Nicholas Higgins 30/06/2020

In Praise of Difficulty

‘To enter life we all need a fearful challenge, something hard to do’, Edward Pearson Pressey, 1909

Ease is the cry of our era. Easier is always better, easier is always best. Google has put the world’s library right at our fingertips. Phones and social media have made communication wonderfully quick. Transport innovations have made worldwide travel accessible to all. Even the favourite clothes of our age, the T-shirt and tracksuit, are easy, imposing little constraint and requiring little maintenance.  

What part of modern life is immune to this smooth, effortless efficiency? Obstacles are everywhere disappearing. All and sundry are stupefied by it - for a ‘good life’, after all, is one without stress, struggle, trial and difficulty. Today’s hedonistic culture is just as zealous in its avoidance of pain and difficulty as it is with the pursuit of pleasure. For difficulty is the enemy of pleasure and comfort, the twin prizes of the secular materialist. It must, therefore, be minimised and eliminated. 

But the most valuable things in life are rarely comfortable. Talk to a parent about raising kids, this task is most definitely not pleasurable or fun, it requires requires work and commitment. Great achievements, like raising a child, completing a degree or running a marathon, require hours and days and most likely years of hard work. But all that time adds up to something infinitley more rewarding than what is ‘fun’, ‘comfortable’ or ‘pleasurable’. 

Since for there to be true joy, there must also be hardship. As Nietzsche put it:

‘You have the choice: either as little displeasure as possible, painlessness in brief...or as much displeasure as possible as the price for the growth of an abundance or subtle pleasures and joys that have rarely been relished yet? If you decide for the former and desire to diminish and lower the level of human pain, you also have to diminish and lower the level of their capacity for joy.’

Joy and hardship, in short, have an osmotic relationship. Diminish the difficulty, diminish the reward. Heighten the difficulty, multiply the reward. This is why the difficult things, like raising a child, are almost always the most fulfilling, satisfying, worthwhile and meaningful.

Whilst I’ve yet to have children, my recent foray into film photography is a case in point. Modern digital cameras arguably do all the work for you, switch to ‘automatic’ and snap away as your shots are saved onto a memory card. Shooting film, however, is a much more intense and emotive journey. The cameras themselves have more quirks, demanding greater concentration, while the film itself is far more delicate: light can leak and fog your frames, chemical processes can go awry, it will attract dust and scratches, and so the list goes on. You also have to pay greater attention to what you’re photographing, as every time you open the shutter there is an immediate financial cost.

To have captured a good film photograph you’ve faced meaningful resistance. To get there you’ve you’ve had to weather a greater storm, battling multiple elements to realise your vision. Thus the sense of achievement you get when you’ve perfected a good film shot is incomparable to mindless snapping on an iPhone. There’s a great joy in mastering something that is not easy. 

Convenience does not allow for this pursuit of mastery. Car’s broken? Call the mechanic. Why learn how to cook? Take-outs only a coupe of swipes away. There’s no need to learn how to navigate with a map and compass, GPS will do it for you. Memorising facts? You kidding mate, ever heard of Google…

There is no longer any struggle, no more grind or graft. This is all result and no process. It’s all destination and no journey, all victory and no fight. No spanners, no cooking, no map reading, no learning. Just pure, easy consumption. 

This lays to waste the wonderful satisfaction that comes with fixing your own car or cooking your own dinner. More than this, it is turning modern man into a plastic pseudo human; a slave to convenience and a passive consumer, not actually doing anything, just organising what will be done around him. With no obstacles, impediments or challenges man’s basis for meaning starts to look pretty flimsy. For a good deal of our meaning comes from facing up to the situations that are thrust upon us, overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks.

Consider for example, Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott’s Polar expeditions, or Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay’s summit of Everest. Certainly the destinations these men reached are impressive, but how much more extraordinary are the stories of how they did it, of the battles and troubles they faced along the way. Scott of the Antarctic actually failed in his objective in leading the first team to the South Pole, dying along with his 5 team members as they bid their hasty retreat. Still, he is revered for his stoic attitude to difficulty. As he put it in one of his last letters, ‘we are setting a good example to our countrymen, if not by getting into a tight place, by facing it like men when we were there’. 

These men show that meaning is not a definitive end, a prize you reach, a proverbial summit of Everest or centre of the South Pole. Meaning is not mortgaged till you achieve X, Y or Z. Rather they show that meaning can happen in the here and now, for it comes from the process, from the struggle.

While some struggles have rightly been eliminated, eradicating them all threatens to erase one of the sturdiest foundations for our meaning. Is it surprising that in this age of comfort and convenience rates of suicides (rising 64% in the last 50 years) and antidepressant use (rising 400% over the last 30 years) have been ominously rising? Perhaps the thing that is killing us is the very thing we thought would save us. Perhaps modern man is hopelessly lost because he no longer struggles, toils or labours? As John Burroughs predicted, ‘when struggle ceases, that family or race is doomed’.

Few of us wish to turn the clock back, but perhaps we need to remind ourselves how useful the right obstacles can be. It is the difficult journeys that make us who we are. Only when we embrace and rise above difficulty is character sharpened and individuality moulded. 

This is the ‘strenuous path’, the inconvenient path to fulfilment.