If You're Not Struggling, Maybe You Should Be

One harmful myth perpetuated by the various cultural medias is the idea that there exists some people in the world who have it easy, and aren’t struggling their way through life. I’ve always thought of myself as someone who has mostly managed to fail upwards, which is probably the best outcome anyone can hope for. Even the billionaires claim to be having a real tough time getting through every day (although my advice to them would be to retire and let someone else get some money, because you guys have enough and at this point you’re just greedy).

An aphorism often (and perhaps falsely) attributed to the Buddha is “life is suffering”, which is one of those phrases that takes a while to sink in. In Buddhism this is called duhkha, which (to quote Wikipedia) “refers to the habitual experience of mundane life as fundamentally unsatisfactory and painful”.

Another fun one comes from William Shakespeare, in the form of what is probably the most famous English soliloquy where Hamlet contemplates suicide (which I’ve shortened below, read the full one here):

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep

No more; and by a sleep, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,

To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause.

The lesson we can learn here is that suffering is a normal part of life. If you don’t feel as if you are suffering, then you’re exceptional and abnormal (and maybe a psychopath?). To have an expectation that you shouldn’t suffer is, at best, delusional.

I would go as far as to say that depression is a normal human response, especially in a world full of suffering and cruelty. I’d even say that the whole pharmaceutical industry built up around selling pills to increase the happy chemicals in our brains is unnatural, and possibly harmful.

The reason I use the term harmful to describe the myth of non-suffering is that it implicitly forces us onto a hedonic treadmill, which seems to mostly benefit those who are selling consumer goods. Perhaps with that knowledge we can free ourselves from the treadmill (or at least limit our time spent on it), once we’ve realized that buying a new gadget or whatever <thing> won’t increase our happiness.

It’s liberating, in my opinion, to understand that it’s okay to just enjoy life as it is, without needing to constantly strive for more money or whatever it might be. Just be present wherever you are now, no need to go to Burning Man or hop on a plane to Cancun and burn a bunch of jet fuel just to learn that this is as good as life gets.

This isn’t to say we should seek out suffering or avoid happiness when it finds us. Rather, it’s about recognizing that our cultural obsession with constant happiness creates its own form of suffering—the disappointment that comes from believing we’re entitled to a pain-free existence.

Consider how social media amplifies this problem. We scroll through carefully curated highlights of others’ lives, comparing our complete experience (with all its ups and downs) to someone else’s edited highlights. This inevitably leaves us feeling inadequate, creating a new form of suffering built on the myth that others aren’t struggling.

The most profound insight may be that accepting the inevitability of struggle doesn’t make life worse—it often makes it better. When we stop fighting against the natural currents of difficulty, we can direct that energy toward finding meaning within our challenges rather than exhausting ourselves trying to avoid them.

Some of history’s most remarkable achievements and deepest human connections have emerged from periods of great struggle. Viktor Frankl, surviving the horror of concentration camps, observed that those who found meaning in their suffering were most likely to survive. This doesn’t glorify suffering, but acknowledges its potential as a catalyst for growth and insight.

Perhaps what we need isn’t fewer struggles but better ways to engage with them—through community, through purpose, through presence. The modern push toward individual consumption as the path to happiness has left us more isolated than ever, cutting us off from the very connections that help make suffering bearable.

So next time you find yourself struggling, remember: you’re not failing at life. You’re not doing it wrong. You’re having a deeply human experience, one shared by everyone from Shakespeare’s characters to the Buddha to the person next door who seems to have it all together. And there’s something strangely comforting in that universal truth.