We’ve built a world that actively punishes effort, and I think we’re all quietly miserable for it. Our optimization for maximum comfort has inadvertently stripped away the very mechanism that grants life meaning.
Every piece of modern convenience, from the streaming queue to the delivery drone, is a victory for the Law of Least Effort—our ancient, survival-driven instinct to conserve calories. But what served us in the savannah is now sabotaging our biology, leading to what Jeff Krasno calls Chronic Ease.
I’ve been thinking about this gap between what we think brings happiness (ease) and what actually fuels satisfaction (struggle). The science is clear: our brains are tricked by frictionless living, trading deep meaning for shallow dopamine hits.
It’s time we stop treating discomfort like a system error we need to patch. The real hack isn’t optimizing our comfort; it’s learning to re-embrace the valuable, necessary pain of doing things the hard way.
The Modern Trap: Why We’re Addicted to Ease
The Law of Least Effort: Why We Crave Ease
There is a fundamental, almost philosophical struggle underlying our addiction to comfort, and it’s rooted in what Michael Inzlicht terms the Law of Least Effort. This universal principle, rediscovered by multiple scientists over a century ago, states unequivocally that every organism tested—from simple animals to complex humans—will inherently choose the path of least resistance when seeking the same reward. If you doubt this, just observe the desire paths—those shortcuts cut across meticulously manicured lawns on a university campus; that is the Law of Least Effort made manifest, universal and undeniable. This instinct wasn’t a flaw; it was a survival strategy.
When we were wandering the savannah, conserving calories was paramount. Why run if you could walk? Why walk if you could stand still?
Every calculated effort was weighed against energy conservation, ensuring we had reserves for moments of genuine scarcity or danger. Michael Easter, speaking on this profound evolutionary mismatch, notes that this inherent wiring to do “the next easiest thing” ultimately backfires when applied to a modern world of infinite safety and abundant, cheap resources. Our most adaptive biological impulse has, quite suddenly, become our greatest modern liability.
Chronic Ease: The Dopamine Trap of Modern Life
The true danger arrives when the entire infrastructure of modern life is designed not just to accommodate, but to actively exploit, this deep-seated preference for ease. Health entrepreneur Jeff Krasno coined the necessary term “Chronic Ease,” arguing that the relentless engineering of our lives for convenience and comfort—a process accelerating exponentially in the last few decades—is actively hijacking our biology and fostering chronic disease. We have, in the pursuit of seamless living, effectively optimized ourselves out of health. This exploitation is most insidious in the realm of reward circuitry.
We are constantly chasing “frictionless or low friction foraging.” Think:
- endless scrolling through curated content,
- the immediate gratification of two-day shipping, or
- the horrifying speed and accessibility of modern sports betting.
This is dopamine without effort; the payout isn’t earned through investment, it’s merely consumed 1.
When dopamine spikes without an accompanying struggle, our neurological baseline drops dramatically, leaving us perpetually in a deficit, desperate for the next easy hit. The essential counterbalances—reflection, states of boredom, meditation, or simply leaving your phone in your pocket while walking—are precisely the acts of invested effort that are systematically vanishing from our lives.
PICC: How Comfort Creates “First-World Problems”
What makes this entire cycle so frustrating is the ultimate realization that the pursuit of total relaxation—the mythical “Freedom 55” with a piña colada on the beach—doesn’t actually deliver enduring satisfaction 2. Instead, the more comfort we attain, the less emotionally robust we become. This is the tragic outcome of David Levari’s insight. Prevalence-Induced Concept Change (PICC). Levari’s groundbreaking research demonstrated that as genuine problems become scarce, our perceptual systems automatically lower the threshold for what we define as a problem.
In one study, when participants ran out of truly threatening faces to identify, they started flagging increasingly benign faces as dangerous. Applied to life, this means as real trauma and existential struggles recede, we don’t stop and feel grateful; we simply broaden our definition of what constitutes a “discomfort.”
The slow WiFi, the slightly rude barista, the unexpected traffic jam—these become magnified, internally generated crises, emotionally equivalent to the struggles our ancestors faced. We end up perceiving the exact same number of problems, but they are now fabricated entirely by our lowered threshold.
The Effort Paradox: How Difficulty Creates Meaning
The Effort Paradox: Joy vs. Meaning in Struggle
We’ve established that we are biologically wired to avoid effort (the Law of Least Effort). Yet, if that’s true, why do people constantly choose difficult, grueling tasks? This inherent contradiction is what psychologist Michael Inzlicht terms the Effort Paradox. Economists and product designers constantly seek to eliminate friction, maximizing our laziness, but we simultaneously pursue challenges—like an excruciating early morning hike—where the struggle is the entire point.
Inzlicht’s research offers a critical separation we rarely make: the difference between pleasure (or joy) and meaning. When subjects rated a list of everyday actions, the data was stark: the more effortful a task was—whether doing taxes or working out—the less immediate pleasure people derived from it. But here is the pivot: the more effortful the task, the more profound the meaning.
Parenting is the ultimate, grueling demonstration of this paradox. If you survey parents hour-by-hour, they are often miserable—sleep-deprived, cleaning messes, performing thankless chores; they report incredibly low momentary joy. They are often miserable—sleep-deprived, cleaning messes, performing thankless chores; they report incredibly low momentary joy.
But ask them if parenting is meaningful, significant, or purposeful, and the answer is universally yes. Costliness imbues vital value, revealing that the costliness of the task imbues it with an extra, vital layer of human value.
Effort Equals Value: Mastery and the IKEA Effect
The meaning isn’t something handed to you; it’s earned through the exertion itself, solidifying a priceless sense of competence. We instinctively cherish things we have suffered to acquire. Think of the famous IKEA Effect, where people who painstakingly assemble a flat-pack piece of furniture—sometimes poorly, ending up with a few extra screws—value that item far more highly than an identical, professionally built one. That extra effort, that sweat equity, becomes an added layer of psychological meaning.
Inzlicht demonstrated this mechanism even with the most mundane, controlled effort. His team gave one group a boring, yet effortful, task: taking a four-digit number and mentally adding three to every digit. The control group performed a non-effortful task: adding zero to every digit. The most mundane, controlled effort.
Which group found the exercise meaningful? The one that had to actually strain their brain, however trivially. Strain their brain.
The dull effort was reframed as important and worthwhile, solely because friction and cognitive cost were present. The takeaway is radical: your brain interprets difficulty as importance.
Peterson’s Rule 7: Meaning Over Selfish Expediency
This entire phenomenon leads us straight to Jordan Peterson’s core philosophical challenge. He argues that life is fundamentally a choice between pursuing expediency and pursuing meaning. Expediency is the easy path, the instant dopamine hit, the immediate consumption of your feelings in the refrigerator to assuage some emotional discomfort. It is yielding to the Law of Least Effort in every single moment, maximizing short-term comfort at the cost of long-term integrity.
Meaning, conversely, requires accepting the Effort Paradox. It means committing to the difficult pathway, knowing that while it feels costly now, it is the only reliable way to build a life that feels important, significant, and purposeful. The mature choice is to consciously inject effort into things like reflection, fasting, or finding the space between stimulus and response when confronted with an annoying person or problem.
The true return on investment isn’t fleeting joy; it’s the structural stability of a self constructed through intentional, meaningful struggle. We must reject the temptation of chronic ease and instead hunt for the “good stress” that makes us competent and whole.
The Biology of Struggle: How Your Brain Rewards Hard Work
Dopamine: Invest Effort, Don’t Just Spend It
The Effort Paradox finds its neurological explanation in the circuitry of dopamine, but we have to abandon the notion that dopamine is merely the “pleasure molecule.” It’s far more accurate to view dopamine as the molecule of motivation, drive, and effort. Crucially, the way we engage with dopamine determines whether we are spending or investing it. When we indulge in frictionless consumption—the infinite scroll, the instant comfort—we are spending our dopamine.
This depletes the account, leaving our motivational baseline perpetually low, forcing us into a cycle of addiction and need for ever-stronger, easier hits. Investment, on the other hand, comes through hard work where the effort itself is the reward. Michael Inzlicht learned this when he realized the “fun” wasn’t publishing the paper in a prestigious journal; it was the grueling process of doing the experiments and attaching the reward (the celebration or recognition) to the strenuous effort, not just the outcome.
This idea of investing dopamine through reflection, meditation, or even just tolerating boredom, is key to restoring our neurological resilience. We’re teaching our system that the necessary discomfort involved in trying hard and pushing limits is intrinsically valuable. This learning—this ability to tolerate effort—transfers across domains, building general industriousness and boosting adrenaline and norepinephrine to make us feel generally alert and capable, ready for the next challenge.
Eustress: How Heat, Cold, and Stress Build Your Brain
If effort is the currency of meaning, then physical stress is the vehicle for resilience. This is the concept of eustress, or “good stress,” which health entrepreneur Jeff Krasno writes about, where deliberately introduced physiological adversity mimetics fortify our bodies and minds. We are engineered to seek thermal homeostasis, but stepping outside the comfortable 98.6°F “warm porridge” zone forces powerful adaptive changes.
For instance, deliberate heat exposure, such as sauna use, is a powerful stimulus for Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF). This is monumental because BDNF not only maintains existing neural function but can actually stimulate the growth of new neurons, defying the old, dismal pronouncements that our brains stop growing by age 25.
Similarly, cold exposure—which I, and many others, “fucking hate” in the moment—dramatically boosts dopamine production in a protracted, beneficial way, building emotional resilience and metabolic health, providing interesting avenues for things like addiction therapy. The lesson is simple: ease into the very edge of your discomfort, because that edge is where biology rewards you.
Optic Flow: Why Trail Running Calms Your Fear Center
One of the most potent ways to weaponize physical effort against modern anxiety involves the interaction between movement and neurological calm. Consider the difference between running on a perfectly predictable treadmill in an air-conditioned room watching CNN, versus trail running. The former is merely physical exercise; the latter is a mental, emotional, and biological intervention. When we move forward outdoors, especially on uneven terrain that requires constant navigation, we activate something called “optic flow.”
This lateralized, repetitive eye movement, first discovered by Francine Shapiro (who developed EMDR trauma therapy during a walk), is powerfully effective at suppressing the amygdala—the brain’s fear center. Running on a trail is not just about moving your legs; it forces your brain to engage with novelty and manage micro-risks, mimicking the ancient, necessary danger of persistence hunting.
The brain sees forward ambulation through a dynamic environment and registers: I am moving, but I am safe. This neurological feedback loop reinforces our capacity for self-regulation and reduces stress hormones. This process of integrating physical exertion with environmental unpredictability calms the fear response, achieving a level of calm fundamentally unavailable on a mechanized belt in a climate-controlled box.
From Theory to Practice: Building a Life of Meaningful Effort
The Trail Runner’s Narrative: Building Resilience Through Ordeal
The shift from understanding the science of effort to embodying it requires a conscious narrative change. This is the difference between simply experiencing difficulty and choosing an ordeal, like the trail runner Mary Pan. She signed up for a run in the Pacific Northwest that was already challenging, but when snow started falling the night before, the event transformed from a tough race into a genuine ordeal. This voluntary confrontation with adversity is what allows us to write a heroic story about ourselves.
People with better mental health don’t deny that bad things happen; they simply reframe the narrative, asking: What can I learn? How can I grow? 1. reframing the narrative
Mary Pan’s story becomes a template for her internal monologue: “I persisted when the conditions deteriorated. I finished that slushy, 40-mile day carrying a heavy pack.” The physical achievement is temporary, but the reinforced identity—the self-story of resilience—is permanent, overriding the temptation of expediency.
The Arctic Reset: How Extreme Discomfort Recalibrates Gratitude
If our biggest danger is Prevalence-Induced Concept Change (PICC)—where comfort makes us obsess over small problems—the solution is a perspective reset so radical it forces us to recalibrate our entire definition. Michael Easter, author of The Comfort Crisis, provides the perfect example, having spent over 30 days in the extreme environment of the Arctic. Most of us feel “inundated with challenge”—costly bills, lack of sleep, an unstable news cycle.
But when you endure a challenge that requires you to burn 6,300 calories a day just to survive while carrying all your necessities, everything changes. Easter’s experience, and the experiences of others who engage in activities like intense volunteering or attending recovery meetings, forces a brutal, immediate juxtaposition between real problems and “first-world problems.” Hearing a story from rock-bottom or freezing while attempting to sleep outdoors gives you necessary context, allowing the minor irritations of civilized life to simply dissolve away.
Industriousness: Effort as a Transferable Skill
The psychological benefits of effort aren’t siloed; they bleed across every area of your existence. This is arguably the most valuable finding: industriousness is a transferable skill. Michael Inzlicht’s research demonstrates that if people successfully learn that effort is rewarding in one domain—say, learning a new language or mastering an uncomfortable cold plunge—they are demonstrably more likely to exert effort on a completely new, previously unexperienced task.
We are actively teaching our children and ourselves the wrong lesson when we only reward success. We should instead focus on rewarding trying, regardless of the outcome, because the ability to tolerate the unpleasant feeling of pushing yourself is what truly builds capability.
By praising the effort, we teach the brain that struggling is itself the victory, creating individuals who are fundamentally more industrious and capable in the face of generalized life problems. Effort is how we become the hero of our own story.
Fasting and Friction: Creating Space Between Stimulus and Response
You don’t need to commit to an Arctic expedition to start investing effort; you just need to install deliberate friction points in your daily routine. Time-restricted fasting is an excellent example because its benefits are as much psychological as physiological. While fasting offers metabolic advantages like autophagy, its underrated power lies in forcing a conscious engagement with discomfort 3. When hunger pangs strike outside your eating window, you are forced to pause.
You cannot mindlessly wander to the pantry. Instead, you must ask: Is this biological need or emotional desire? This forced restriction creates a profound, Viktor Frankl-esque space between the stimulus (hunger) and the response (eating), giving you a moment of choice and, critically, liberation 3. Creating that mental space under mild duress is the ultimate exercise in emotional resilience, transferring the skill of “saying no” from the kitchen to the rest of your life.
Conclusion
We’ve explored how our ingrained “Law of Least Effort” and modern life’s “Chronic Ease” conspire to trap us in a cycle of low-friction, high-dopamine pursuits. This constant quest for comfort, while seemingly benign, actually lowers our threshold for problems (thanks, PICC!) and hijacks our natural reward systems. It’s a dangerous evolutionary mismatch, as Michael Easter would put it, where what once helped us survive now hinders our well-being.
But as we’ve seen, the narrative doesn’t have to end there. The “Effort Paradox,” as defined by Michael Inzlicht, reveals that while immediate pleasure might decrease with difficulty, the long-term reward—meaning—skyrockets. Whether it’s the “IKEA Effect” showing how our own labor imbues objects with value, or the profound significance parents find in the daily grind, effort is intrinsically linked to worth. Jordan Peterson’s Rule 7 frames this perfectly: choosing meaning over selfish expediency isn’t just a mature decision; it’s the path to a robust self.
The science further underscores this: investing effort, rather than just spending it, builds resilience and motivation. Deliberate stressors like cold plunges and saunas offer direct physiological benefits, while activities like trail running, with their “optic flow,” actively calm our fear centers. And perhaps most encouragingly, industriousness isn’t fixed; it’s a transferable skill we can cultivate through intentional challenges, from a snowy trail run to mindful fasting, each creating vital space for choice and growth.
So, as we navigate this modern landscape engineered for ease, remember that true fulfillment isn’t found in the absence of struggle, but in the meaningful embrace of it. The path to a richer, more resilient life isn’t paved with comfort; it’s forged in the fires of intentional challenge.
We are defined not by what comes easily, but by what we choose to overcome. The greatest reward isn’t found in the destination, but in the character we build on the arduous journey itself.