Life is heavy—all of it. Our careers, finances, relationships, decisions, and identities all carry a weight that can be tough to carry at times.
Mere existence in the first world today carries a unique level of importance and urgency that, oftentimes, feels frivolous and inescapable. You are told that you have the ability to be anything, do anything, and achieve anything if you just try hard enough: the meritocracy argument. To an small extent, I tend to agree. If you are able to apply yourself and create value, you can achieve success unrivaled prior to pre-war times. There is more money than ever to go around and more stuff to buy with it than ever. So if making money and buying things is how you define success, then most people can acquire a decent amount of that kind of success.
The issue with this meritocracy approach to success is that it comes at a cost. To achieve that kind of success, it takes a lot of prioritization. You have to prioritize time for education and work. Most importantly, to do this well, you have to invest the most valuable time that you have access to: your time in the earlier years; your teens and twenties, specifically. This is your most valuable time because this is when you can invest the most focus and energy with the fewest conflicts towards long-term goals. Like investing money, the more time it has to compound, the longer it can grow. So what do you choose? Do you invest in your career and material success, or do you invest in your human experience- your friends, family, and character? You can try for both, but they both will fall short of the ideal if you split your time and energy. We don’t tell people this enough. That decision, both what we choose and the fact that we have to choose at all, is insanely heavy.
John F. Kennedy once said, “Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men.”
We take this to heart and impose it on each other. If given the choice to do something slightly easier with slightly less payoff, we consistently opt to do more in hopes of getting more. We expect others to do the same. Why? Because more is better, of course. It may as well be in the modern human constitution. That weight we impose on others, sometimes, is heavier than they can bear.
In a world that seems to feel heavier all the time, we have to find ways to carry this weight, constantly and gracefully. The only way to do that is through training.
Humans have always been beasts of burden. If we are not carrying some weight, facing some challenges, or doing some work, we become complacent, expectant, lazy, and ultimately destructive. If we spend more time trying to lighten our loads, we get weak and are unable to rise to the occasion when the weight of our existence is dropped on us without warning. In that moment, the weight crushes us. When we become bored with the ease of life, we tend to find ways to create challenges. We mainly do this by screwing things up simply to have a problem to fix, only to find that we are ill-equipped to do the labor required.
While it is in our nature to carry a load, we are not naturally built for it. Our ability to carry weight is not one that we are born with, but it is honed by our environment. Children are not born strong; they are raised in environments that require and help them build strength, suited to the challenges around them. That strength can be physical and mental. It can mean the ability to do heavy work or repetitive tasks. It can even be to manage high amounts of stress and responsibility, or simply take orders. All are forms of strength with applications that they are best suited for.
There were times when one primary form of strength could suffice, and that specific strength could be fully utilized and ensure stability in society. That is not the case today. We are all expected to be able to lift heavy things, carry them long distances, do complex math, follow detailed instructions, look good, and remain flexible while doing it. We are not built for that, and we did not train for that. The environment we grew up in did not help us develop this kind of strength, so it all seems impossibly heavy.
If you feel this way, like you weren’t built or prepared for this, or that you can’t carry the weight you are expected to, you aren’t alone. Most of us feel that way more often than we are allowed to admit, because we will be labeled as weak. Being labeled as such doesn’t lend people to help us; it adds more weight: the weight of the label.
Sounds hopeful, right?
There is hope, and it lies in simply a better way of doing things. Choose your weight. Not all weight needs you to carry it. Sure, you have your own baggage that you must tote around, but how much of it are you just carrying because you think it is what you should do?
For me, the first thing I dropped was global and political weight. Our society is a mess right now, live-streamed 24/7, and the only way to keep you watching is by convincing you that this is your weight to carry. Disasters and conflicts from all around the world that you can do nothing about. Pain and suffering that you can’t begin to understand how it would happen, based on your life experience. All this is designed to make you feel the gravity of a situation and compel you to give it attention. If you give it attention, it feeds the machine. Soon, that attention turns to curiosity, then opinion, then obsession. The system will help you accumulate more weight through each step of the process.
Everyone wants you to pick a side. Why? Well, it removes a whole lot of challenges for them if they know which side you are on. They no longer have to appeal to logic or convince you of anything. Even if you disagree with one of ten items, you chose a side, so you will go with it. Us vs. Them mentality creates emotion, and emotion can be bottled, bought, and sold in this economy. Emotion takes up a lot of energy to carry. Energy that could easily be spent in pushing back or walking away.
The other weight that I shed was that of others’ expectations. The things that people said I “should” care about and the things that I had to do to maintain them as connections. A good, healthy relationship of any kind has “musts.” The connection must have some purpose, mutual benefit, cordial communication, boundaries, and a desire to continue the relationship. All that requires me to be an independent actor. Nowhere in that does it say that I must do XYZ to be eligible. Qualifications for relationships make them transactions or plain exploitative endeavors. I have transactional relations with employers and debtors, but not my friends and family.
Trying to meet others’ expectations and requirements robs you of strength and simultaneously adds weight to you. Learning to be your own person, regardless of others’ expectations, is one of the greatest workouts you can do to weight-train.
We do need to be stronger. We need to stop looking for ways to make life easier, because life isn’t easy. It is heavy for a reason, and that’s because it is important. We do things every day that we can’t afford to mess up, and that requires focus, strength, and fortitude. The easy way relinquishes our control and sets us on a course of total atrophy. It is hard to respect someone who cannot support their own weight. The people we admire are those who do what we don’t feel we could: those carrying more.
The weight of life is heavy, but don’t make it heavier than it has to be. Limit what you choose to take on, and don’t be afraid to shed what doesn’t have to be carried. Build strength to carry more of the things that matter and leave some capacity to help others. Sometimes things get so heavy, team lifting is required.