to grow and expand, and I never would have pushed myself to explore those new opportunities and challenges if the comfortable path had remained open.
3. You become more easily frustrated in life.
Emotional resilience is a muscle. As the American Psychological Association shares, challenges help you exercise that muscle and keep it strong. When life gets too easy because you’ve removed all the obstacles, you will find that your emotional resilience also weakens. You’ll find that events that didn’t affect you before may affect you much more severely now. That’s to be expected.
Even if you are making your life easier for good reasons, it’s a good idea to still look for challenging things to do. Of course, there are certain aspects of life you want to be easy. You want your relationships to be happy and joyful. A job should be at least tolerable, if not fulfilling or enjoyable. That’s normal and reasonable.
But if things get too easy all around and you find yourself stagnating? Maybe try supplementing it with some challenging goals, like running a marathon or writing a book. Choose things that will challenge your capability and encourage your personal growth.
4. You drift along instead of actively choosing your life.
One big issue with convenience is that it will steer you down a path that you may not want to be on. If you’re always looking for the easy-to-do things, then you’re essentially gating yourself off from more challenging goals.
I’d be willing to bet there’s been at least one time in your life when you avoided trying something new because you wouldn’t be good at it. But that’s part of that paradox. You don’t get good at things by not doing them. You get good at them with a willingness to look foolish in the beginning, and practice, practice, practice. It’s challenging. But that’s the point.
Yet, so many people fail before they even start because they don’t approach the situation excited for the challenge. They just want the benefits of being “good” without the sacrifice that is required to get there. You don’t even need to be good at the thing if you don’t want to. There’s a lot to be said for the joy of just trying new things.
5. You may feel less pleasure as your emotions flatten.
Much like resilience, emotions require exercise, too. The human experience is all about emotions, and anyone with depression will tell you how terrible it feels to lose connection with them. Indulging in too much pleasure or comfort makes it more difficult to actually enjoy those things. You need the lows to truly appreciate the highs.
When you avoid challenges, you are dulling your own emotional responses. The deep pain of hurt or struggle is something that makes us appreciate the good times all that much more. If you avoid one, you’ll lose the other. If you indulge in pleasure and comfort too much, then your tolerance to it will grow, and it’ll feel less impactful.
6. You may start mistaking comfort for fulfillment.
Fulfillment is a beautiful emotion that typically comes when you’ve achieved something difficult. It evokes a sense of pride, and for many people, it helps to validate their own sense of self-worth. Of course, one can’t rely on doing things to validate themselves, but it is a nice sprinkle of seasoning on top of an already healthy perspective.
Comfort may be nice, but it doesn’t provide much for your well-being or mental health. Fulfillment helps you build self-confidence and look forward to new challenges that may bring you closer to your goals. It’s not something that you can just replace with comfort, otherwise you lose out on another facet of the human experience.
7. You may find that you start feeling less proud of yourself.
Pride isn’t an unhealthy emotion. Many people preach that it is, because we’ve been drowned in this idea that any kind of self-love is somehow wrong. There’s nothing wrong with pride in healthy doses. It’s when pride starts causing you to elevate yourself over others that it becomes an issue. That’s when pride starts crossing the line into arrogance.
How do we build pride? Well, by doing things, by overcoming the challenges we face in life. You can set goals and then strive to reach them. That will bring you closer to pride. By not doing that, you may find that depression and despondence set in. There’s a feeling that comes when you aren’t challenging yourself that’s almost like an emptiness, a yearning to make yourself feel good about accomplishment.
Final thoughts…
Comfort and convenience are the bane of truly experiencing life. Yes, we would all love a comfortable place to rest our heads at night, a place of peace and harmony. But personal growth is on the other side of challenge and struggle. Failure and making the wrong decisions are how we grow emotional resilience and develop wisdom.
Take the road less traveled at times. Choose discomfort over comfort. Allow yourself to feel it, sit with it, and love what the experience can teach you. Doing it in small doses makes it so much easier to cushion the blows when life really starts beating you down. And it will, sooner or later. That’s just the way life goes.
