Make Your Dream Life Desirably Difficult

Imagine Life at 1% the Cost

I was walking down 4th Ave. in Vancouver, fantasizing about what life would be like if I were a hundred times richer, when I had a thought:

What if a genie made everything cost 99% less, just for you?

My new phone would have cost only $15! Flights to Cape Town: $50! The poutine, nachos, Korean food, and Japanese ice cream Kim and I celebrated our third anniversary with would have been $1.20!

At these prices, I’d start shopping around for a 3-bed condo by Kits Beach (~$20k) and a luxury ocean view pad in Cape Town (~$15k).

I don’t know about you, but I think it’s way more fun to dream about life at 99% off than to imagine what I’d do if I had 100 times more money.

The Best Positives are Negating Negatives

I’ve watched enough Succession and read enough Mr. Money Mustache to know that nicer homes, newer phones, and more nachos won’t drastically increase my long-term well-being. So my train of thought chugged along to this next question I asked myself:

If everything cost 1% as much, what negatives could you pay to make go away?

I would:

• Let the staff at Whole Foods prepare my lunches for me for $0.20 a pop.
• See a private specialist about my wonky knee.
• Pay an agency $2 a month to deal with TheZag.com’s back end.
• Uber to Kim’s parents’ for $0.50, so I can read a book during the drive.
• Stop scouring Facebook Marketplace for a replacement microwave because my new condos would have ones that work.
• Ask Kim to order pomegranate molasses from Gourmet Warehouse rather than send me on a “life whack” of a goose chase.

These are unproductively difficult tasks. They are:

1. Unenjoyable for me to do.
2. Unskillfully done by me.
3. Unrewarding to have done on my own.

They’re wastes of my time. If I could magically afford it, I’d outsource them all and reallocate my time to other things.

Like what?

The Two Types of Difficult I Desire

Difficulty is like death in the movie Final Destination. No matter how hard you try to escape it, it will find increasingly elaborate and gruesome ways to get you. So rather than flee difficulty, I’d rather chase it.

As I see it, there are two types of desirable difficulties worth pursuing:

If a genie gave me a 99% discount on life, I would try to spend 100% of my effort on these.

I’d also work towards turning Favors into Obsessions. 

How?

By grinding down my resistance to doing them until they become habits you’d have to pay me not to do (like lifelogging). And by devising approaches I enjoy that get me the results I want (like how I stopped treating working out like work).

More Good Work = More Good Life

Desirable difficulties abide by the aphorism Kevin Kelly’s been sharing while promoting his book Excellent Advice for Living:

The reward for good work is more work.

This applies to all areas of life:

• Fitness: The faster I get, the farther I can run in a given period of time.
• Hobbies: The better I get at beach volleyball, the tougher the competition I can get hammered by.
• Relationships: The more I get to know Kim, the more enjoyable our time together.
• Learning¹: The more I learn about psychology, the more questions I come up with that I’m curious to find answers to.
• Career: The good-er I get at motivating you to zag your life in fulfilling directions, the closer I get to being 100 times richer and working 100% on desirably difficult things.

The Difficult Dream Life: Not Too Difficult to Attain!

My “perpetually perfect” life is devoid of unproductive difficulty and filled to the brim with three things:

1. Desirably difficult tasks.
2. Rest, so I can do more desirably difficult things.
3. Nachos.

The more I dream about this life, the more I realize I might not even need everything to be 99% cheaper to get there. So maybe it’s not a fantasy!

Related Reads

On The Zag

Elsewhere

• Moral equivalents of war by Russell Max Simon (Check out the “Unfollowables” interview he did for The Zag, too!)
• Proof You Can Do Hard Things by Nat Eliason
• Life on the Grid (part 1) by Roger’s Bacon

Please Comment! (Doing So Is Desirably Difficult)

• What’s the first thing you’d buy if everything were 99% off?
• What’s an unproductively difficult task you’d most like to outsource? What desirably difficult task would you replace it with?
• Do you have any unconventional obsessions (something you enjoy doing and are glad to have done)?

1. “Desirable difficulty” has a different meaning in the psychology learning along the lines of, “You want the learning process to be difficult (in the right way) to improve long-term performance.” And “performance” seems to mean doing well at tests, which is not the type of learning I’m most interested in. See Wikipedia if you desire to learn more about it. ↩︎