Alpha 5.0

[mat422]

Of course, I'm not denying that.

But,
Life would be easier if we didn't have to eat; if we never felt pain, if we didn't need sleep, if we never grew old, if we didn't need to recover from injuries, if we were invulnerable, or if we were immortal.

But that's not what life is. Life is hard. You can embrace it or try to find a way around it. But if you choose the latter, you'll feel like you've never really lived at all. I know this because I was there (and still am in a lot of ways) but I know that in order to grow, I need to experience difficulty and pain.

Some amount of difficulty and pain comes with growth. You have to question though when enough is enough. What happens when life is so hard you aren't making progress as well as you should? I completely agree with you, but the difficulty of life is on a spectrum. It's not just two extremes of incredibly easy or ridiculously difficult. A lot of people take pride in going through life with excessive hardship, they wear it as a badge of honor. To the point where they might look down on people who have an easier life as lazy. Just like those who see being poor as a virtue and being rich as having a vice. Back to limiting beliefs and building a reality around them. Are some challenges good? Definitely. Challenges are what life is all about, it helps us learn and grow. But I'd argue that not all challenges are good. Some challenges just beat you down and strip you of your willpower. Sometimes life isn't all about experiencing pain and difficulty, sometimes it can be about learning to do something better or learning that you don't need to experience that degree of pain and difficulty.

Have you ever gone to the gym? Lifting weights properly (as in, not just doing it for the sake of lifting and to impress people, but to actually try and figure out how your body works and then work with it) you learn a few things:

First off, you learn that lifting weights is hard.

Then you learn the difference between "good" pain and "bad" pain in terms of the days after. If it's a good pain, you know your body is recuperating. If it's a bad pain, you know you did the workout wrong and injured yourself.

You learn to get in tune with your body, almost like it's a separate entity. There is much you can learn from yourself.

You learn that eventually you get used to the pain and see it as a sign that you've accomplished what you were after (a workout that will stimulate muscle growth), and you learn that such a workout can be accomplished in a little less than an hour, so you also learn that most people who "hit the gym" for hours and never see any gains are probably doing it for reasons other than improving their body. Which means that you also learn that you, in fact, ARE trying to improve your body, and all that knowledge about pain and difficulty means you learn that that is what is required to grow.

Then you learn that if you stop feeling the pain, and lifting weights becomes easy, and you're not seeing any gains, that you have plateaued and are not going to improve until you start lifting heavier weights, which means: more difficulty, more pain, and more exhaustion.

That's life my friend. It's the same with anything.

So how does it become a comrade? Because it's a sign that you are growing and making efforts to improve despite the difficulty. While everyone else in the world is content to settle for what they get by putting in the minimum amount of effort to get it, you're not willing to settle for anything less than everything you want, even if it's "too hard".

Yeah I used to lift weights, not anymore though. Might get back into it. Might just go back to bodyweight exercises, I'm more interested in gymnast type strength exercises. Anyway, you're aware that some people never get DOMS right? Soreness after the day of a workout isn't necessarily an indicator of growth. The biggest indicator is obviously progress. If you lift to failure and overtax your CNS, you're out for a couple of days and the next time you lift you won't make as much progress. Whereas if you don't push to failure, you might not experience as much pain, but the progress is there in the next workout. Same could be said for people in life. Some individuals experience tremendous pain and little progress, whereas others experience little pain and tremendous progress.

I see where you're coming from, but I also see how your experiences have caused you to interpret reality in an absolute fashion. I admire and respect your determination to keep pushing. But just remember that every single person experiences their own reality and some of these individuals do not feel the need to experience excessive pain and difficulty.