Laziness is contagious. We’re supposed to just nod along like it’s normal that everyone’s just surrendered to a banal existence?

Nyad (2023)

“I get tired of sitting on cushions. Cushions in my car, cushions on the chairs at home, everyplace I go they have cushions.”

Lou Gehrig

I’m running late for a group ride. And I just realized I didn’t pack my helmet. At this point, it’s very easy to call the whole thing off. It’s a valid excuse, and I’d definitely get to jump back under the covers. However, I choose the ever so slightly harder path, rush to get my helmet, and made it to the meetup point with a few minutes to spare.

There’s nothing particularly disciplined or uncomfortable about what I chose to do there, but these small, forgettable moments hold a great deal of influence on whether we actually stick things out. Diets, workouts, projects, relationships, can all die from the smallest wounds.

Marcus Aureliuus famously questioned our need to huddle under the blankets and stay warm, but comfort seeking is built into us. Take a look around. We prefer comfort wherever we can get it, from the daily routines that make up most our lives to the support and familiarity we seek from friends and community. You’re probably even reading this from a comfy chair. So if we’re ever going to stick to a diet or workout, at some point we’ll need to face this wired-in tendency for laziness and comfort-seeking.

The good news is there’s no need for extreme feats of endurance. We simply need to find small ways to stop quitting and giving in when things get tough. In every aspect of lives, we need to tough it out.

A lot of adulting boils down to being okay with what’s laid in front of you. We can complain about our responsibilities, but eventually we do them. You might not get excited about filling up the petrol tank, budgeting or getting your teeth cleaned, but at some point you stop resisting and you accept the responsibility. It wasn’t always like this though. At some age in your life, cooking dinner for yourself would have been a painful, herculean task, and now you just do it. Why should exercise be any different? We’re adults when it comes to vacuuming, why can’t we be adults about exercise?

We’ve all got a picture in our minds of what disciplined or discomfort looks like. These pictures and beliefs are usually informed by our upbringing, conditioning or latest action film we’ve seen. We think we need to push ourselves harder or go further than we’ve ever gone before. But that’s performance, not discipline. Toughing it out is simply how you respond to any little moment where you want to give up. Whether we’re a novice, or a professional athlete, any workout will present a number of little obstacles. It could be obvious (a massive hill to climb) or extremely subtle (a niggling scratch on a finger). But how you respond matters. Do you give in? Do you take an easy way out? Do you cut corners?

Taken to the extreme, seeking voluntary discomfort can come across as silly, entitled and masochistic. In Living with a Seal, this taboo is explored in a light hearted way when a well heeled businessman invites a Navy Seal to be his live-in personal trainer. We never learn much about The Seal aside from his love of push-ups and contempt for lazing about. I wanted to know what he was thinking as they go for a run around Central Park in the middle of the night. Did he find this stuff meaningful? Did he enjoy it? Was he laughing on the inside at the absurdity of it all? He’s a man of few words, and we get no philosophy, reflections or even a reason why he’s so disciplined in the first place. The message really did seem to be that simple: discipline and discomfort do some good.

Epictetus was an emancipated Greek slave turned Stoic philosopher living in the Roman Empire (55-135 AD). Many of his thoughts around what it means to be free have been collected into the short book Of Human Freedom. Using lots of examples from his own life, friends and culture of that time, he makes the case that cultivating (psychological) freedom was the ultimate goal of human life. Freedom, ‘the power to live our life the way we want’, and the peace and happiness that comes with it, could be achieved by giving up a desire for things to be a certain way and accepting things as they are. The opposite of freedom is slavery. External stuff like reputation, money, fame chain us down, simply because they are never truly in our control. How can you be free if there is any sort of dependency or condition on that freedom?

How do we get free?

Freedom therefore needs to be developed internally and be a total surrender to fate. It can’t be anything less. He talks a lot about the will of the gods, but this hasn’t got anything to do with faith or religion. It’s simply an acknowledgement that life is mysterious, complex, ever-changing and impossible to control. Any sort of manipulation, tweaking or what the Buddhists would describe as clinging is like slamming the brakes on a car that’s already sliding on a sheet of ice. Painful and not very useful.

Peace is hard work. Change is uncomfortable.

Freedom doesn’t come easy. And if there is a cliché image of the Stoics as miserly, grumpy men in rags, Epictetus comes across as the grumpiest. To him, the stakes (your peace and happiness) are high. Like a strict teacher, he wants nothing but your best effort. We need to take this introspection and reflection really seriously.

Not only does it take hard work, but a more stoic approach to life will change how you behave and respond in daily situations. Let’s say you’re a competitive runner. By recognizing that you are attached to your race results (external), you’ll naturally recognize that you can’t be happy if those results don’t go as planned. You might develop a healthier relationship with your running but it’s also going to be hard for you to race so blindly again. This is a common trade-off. Change is uncomfortable. It could be a diet. You might start to watch your snacking and suddenly find yourself battling nagging thoughts that you have ‘become boring’ or ‘too strict’. 

A common response to dealing with both the relentless reflection of Stoicism and the messiness of earthly life is to go and metaphorically live in a cave. Like devotees to any religion, Crossfit or new self-help book, it’s sometimes easier to blindly follow the rules. The problem is our minds. We can automatically bias toward behaviors that our minds have deemed to be safe and comfortable. Epictetus calls this out by asking us to consider why we read books in the first place. Books “are helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.” An introvert will happily do all the hard work, as long as it happens in their quiet study.

It can be difficult to get some separation between ourselves and our biases and proclivities. Here’s an example that shows how we tend to avoid uncomfortable stuff. Read it slowly and really see if you can feel your response:

“When you do this, it will drastically change your life and behavior. Things won’t be the same.”

See? I didn’t even say anything and yet a part of you likely felt some resistance. Maybe your mind dismissed it with an eye roll “oh yeah right, that won’t happen.” Or tried to temper it and control it “um that sounds a little bit extreme.”

If there’s a condition, you’re not free

Recognizing that your mind sticks blindly to preferences and ingeniously covers over its own trails is hard to do. It’s like a really good magic show, where you are both the mastermind behind the trick and the awe-struck audience. It can feel a bit like trying to negotiate with someone who is gaslighting you.

For months after I read Of Human Freedom, part of me felt confused and conflicted. My mind could not accept the contradiction that it had created for itself. The idea of mental discipline felt incompatible with relaxing control over my actions and embracing the random, chaotic nature of everyday life. The more I dug into that resistance the more my mind tried to point me in another direction, tried to make me to stop, to throw out the book or to dismiss my confusion as unimportant.

Ultimately, my mind was very happy to practice some of the ideas of Stoicism on the condition that it remained in a safe and comfortable zone. But freedom has no conditions.

Hesitation is the worst of all crimes

Mahabharata

If there’s one positive thing to say about a personality test, it’s that they are short. Answer a few simple questions and a few minutes later you possess a shorthand for understanding yourself. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), the most popular personality test, is based on Jung’s theory that we have a mixture of of attitudes (extraversion or introversion) and a primary way of seeing the world (thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition). These cognitive functions help us to make sense of stuff, make decisions and form a large part of our personality. But they’re not perfect and even Jung emphasized the fact that these labels are more useful for orienteering rather than any sort of definitive explanation.

The last time I took a personality quiz, about eight years ago, I was told that Thinking was my primary function. I wasn’t surprised, since I’m often ruminating or lost in thought, but I remembered feeling disappointed with the job suggestions for a ‘logical’ type like lab technician or legal clerk. Recently, I took the test again and got Intuition, quite a different way of seeing the world than categorizing and analyzing everything. Had I got myself that wrong? Have I been ignoring my strength this whole time?

Jung defined intuition as a “perception by ways or means of the unconscious.” It doesn’t sound practical, but there’s good reason we all have the capacity for intuition. When you live in primitive conditions, like humans have for most of their existence, unpredictable things are likely to happen. The weather turns nasty. Floods. Famines. There’s a river or an impassable mountain right where you least expect. These situations couldn’t always be foreseen by sights and sounds alone. When you can tap into intuition, you now have ‘hunches’, hints, deeper feelings of uncertainty or confidence. To help him survive, man learned to listen to these gestures from the unconscious.

Since I usually rely on my ego to make decisions, I am not comfortable being intuitive. And it turns out, in 2023, I don’t think you need intuition to get by. Our culture and the modern world is geared around, protects and encourages Extroverted Sensing type people (practical, outgoing, social, pragmatic) types to succeed. We have really good signage, GPS systems and documentation to explain the world and make it really easy to get around. Gamblers, the classic ‘extroverted intuit’, who think with their guts are probably beaten by machine learning models or uber-rationalists. Even dreams are ignored by most people, or denied entirely.

But without intuition, decision making can degrade. It’s appropriate to use your ego to shave or make your bed. But often it gets in the way and even makes the process of decision making feel worse. Take driving for example. If we are good drivers, we’re usually letting muscle memory do most of the work. But when we need to stick a difficult park, we might find ourselves thinking our way through it: “Is he leaving or not? Can I fit there?” This can feel painful. We hesitate. We second guess. We jitter. This is where we make mistakes. It’s like we have suddenly slammed the handbrake on bubbling unconscious processes. And the longer we hesitate (is it this turn off or the next?), the more confused we get and the more likely we are to take the wrong turn.

I really can’t blame the personality assessment. Unfortunately, because our sense of self is a bunch of thoughts and feelings we believe about ourselves, there is a risk that a personality quiz can have too much influence on us. I was the one who created a narrow world view, who told myself for years that I’m a thinker and I’m only interested in cold hard facts, not the test. By ignoring my unconscious, and my gut, I have tended to approach decisions (and driving) in a halting, hesitating way.

If you can accurately find out your primary cognitive function, go for it. Like using your whole leg to push the pedals, life should roll more smoothly for you if you can lean into this strength.

But if you have any doubts about your ability to self-assess, don’t bother. Instead, I think it’s worth learning the framework, and notice what you can in yourself and others.