How come life seems to come so easy and effortless to some people? Watching others pursuing life comfortably with ease, seemingly in absence of hard work and sacrifices, may bring envious feelings. Especially if you yourself keep struggling despite the great efforts to keep on fighting every single day. Living happily at ease without the need for effort or great sacrifices may be the ultimate impossible goal for many. Why are they able to live happy lives so effortlessly when others cannot? 

Every time we are playing games – whether they are board games, sports, or video games – we all have very clear psychological tendencies. When winning, we feel great and want to celebrate. On the other hand, it hurts to lose. When the pressure on winning is high, we release some of the pain from losing by creating external causes. Our psychological defense mechanism comes to our savior and convinces us that parts of the reason we lost were that the rules of the game were unfair, the referee made mistakes, and the video game was lagging. It surely cannot be the case that I myself played the game poorly.

The same dynamic is present when it comes to the game of life. Although not everyone explicitly thinks about it, many people regard the meaning of life as some version of maximizing accumulated happiness. If I fight every day to sacrifice my leisure for hard work and still fail to achieve happiness and comfort, am I then losing at life? No of course not, it must be something wrong with the game that I do not see, and everyone feels the same struggle I do, they just hide it. I am not a loser. But whether it is the xbox controller, football referee, the national government, God, or ‘society’, they are all just psychological guards with the purpose of protecting our short-term emotional well-being. They are not necessarily true. 

As everybody knows, feeling envious is a destructive state as it makes us annoying to be around and takes energy from more important activities. Hence, the body fights the feeling of envy by feeding us thoughts such as: “They probably struggle the same way I do, they just hide it”, or “I deserve my achievements more because I have had to fight hard to get them”. Although this psychological defense mechanism within us is effective in bringing us comfort at the moment, its ideas are misleading. 

Optimism makes me confident there is a way one can achieve a happy comfortable life without the need for effort and sacrifices. Imagine the following. You are staying at the coast looking out into the ocean. There are many small islands out there, each with its own unique properties. One approach would be to get information on all the islands, figure out which one is the best, and take a row out straight to the chosen island in a rowboat. Alternatively, you could just not look at any of the islands beforehand, and just straight away jump into the boat without any rows. Just laying effortlessly and enjoying the sun on the boat, as opposed to keep having to row to follow a certain track, the wind could take you to any of the islands. The same principle is true with the destination of life. Whether one chooses the island of being a teacher, footballer, or Instagram model, it takes great effort to resist the wind and keep on a straight track. If on the other hand, you just lay in the boat waiting to be surprised where you end up, your journey has not required any effort or discipline. 

In response, people could argue that the person who deliberately follows the track to the best island will have a better life long-term. Well, not certainly. Economic research has found that the well-being of people is not only determined by the physical conditions of the world they are in, but also critically depends on their prior expectations. ‘Happiness = Reality – Expectations’ is a clever saying that is not far from the truth. The idea is that when browsing through all the islands and selecting your preferred one beforehand, you build expectations on what the island experience will be like. Those expectations will hamper the actual experience, and the mere knowledge of the properties of the other islands may disturb your comfort when you have gotten used to all the benefits on your own island. By just jumping onto the boat without expectations, directions, and rows, you could easier appreciate what you find on the island you happen to arrive at. 

Substantial amounts of students at schools across the world perceive their studies as a selected path where the whole point of the journey is to arrive at a destination where they have their desired education, and jump into their rowboat to defy the wind with pure discipline and muscle. However, after arriving on the island, it did not take long before they found another new target in the ocean to chase. A career. Just after catching their breath after the first journey, they go again, fighting the wind to reach their new goal. The problem is that a career is not an island, but rather just like the horizon, and no matter how hard you row, the target never gets reached. To go on a journey, solely for the purpose of arriving at the destination, with the target set at the horizon is something only the human race would be dumb enough to come up with. 

My intuitivWhy would life reward blood, sweat, and tears in the first place? It seems like a poor incentive structure if the way we are supposed to act to achieve happiness were to keep traveling through effort and pain. When we hurt ourselves physically, our body responds by sending us pain to signal that we should stop doing that. Does it not seem natural if the pain of effort is the body telling us we are going in the wrong direction, because happiness is not to be found there? I prefer to float around in the ocean, less like a rowboat and more like a jellyfish, destination- and effortless, enjoying the journey while excited about a mysterious future. 

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