We Live a Hard Life in an Easy World

A diagnosis of modern ease and its emotional consequences

Being human hasn’t gotten any easier. If anything, it feels harder now, because everything else has gotten so absurdly easy.

We no longer break our backs in fields or factories. Most of us in the developed world work in services, in offices, in front of screens. We’re living inside a civilization built on unthinkable labor, but we don’t remember what it took to raise these cities. We are exhausted but it’s a different kind of fatigue that we endure. Spiritual and emotional.

We search for scapegoats to explain why we feel so frayed: phones, social media, algorithms... They play their part. A big part. But I think the deeper cause is simpler and worse.

We’ve become unable to cope with life in a world that’s too easy.

This pervasive easiness is why so many people, young and old, aren’t just distracted by their phones, they're also unwilling to learn, to put up with the lightest jobs in history, to read, to cultivate their friendships, to have sex, to have kids, to get to know themselves, deeply and intimately.

Make no mistake. We are strong. If we had to hunt or harvest to survive, or plough the earth, or assemble machines, we would. No one would be glued to a screen. No one would be addicted to anything. Addiction is a luxury; it only exists because we can afford it. But our strength is measured against the world. What we call life has always been hard and will always be. Addiction exists in the mismatch between an easy world and a hard life.

So everything’s easy, but falsely so. For this ease brings unseen hardships we carry inside, of the kind we don't know—and shouldn't have to know—how to combat.

Our jobs are not daunting, but we still feel busy. Why? Because they are hollow. Artificial. Meaningless in a way our bodies weren’t built for. We were made to work four hours of something hard but real. Not twelve hours of clicking, waiting, and pretending to be busy.

This mismatch between what the world gives us and what our life desires is a constant.

Reading a book is harder than scrolling.

Raising a child is harder than traveling.

Sex is harder than porn.

Talking in person is harder than messaging.

Writing is harder than prompting.

Eating well is harder than eating badly.

Moving is harder than sitting.

These aren’t trade-offs but revelations about what we lose. Every convenience we gain leaves behind some essence, some strength, some human need that gets numbed out. The more the world does for us, the less we can do for ourselves.

And then, life shows up. And we break.

We saw it when the internet exploded over an AI model that could generate Studio Ghibli-style art. I wrote about it then. People weren’t reacting to abundance as I initially thought; they were reacting to ease. ChatGPT made it effortless. Nobody would have spent an hour crafting those images by hand (except the real artists at Studio Ghibli, who never had it easy in the first place). But ChatGPT did it in seconds. That’s what felt so strange. So appealing. So shocking. So free. So wrong.

We’re not built for this kind of fake ease. We evolved inside difficulty and around it. When the world makes it disappear, we make it up with productivity routines, morning schedules, and tasks to optimize. We fill the void with likes, followers, manufactured attention, and endless games of self-improvement.

None of that really matters, and we know it, but we still need something to push against.

But eventually, we run out of things to optimize. We stop for an instant to catch our breath, but it’s our thoughts and emotions that catch up. And we break. Because we’re suddenly facing the only thing we can’t ever make easier: ourselves. Our inner lives. Our minds. Our incapacity to be human. Our internal struggle that neither technology nor civilization can soothe.

We don’t know how to deal with ourselves. We’ve never known, but now it’s more obvious because everything else is easy by comparison. The contrast is unbearable. We’ve grown up surrounded by ease, and then life gives us grief. Disconnection. Shame. Loneliness. Anxiety. Jealousy. Guilt. Uncertainty. Overwhelm. And we don’t know how to deal with it. And we break. And it hurts more than it should.

I'm not blaming anyone. Not you. Not me. Not even the system. I can’t escape this false ease. I was born in it. Like you. I just want to see it clearly. Maybe that’s all we can do. See clearly this disorienting severance between material comfort and emotional struggle.

But I want to end on a positive note. I think we can achieve a balance between the conveniences we’re lucky to have as citizens of modernity and the hard edges we can’t do without. It’s the only way not to drown in the irreconcilable gap between an easy world and a hard life.