approaching life with ease
the essence of living effortlessly
Why is it that some things feel effortless and others feel like back-breaking labour, even if they objectively don’t demand much effort at all?
I’ve noticed that there are some things I will do pretty much anything to avoid, and there are some things I can’t help but do even if they are not strategically relevant or important at all. I’m notorious for finding elaborate, well-supported intellectual reasons as to why I have started some things that I know are a priority, and avoided others. But the more I peel back layers, the more I see that some things simply feel hard and some things feel easy, and all things being equal, I am always going to reach for what feels easy. Because I value living effortlessly.
One can easily understand why this would be a challenge. Some things do need to be done, even if they don’t feel particularly easeful or enjoyable (I’m resisting the urge to cite taxes as the most universally relatable example, but you get the gist). The good news is that I have learned that you can manufacture ease — to a degree! This requires you to look at what you are avoiding and to understand why you do not want to do it. Once you figure out what it is that is getting in the way of your ability to start, finish, complete what you are doing, then it is much easier to approach this task, without all the baggage/avoidance you were bringing to it initially. You can pollinate the task with the things that make you feel easeful and inclined towards those other tasks that you reach for regardless of how “important” or “urgent” they are.
In a way, this is sort of what some forms of psychedelic therapy try to do: bring the positive emotions you can access in altered states of consciousness to memories that have negative emotions associated with them. This weaving-the-positive-into-the negative method is what I am trying to do with tasks that don’t feel easeful. How can I create joy within what I am avoiding? How can I bring ease towards resistance?
Sometimes this is as simple as going to a cute café and getting a little treat as you do your hard things, but other times it can be a bit more dimensional, a little more nuanced—like: how can you learn to see and feel the abundance that comes from doing things that you are avoiding. Say: you don’t like doing your taxes, or writing website copy, or answering emails, but there is a real, tangible material difference in how you feel after doing it (i.e. relief). If you tune into that feeling of relief and feel into it before starting, you can approach that task with the ease that will flow from competing it.
Personally, I tend to avoid slightly frictional but extremely high leverage tasks. Things that will make my future self a lot happier and bring a lot more ease to her, but require a little bit more focus, effort and sometimes discipline on my current self to complete. One method that has helped me approach things I don’t really feel like doing now, but know I will want to have done in the future, is simply celebrating when they are complete. Or: actually noticing how my life gets easier when I do them and then consciously stewing in the ease I get from facing the resistance and doing those tasks.
Over time, the more you (or, at least, I) do tasks that feel resistant and frictional, the more effortless they are to approach. Conversely, the longer I put something off and the more I build it up in my mind to be bigger than what it is, the harder it is to approach, and the grander the narratives in my mind become about how challenging and high-effort it is — whether true or not — simply to justify why I haven’t done it yet. Don’t fall for this mental self-justifying trick! Just because you haven’t done something yet, that does not mean that it is actually hard to do. I have learned this many times over and always laugh at my past self for building up something that usually takes anywhere from 2-90 minutes to actually complete to be this huge existential mountain I needed to do all this mental preparation to embark on. When in truth, the task was simple all along, I just didn’t feel like doing it.
replacing resistance with ease
Lately, I have been trying to notice when resistance comes up and instead of flinching at it, reactively reaching for something else instead, I bring curiosity to it. I ask myself how I can replace that resistance with ease, instead of brute forcing my way through it, or more commonly: avoiding it until it becomes so urgent that I have no choice but to face it, which usually results in effort powered by adrenaline/stress… not ideal for the living-effortlessly-dream!
This is always a work in progress, but simply adopting the belief that ease is possible in any area of life and making a sincere effort to bring it everywhere by consciously cultivating the feeling within has been rewarding in more ways than I can count. There are always new edges of resistance I am learning to approach and court more thoughtfully, but remembering that my problem is usually more of a framing issue than a skill issue has been helpful for me in getting over my blocks. Maybe you’ll find it helpful, too!
How do you approach and complete tasks that you find yourself avoiding?
Related essays you might enjoy: to be creative, be where you are, don’t let your ideas rot, on being ready. Also, find me on Twitter.
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Note: a part 2 to this essay is coming soon, where I dive into my definition of a Good Life. Make sure you are subscribed to Mind Mine to get it when it’s published :)
hi, long-time lurker here! I've actually been thinking about ease in the context of my hobbies lately and trying to select hobbies from more of an ease-oriented perspective.
people typically talk about two things when it comes to potential: discipline and talent. the idea is that people have some amount of innate ability to improve at a skill, but that ability will be multiplied by the degree to which you can keep yourself focused.
but this binary division misses a third important quality, which I call "inclination". if talent is "ease of improvement", then inclination is "ease of action": a compelling urge to *keep improving at that thing*. sometimes this inclination borders on obsession: when you're not doing that activity, you can't stop thinking about it.
even though these things typically both fall under the umbrella of "talent", there have been many times where I have felt one but not the other. for example, I have always felt a strong inclination towards chess, even though I do not feel particularly talented at it. on the other hand, I feel that I have a talent for pickleball, but very rarely do I feel the urge to pick up a racket and start grinding.
I've decided that inclination is a better predictor of success than talent or discipline. because while talent lowers the amount of necessary time investment, and discipline acts as a sort of multiplier on your investment, inclination is the best predictor of the amount of time you'll actually invest. and isn't that really what's most important? I am better at chess than pickleball, after all.
for the longest time I've tried to select hobbies on talent rather than inclination. but I've realized that this had led me to subconsciously pick hobbies that require more discipline than is ideal. and it doesn't have to be this way. I can actually just explicitly prioritize inclination over talent, in order to decrease the amount of friction in my life. so I've been trying to lean into that lately.
this essay is interesting bc it suggests a third route— trying to tune the inclination itself. I treat ease of action as relatively fixed— while I may experience momentary changes in inclination towards specific actions, I'll still feel, say, twice as inclined to play chess vs. pickleball over the long run. but maybe I would be better off thinking about how to bring inclination and talent into alignment!
I remind myself “don’t think, just do.” As typically, like you mentioned, I build it up in my head as something difficult when really it takes less than 90 minutes to get though & I always feel better after.
Sometimes I ask myself that question “can I enjoy this? Or can I be okay doing this?” And the answer is always yes, I just have to choose to see it as a fun challenge to do this joyfully but it’s always something I’m capable of doing, I just have to remember or remind myself that I have the power to choose.