5 min read

Ever wonder when life will finally get easier? Spoiler alert: it never does — and that's the beauty of it.

Life never gets easier — the better it gets, the more work comes with it. A take on resistance, cat poop, and why the path up is always more work, not less.

(illustration)

When Will It Get Easier?

Every time I listen to different gurus, meditators, mediators, and just random dudes, they all say that after their course/service package/scam, life will get easier.

As an old rap song once said: “Define better!” Meaning, “What exactly do you mean by ‘better’?”

Every morning, I wake up with one thought: I need to clean up two piles of poop from my two cats. This act in our house is sacred because cleaning up these poops on time reduces the intensity of my wife’s irritation, and the cats feel better too. After dealing with the poop, I must turn on the mini vacuum and carefully suck up all the scattered litter. After that, peace is restored, and everyone feels better.

At some point, I might ask myself: “Oh my God, when will this get easier? When will it be less of a hassle?” Will there ever be a moment in my life when I won’t have to suffer with cat poop?

Well, here’s the real answer you don’t want to hear: It will never get easier.

You’ll have to clean up after the cats your whole life. And when the cats are gone, it’ll just be a little sadder, and that won’t make anything easier either. You could replace one cat with another, but the poop will continue. Sure, you could hire a housekeeper, but to afford one, you’ll have to grind so hard that paying for a housekeeper will feel like a luxury.

Wait until your kid is old enough to clean up after the cats? Sounds like a great idea, but anyone with kids knows that the amount of effort you have to invest in raising a child far exceeds the hassle of dealing with cat poop.

And that’s perfectly fine. The only question is how much resistance you create against the world around you.

An interesting observation was made by a user named Nathi ORea on a physics forum in 2020. He measured the electrical resistance of the human body and found that it varied wildly — from 1,000 to 100,000 ohms. The only thing he didn’t do was measure the resistance of the same person in different emotional states under the same conditions.

https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-is-the-impedance-of-the-human-body-and-why-does-it-vary.997300/

Have you ever tried giving a gift to an angry person? Or getting something from someone in complete apathy? People create their own internal resistance to things. And what’s funny is that this resistance can actually be measured in volts, just like in the post above.

So, what am I getting at?

When people come to you asking to fix their computer or update their OS, you can always resist and tell them to screw off. Just like in elementary physics, you can create enough resistance that people simply stop coming to you. If you sigh heavily and yell at them enough, they’ll start bringing you less work.

There’s another option. You can just stop talking about a certain topic altogether and cut off the connection entirely. That way, you don’t even have to sigh. No current will come your way. People usually say you can become a hermit in the woods, but I haven’t seen any of those. What I have seen, though, are stoners living in tents on the streets of Los Angeles. They don’t give a damn about anything. No address, disposable phone. They collect welfare and spend it on weed. Modern-day hermit life, right there.

But there’s another way.

You can ask for more volts and lower the amps. You can stop sighing and start doing five thousand actions a day. That way, you won’t overheat, life will seem simpler and better, and — most importantly — the number of watts you output will be much higher. And you won’t even have to stress about it. You’ll just be doing your thing.

(Yes, I get that the resistor analogy is a matter of taste, and it’s not that simple. Obviously, the body doesn’t change its resistance just because, and there are many other factors involved. So take this as a literary comparison that still works well in practice.)

Now, back to work. Cleaning up cat poop can be done in three different ways:

  1. You can ignore it completely. This will inevitably lead to some kind of explosion later, but that explosion will be later.

  2. You can do it while huffing and puffing as much as possible. In this case, the explosions will be local but constant. You’ll always be dealing with small, annoying things.

  3. You can just do it without overthinking. That way, nothing explodes.

If you just do the work, as described in option three, you’ll get the result, and nothing about it will bother you. And that’s it.

The moment you start arguing with yourself about this work, that’s when the problems begin. The task won’t disappear — it will just feel heavier.

If you don’t argue with yourself, the work remains, but it won’t be a problem. Instead, you’ll get the benefits of doing it.

And the amount of work will never decrease.

That’s the biggest joke of all. The better your life gets, the more work you’ll have. No matter how you spin it — the better your car, apartment, country, whatever — the more you’ll have to work to maintain it. Some people never move forward in life because they hate filling out forms. Others have mastered forms so well that they can knock them out in 20 minutes and $500. And then there are those who built an entire business around forms and charge $5,000 per clueless person who doesn’t know how to fill one out.

So, the path to the top never involves less work. It always involves more. It will either be your work, or your assistants working for you, or your employees.

And the best part? The more work that flows through you, the more results you’ll see, and the more often you’ll be able to say: “Well, finally! I actually pulled this off.”

So don’t fall for those who tell you that something is easy. Look for those who offer more ideas and more work.

Keep reading

Related posts