I remember a while back, talking to a friend who was struggling with something and they were constantly trying to find different ways to come up with shortcuts to make it easier.
Why we didn't really have much of a conversation and I ended up leaving that conversation with memories about a part of my own past when I was briefly involved in gaming.
Interestingly enough, one of the things that ended up turning me off (multiplayer) gaming was the fact that everybody was seemingly looking for ways to make challenging games easier by finding "cheat codes", or systems that would somehow break down the game and make it easy when it was actually (supposed to be) difficult.
The reason I felt somewhat put off was this obsession with making everything easy. I wanted to play the game, not cheat the game.
Don't get me wrong, I tend to be rather lazy by nature and like things to be as easy as possible, but how do we really benefit from taking the challenge out of everything by putting all our effort into shortcuts to get through a problem as opposed to actually just solving the problem?
I got to thinking about this particular dilemma today when I came across a really good analogy, in which somebody pointed out that you don't get huge quads by taking the elevator, you get them by running up the stairs... which is far more difficult than taking the elevator.
And yet? Most of us take the metaphorical elevator through virtually every aspect of life, if we can get away with it.
Of course I'm as guilty of this tendency as the next person, although it tends to cluster more around things that I really don't like doing.
Allegedly wise people have told me that I would "start liking things once I developed proficiency in them," but I've never really felt that to hold true. The statement seems like a bit of a misnomer, kind of like claiming that "if you hit yourself in the head every morning with a ball-peen hammer, eventually you'll start liking it." If you phrase it like that you can clearly tell it's patent nonsense!
I suppose we owe some of this aversion to difficulty to society in general... right down to TV advertising suggesting that there is an "easy button" for various aspects of our lives. And so, we don't accept that some things are simply difficult.
I look at one of my favorite sports from way back when — because I was always into solitary pursuits — golf, and notice how much it is the equipment that is making mediocre players better... rather than endless hours spent on the driving range, honing your skills.
But I also recognize the growing impact of the time factor in the sense that we often have so much going on in our lives that "shortcuts" become more of an essential for survival rather than simply a desire to not do difficult things.
Regardless, I don't believe we do ourselves any favor — in the greater sense — by focusing on finding the easy way out in place of developing actual skills.
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Created at 2026.02.05 01:15 PST
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