No Really...Modern Life is Actually Hard

Christian Krohg. Madeleine. 1883. Public Domain.

In many ways, human life has never been as easy as it is for most of us in the West today. When it comes to the amount of physical labour required to sustain ourselves things have never been less demanding even for those few who still do physical work for a living. Technology has made life easy, cheap, and comfortable. It should blow your mind that a typical person can work mostly sitting down for just seven or eight hours a day, just five days a week, and then kick back and enjoy a roasted chicken dinner followed by a quick call to a friend across the country and then a movie in their private cinema with a scoop of ice cream that they keep in a box in their own house. Our ancient ancestors would have been unable to even comprehend such an easy existence.

In spite of this we all complain about not having enough time for the things we really want to do, talk about how we find ourselves constantly fatigued, receive ever increasing diagnoses of mood and concentration disorders (depression, anxiety, ADHD), and often seem to just feel that everything is harder than it once was. Our lives are profoundly easy physically, yet as a whole we are surprisingly miserable, it seems.

To some degree we’re probably just not as grateful as we should be for all the good things we have. Focusing more on gratitude will without question help your spirits and improve your quality of life. But there is an important way in which I think we are all actually just correct: human life is profoundly more difficult today than at any time in the past. We are struggling in no small part because living in a world like the modern West is really, really, really hard.

I’m not exactly thinking of things like rising inflation, the cost of housing, horrifically awful political leadership, collapsing birth rates, or the slow motion disaster of climate change. These things are major problems to be sure, but they are somewhat abstract and, moreover, humans have faced those kinds of problems for generations. Rather, what strikes me is that we are all facing a level of actual challenge in our regular, day-to-day survival environment that is sincerely more daunting than what past humans normally had to process. That challenge is simply: choice—constant, ever-present choice. Choice is genuinely hard.

Our modern choices certainly include our consumer choices. What to eat, what to wear, what to watch on TV, what to do with our free time. We have never had more such choices than we do today, and the range just keeps getting bigger all the time. But more than that, our society has put enormous effort in the last two centuries or so into massively expanding the kinds of life choices people can make, and enfranchising more and more people into that increasingly wide array of life choices. Where 200 years ago most people’s lives were generally scripted from day one, we have arrived at a world that is very much the opposite (which, again, is a very good thing in most respects).

These days just about anyone can pursue any career path they want and can change to a completely new one at almost any point in their working life. People can live in any number of cities, towns and countries. People can have kids or not. People can settle in to a traditional monogamous marriage, or become a monk or nun, or organize their sexual and romantic lives around a complex network of partners, or simply focus on participating in anonymous drug-fuelled orgies every weekend. Those who are looking for one or more long-term partners can choose from hundreds of apps and websites that will present them with a literally unending scroll of options to swipe on; because the scroll never ends they can reject any of these options for the slightest reason or for no identifiable reason at all. People today can decide what gender to be, and when doing so they can select from not two but dozens of existing options, or create a whole new gender of their own from the ground up, making choices all along the way about what this new gender is and means for them. People can choose any religious faith to pursue that they want, and embrace any core life philosophy—and they can change at any time and for any reason. People can pursue alternative medical therapies, embrace any number of natural diets from paleo to fruitarian, and build their own path to wellness by making yet further choices about what that means to them and whom to listen to about achieving it. Choices everywhere, all the time, from the early years until the bitter end. Indeed like a rocuronium stuffed maraschino cherry on top of this life of choice we are now even encouraged to make our own choices about when to die, assisted by doctors who will happily treat our illnesses one day and then kill us the next depending on what choice we make.

We have built our entire cultural identity around this endless project of expanding choice. It is as though, having discovered that many people in many situations benefit from more choices, we have concluded that all people in all situations will always benefit from infinite choices. Increasing human choice is never bad and always good, and so it is now the fundamental spiritual principle of Western society.

I am deeply grateful for much of the fruit of that social project. A world of limitations can be suffocating at times, and downright horrifying at others. Social and material limitations can be and very often are tools of oppression and abuse. A world where basically every choice is open to everyone relieves us of a lot of suffering, and it can often protect people from controlling forces that might otherwise leverage social limits for their own vicious purposes.

Yet, a world of infinite choice is also extremely difficult to actually live in, no matter what our social narratives might claim. Choices, quite simply, require mental energy—sometimes a great deal of it. Big choices require time, reflection, research, conversation, sleep, and conscious thought. Heck, simply choosing pasta from the amazing pasta aisle at my supermarket has probably taken up literally hours of my life by now (not that I want to live in a world where bronze-die conchiglioni rigati are not available whenever I want them). Making deep and serious life choices is all the more demanding, especially when some of them might require weeks, months, or years of concerted effort. And we are faced with such choices almost constantly, and far more than human beings ever have been in the past.

There is serious mental drain happening as a result of all this, and the impact is not minor. Very few people in any generation prior to my own have had to expend real emotional and psychological energy asking themselves whether they are, in fact, a man or a woman or neither or both. Very few of them have done a deep dive into various religious traditions to decide which one (if any) they are going to follow. Very few have had to build up their own set of values, or their own life philosophy from the ground up. Very few ever even thought about whether to get married or have kids—those were just things everyone did. Very few ever faced career decisions wherein they had real options as drastically differentiated as university professor and house painter. I have had to put effort into all of those choices and who knows how many more, as has basically every other Westerner my age or younger. And those things are just some of the bigger ones. Medium-sized choices like what type of medical care to accept for a given illness, what school your kids should go to, or whether to quit your middling job face us even more constantly. When you add it all up what emerges is a life in which one devotes a truly breathtaking number of hours, and a gigantic amount of mental energy to choices that previous generations simply didn’t have.

The world of infinite choice is a world of infinite choosing, and choosing is a highly draining activity. It is also a highly anxiety-provoking one. What if we get the choice in front of us wrong? The stakes of buying the wrong kind of pasta are not very high. But the stakes of choosing the wrong gender, religious community, life partner, or career could be enormous. We almost certainly worry about our choices more often than any group of humans ever has simply because we are making impactful choices more often than they ever could have imagined.

Our minds and bodies are not well designed for making hundreds of important choices a day about every aspect of existence from the mundane to the existential. Given the scale and scope of choice in our world, we should absolutely expect to find current generations demonstrating high levels of depression, anxiety, and distraction. Each of these is part of our natural (and intended) way of dealing with choices. Drained, worried, pulled in all directions—this is a perfectly reasonable response to so much choice. I am not making any clinical pronouncements here; I am simply saying that the enormous mental and emotional challenge level of living like we now do will by definition result in human minds and brains spending more time in modes like depression, anxiety, or distraction as we process constant choices. Choice is not just a good thing that we should all be grateful for. It is also an expensive thing from the point of view of both mind and body—we pay for every choice with the process of making that choice and the time and energy that it costs our human systems.

Now comes the point in the essay where genre often demands that I share some thought about what we might do about the problem I have just described. I am not, however, going to do that. My message is simpler. I merely want to give all of us modern Westerners a piece of encouragement. It is easy to feel like we are being silly if and when we struggle in a world of material ease and infinite choice. It is easy to notice that in a certain way we have things better than pretty much anyone has ever had them and to feel like we should therefore not be so emotionally and mentally exhausted. It is easy to look at the people in this world who seem to be doing just fine (for the moment anyway) and wonder why we can’t just…be like that. It is easy to think that this way of living should all be easy because in some ways it really should be and in some ways it really is.

But I think we should give ourselves a good bit of space to recall that modern life is also genuinely incredibly difficult—not in a whining-about-some-silly-annoyance kind of way, and not even in an abstract people-can’t-afford-houses-the-climate-is-becoming-dangerous-and-we’re-at-war kind of way, but rather in a concrete, cognitive way. Whatever it might look like on the surface, and however easy it might be in some respects, this modern life is also an incredibly difficult one for humans to navigate and thrive in. We can do it—many people do—but often in the same way that we can climb Mt Everest or run ultra-marathons. Living well with endless choices is possible, but it is not at all easy. So, if nothing else, the next time you’re feeling burnt out and overwhelmed at least give yourself a bit of credit. You may have a lot of things far easier than your ancestors ever did—but in some equally important ways your life is dramatically more difficult than they could ever have imagined.