What Does it Mean to Make Life Easy?

Because It Doesn't Come from Always Making the Easiest Choice

Do you want your life to be easy?

I suspect most people would answer that they do. At the very least, we all would like to be free from hardship.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we never had to worry about our car breaking down, or losing a job, or expensive home maintenance issues? Even the little things - having to cook when you’re hungry, walk the dog, clean the cat litter, feed the fish… Okay, I get that not all of us are pet people, but you know what I mean - all the small challenges life throws at us even on a daily basis.

So, do you believe that your life is easy right now? Hopefully, it’s not too difficult, but I’m sure you have some struggles and challenges, or difficult decisions to make.

I’ll preface this article with the fact that I don’t believe that an easy life should be your ultimate goal. There’s a particular kind of ease of life that comes from making good choices, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t also have to work hard at times. In fact, working hard is exactly what brings about my idea of the easiest life possible - the life in which the things you choose to spend your time on are just that — by choice — and are working towards a goal of your choosing.

What got me thinking about all this was a discussion I recently with my husband. The concept came up while discussing some of our friends who - for various reasons - have ended up working in industries in which they have no interest, stuck in a dead-end career, or having no career at all. These same friends tend to exercise little, to eat whatever is low effort and tastes good, and not to spend time on any productive hobbies.

One might say — and my husband did, initially — that these friends live their lives easily because they don’t spend any more than the bare minimum effort, but I don’t see it that way. Their choices bring them the most pleasure in the immediate term, and that might feel the best and easiest in the moment, but this comes at the direct cost of any improvement they could see in the trajectory of their lives.

Additional effort could be strategically spent as an investment into an easier future in both the near and long terms:

• Extra time to cook food for the week will let you eat healthier and more affordable meals for a time, which can result in financial savings and better health.
• Putting in extra time or effort into your job to position yourself for a promotion could mean more fulfilling work or higher pay to fund whatever other changes you need in life.
• Studying a new field on your own time, or going to school if necessary in order to transition into an entirely new career could free you from a lifetime of settling if you aren’t happy in your current industry.
• The time and effort to work out could result in improved health, higher energy levels, and reduced future medical bills.

For any of these examples, a big part of the problem is knowing what you might want to do differently. If you don’t know what you should be eating, it’s hard to cook. If you don’t know what is expected of you at work or what paths to promotions are available, it’s hard to work towards that possibility. If you want to change careers but don’t know what field you would be happy in, it’s hard to commit to a new educational program or even put in the effort to teach yourself something. I get it. All of these things take effort, and you only have a limited amount of energy to give.

A big part of the problem is knowing what you might want to do differently

The unfortunate truth is that the upfront expenditure of energy is the only way you’ll be able to figure out what will make you happier or more fulfilled going forward. The satisfaction comes later. The exploration of options is just another use of effort now that will delay your gratification in the moment for the sake of crafting a much better life for yourself in the future. In the end you just need to start, and hope that you will be rewarded. Put in enough effort to test your ideas out and get a sense of whether it’s the right path for you, then pivot if it becomes clear that it’s not.

It helps to start small. Buy a book on your possible topic of interest and read it a little every day. Find some free Youtube videos to learn the basics, or find a group or Meet Up that will help you dip your toes into your new field. Leverage friends or family if you can, whether to borrow equipment to get started, or to have someone to talk with to generate ideas or get psyched up about your new project.

Keep in mind that money spent does nothing to guarantee or enhance your own commitment. It’s better to let your skill level as you grow in the new field drive your spending, rather than buying the nicest and most expensive tools and supplies at the start and expecting that you’ll be inspired to train until they are the right fit. How many home gym sets have been purchased with enthusiasm — often around New Year’s — only to sit and rust in the basement or garage, never to be used again? Set a reasonable budget to spend on supplies or classes if you need to purchase anything to get started, and only spend more when you’ve proven to yourself that you’ll put in the time to make the investment worthwhile.

Unfortunately, too many people who don’t have a path in life are also not willing to spend time or effort, let alone money, to try to find a path. When every day feels like a grind, the idea of putting in more effort must sound absolutely bonkers. It’s understandable to feel this way. Who wouldn’t be burnt out after spending the majority of their waking life doing something they don’t want to do? We all have limited energy and time, and those are two of our most precious resources. But the sticking point is this: If you don’t do anything different, how can you expect for anything to change?

Instead of trying to create small investments in a better future, some people I know — and likely many I don’t — must force themselves out of bed day after day and go to work at a job they hate, with no expectation for their lives to change. They struggle financial if something unexpected happens, and in some cases they struggle financially even if everything goes exactly as expected. They tend to wake up tired, achy, hungry, grumpy. They wonder where all their energy has gone and fondly remember their youth when they weren’t tired all of the time and they believed they could become an astronaut, a firefighter, a scientist — anything they wanted.

I would argue that people in this situation have chosen the hardest path not the easy one. In all likelihood, they’ve done so by making no choices at all for some portion of their lives. Too often, people simply take the route with the lowest apparent effort, directed by the gradients of ease in their immediate vicinity. Maybe it’s because they don’t believe they can control what happens to them. Maybe it’s because they haven’t had role models to show them there’s another way. Maybe no one has ever told them about the Marshmallow experiment*. Maybe they’re content to just wait out their lives, but I doubt that one.

*The Marshmallow Experiment

Led by psychologist Walter Mischel at Stanford University in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this experiment sought to understand the process of delayed gratification in children. Children were presented with a reward (a marshmallow) and told they could eat it immediately, or wait about until the experimenter returned (about 15 minutes later) to receive a second marshmallow if they had not eaten the first.

Subsequent follow-ups with the participants over the years provided profound insights into the long-term impacts of the tendencies they demonstrated during the experiment. The findings suggested that the children who had the ability to wait for the second marshmallow generally fared better in life. They showed higher academic achievements, more positive life outcomes, lower susceptibility to substance abuse, reduced obesity rates, better stress management, and superior social skills.

The findings of this study underscore a critical aspect of human behavior: the ability to delay gratification for future benefit plays a crucial role in determining success and happiness. It suggests that cultivating patience and strategic thinking in children about long-term rewards can lead to a more fulfilling and accomplished life.

You can read more about it, here.

On the other hand, someone who invests into their future, spending time and money to deliberately shape their experience, has the capacity to make life much easier. Exploring different career options may take a lot more time and effort, but being able to make a living without feeling like you are sacrificing those hours is the biggest leap you can make towards feeling that your life is easy.

When you no longer spend eight hours per day counting down the minutes until you are “free”, you can arrive home still feeling refreshed and ready to take on another project instead of just flop on the couch, order fast food, and turn on the latest Netflix special. It becomes possible to work towards other things you might want to accomplish in life, such as writing a book, playing an instrument, learning a new language, or inventing something.

There’s definitely a range of how fulfilling a job can be, and not everyone will want to depend on their career for overall satisfaction in life. If you’re like this, no worries. It’s absolutely possible to work a job that pays the bills while cultivating joy from other callings in your free time. I would still recommend finding a job that you can commit to staying in for the long run that is at least tolerable and doesn’t add stress. Once you have that for stability, your priority can be exploring your other passions and find something you can work toward.

Have you ever gone through a transition in which you made incremental changes to make your life easier in the long run? Tell me about it, and what motivated you to get started on that journey.