Hey, fellow human being. Life is hard and so it is. We need to learn how to deal with it and learn to be happy even when we all agree that life is so hard. Can we do something to make it easier?

That is what we will try to see in this piece. Please continue reading.

Yes, life is hard and we didn’t even choose it. Our parents brought us into the world without our consent. Life offered no playbook, no rules or guide. Once we lose the innocence of our childhood, we realize that life is hard, and it doesn’t really get easy if we don’t take the steps to deal with it rightfully.

To be honest, life shouldn’t be hard. It should be fun, and enjoyable but thanks to society, and the way it is structured, happiness has become so difficult, and because happiness is difficult, life is hard. Fuck society.

Since we can’t really f*** society, we need to figure out why life is hard, and how can we make it less hard, since it won’t get quite easy at any point, unless we make some software changes in nature’s configuration, which is not going to happen anytime soon.

Why is life so hard?

1. We are mortals

You see, we have limited time. We can’t do anything about it. We are going to die, we like it, or not, nobody gives a fuck about it. Since we are mortals, we must organize our lives in a way that we can achieve at certain set of goals within a given time frame.

Most people assume that they will live 60 or 70 years, and hence they want to resolve their life matters within those years. What are those matters? Among other matters, they are the below:

• Finishing education
• Getting married
• Raising a family
• Finding success/making money
• Finding happiness

The goals are complicated. For example, in my view success and happiness are at loggerheads with each other. The fact that we don’t have unlimited time, there is always this pressure to organize time in a way that we are able to achieve all of these goals. It is not impossible, but it is certainly hard.

2. Incorrect priorities

We have messed up our priorities as a society. We are more focused on catching up with what the majority is doing, then trying to figure out what we should be working on instead.

Mark Twain said, ‘Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.’

But, the society doesn’t care. Most people do what most people do like a herd of sheep mindlessly walking aimlessly.

What should be the priority?

The priority is to be happy. Only when the individual members of the society are happy, the society on the whole would be happier.

Life is hard because it is not centered around individual happiness but on social conformity.

 3. Lack of self-awareness

In order for us to make our lives a little easier, we need self-awareness. Now, if we keep living our lives according to standards set by others, how would we ever reach self-awareness?

Self-awareness rests of the idea that we are unique and unprecedented individuals with unique attributes, thinking and character. We need to understand our strengths and weakness. Once we understand ourselves better, we can begin to design our lives around our strengths. Most people don’t make any effort to understand themselves for most of their lives. Their lives are spent in meeting the standards of the society because they don’t ever ask themselves what standards they stand for.

Lack of self-awareness could make life easier, and there is every reason you should invest in it.

4. People don’t accept others for who they are

The problem with that we live within this miserable society which works pretty hard day and night to make everyone like them.

Your parents want you to follow their version of happiness when it only brings you pain. The relatives want you to follow their version of happiness when it only brings you pain. Your partner wants you to follow their version of happiness when it only brings you pain.

Now, you can ignore the society but you can’t ignore your family. You may be dependent on them financially if you are a student, and that makes the situation even more difficult.

Life is hard because people are not willing to accept other people for who they are. They won’t let LGBT people be themselves, because why should they be different? People won’t understand that someone doesn’t want to be a mathematician just because his father loved maths. What bullshit!

Every human being is unique and people make life difficult by forcing everyone to become homogenous. Why?

5. Money

 Money is a huge reason why life is hard. Now, money is fuel for life. However, for most people, money is the reason for their existence. They do everything for money, like buy things and then they show off those things because that’s the purpose of their lives. That is all they have, to show.

Money follows people’s beliefs. There is enough money available in the world for everyone but still so many people sleep hungry, enough money available in the world for everyone but still so many artists struggle to make their art commercial. There is enough money available in the world for everyone but so many people end up committing suicide for lack of money.

Since the society is messed up in their thinking, people hoard money till their last breath. They don’t even live their lives. I know people who have so much money that they could spend a life time chilling, but they complain every day for lack of money. On the other hand, there are large swathes of people who could put money to better use, but they can’t get access to it.

6. Fear

Jim Carrey tells a beautiful story about his father choosing a conservative job as an accountant because he did not believe that he could succeed with he loved, and then he lost that job. He says that you could fail at what you don’t love, and so why would you not take a chance doing something that you love?

Life is hard because all our lives, we are driven by our fears instead of being driven by love.

We fear losing our jobs.

Scared to lose love.

Afraid of losing our parents.

Dead scared to lose our money.

We worry about losing our reputation.

Fearful of failure.

We are scared to be rendered poor.

Afraid of losing our health.

Scared to die before truly living life.

All of us fear so much that we hardly take a shot at our dreams. Fear makes life really hard and doesn’t let us do the things we really want to do. If we are to live meaningful and happier lives, we will have to get rid of the fear. Nobody is totally fearless.

We all feel fear. The ones who do great things do what is needed to be done in spite of the fear.

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt.

7. We don’t like our work

Life is hard because we don’t like our work. Do you realize how much time do you end up spending at your job or at your business? As per Gallup, 85% of the world’s working population, hates their jobs.

Of course, if you are one of these people, and there is a high likelihood that you are, your life is hard. We spend so much time at work that if you can’t find a way to enjoy our work, life will continue to be miserable. There are several reasons for this phenomenon and it is not always the fault of the employee. Even companies do not hire people based on the strength of candidates. They hire on experience, and most people are quite experienced at doing jobs they hate. For starters, they pick any job that brings in a salary.

If we don’t fix this situation, we are stuck in a situation where people hate the majority of their lives. If people hate majority of their lives, how would they expect life to be pleasurable and joyful?

8. We don’t love people we are married to

As a society, we are not quite good at finding people we would be happy to live with. In countries like India, most people still get married to people through a retrograde system called arranged marriages. There are matrimony sites where parents of the prospective bride/groom look for partners for their kids, and hence people end up marrying people they don’t even know. Even with love marriages, there are compatibility issues. Marriages are hard to work, and they would continue to fail as long as people continue to marry people who don’t value what they value.

Work and family life are the two most important parts of our lives, and since they are quite messed up in the current stream of things, life is understandably hard.

9. Life is harder for some people than for others

You may be wondering that these are reasons that apply to everyone and your life has even more reasons that make it hard. There is no explanation for why life is harder for some people, and not for others. We don’t know. Destiny has its own ways, and there are things which are absolutely beyond comprehension and control.

For example, diseases which are fatal and have no cure. Every year, thousands, if not millions of people die from cancer, and not all of them were addicted to drugs or smoking or alcohol. I have seen a relative who did not ever smoke or drink, and was religious through her life, die of breast cancer. There is no reason why she deserved so much pain that life gave her. We don’t know. She died before she hit 50 years of age. She has a son, who is now living without a mother, who died way before she should have.

We don’t know why life is harder for some people than it is for others. All we can do here is accept.

10. Ageism

I am turning 40 in 2021. Now, there are lot of notions around what kind of life we should be living at a certain age. Most of us don’t have a clue about life, and how we should live it. So, as mentioned earlier, we follow the herd. Now, some of us realize a little later in life about things like self-awareness and happiness. We feel as if we have had an epiphany about life and now we know how life should be. However, the society again comes in the way. You are told you are now too told to pursue your dreams, and hence you should shelve them. What utter bullshit is that?

We live in a society where most people don’t even discover what they are passionate about till the end of their lives, and if someone discovers their dreams in their 30’s or their 40’s, why should they shelve them? Yes, most people are in a situation by then that they are forced to resort to ageism standards of the society, and then give up on their dreams. They also have responsibilities, which don’t allow them to take the risks needed to shoot at their dreams. They can’t do it alone.

Only if we had supportive families and a social structure which helped people in achieving their dreams through emotional and financial support, life wouldn’t be as hard as it is now.

11.  We compromise

You saw the statistic that most people hate their jobs. Now, logically, if most people hated their jobs, they should be trying to solve the problem. But no, nobody is trying to solve the problem anymore. They have accepted their misery. They have fucking accepted their misery.

People compromise with bad jobs. People compromise with bad relationships. They don’t revolt. We have a meek society here which has accepted that life sucks and is fine not doing about it.

Now, we have a situation where one hand, we are wondering why life is hard, and on the other hand, we are okay chilling about it.

12. We don’t believe we can be truly happy

Deep inside, we doubt our abilities. We think we can’t really be truly happy, and that’s the reason we compromise. We are not ready for the fight. It is difficult to fight for your happiness. In a miserable society where most people have compromised with unhappiness, trying to take your life towards happiness, takes guts.

Most people lack courage. If we are to make life easier, we need to believe that we can be happier, and then work in that direction.

I am not quite sure if this is conclusive enough. Do let me know in the comment section please. Life doesn’t have to be this hard if we operate with self-awareness and chase our happiness right from the beginning of our lives. Life becomes hard because by the time we realize who we are, a lot of time has gone by, and it becomes way harder to pursue your dreams, which could make life easier, and happier, if achieved.

I hope you would be able to solve some of the problems mentioned here, and make your life more enjoyable and fun. Yes, life will never be completely easy, but we can get to a point where we enjoy our days, even with the responsibilities of work, and family.

Life is hard because priorities are wrong. It is hard because we prioritize material success over inner happiness. Life is hard because the society makes it hard for people to follow their dreams. It is hard because we don’t have self-awareness. The responsibility is on us, on all of us, to make life better for each other. Unless we don’t, it is not getting any easier anytime soon.

Thank you for reading.

The purpose of this blog to help you find your happiness. Please read the other posts on the blog, and follow so that you get updates when new posts are published. Please share any posts you like with your friends so that they can also find their happiness. If you have any feedback for me, please leave it in the comments and I would be happy to work on it. If you would like to support my writing and this blog, you may please send a donation through PayPal here.

I appreciate the time you spent in reading the blog and wish you happiness.

Love,

Amarvani