Think you like an easy life? You’d be wrong. When left to our own devices, we always choose to do what’s hard, despite our preconceived notions of ourselves.

I remember a time when I had no responsibilities, and all I wanted to do was play Quake. This was before e-sports was a thing, and I assure you that this statement sounds way less juvenile when you learn that the game was released three decades ago. So yes, the younger me harboured thoughts of being the best Quake player in Malaysia for nothing other than to have bragging rights.

Back then, video games were the penultimate hobby associated with losers. Cash pools of one million dollars and internet clout surrounding games had yet to exist. So, like the programmers of the 1980s (and not the app creators of today), we, too, were relegated to a group of people who had nothing going on for themselves.

But video games are hard. And mastering them takes time. Trying to land a headshot requires arguably the same motor skills that help you nail a piano score. The only difference is that you don’t receive admiration or a standing ovation for it (at least until now, how times have changed).

All this to say that life could’ve been so much easier had I chosen to simply do nothing. But then, there are the people who take doing nothing to another level. And these people meditate. That’s hard, too. So no matter who we are and what walk of life we come from, we are innately drawn to hard things. It’s just in our nature to put value on what is scarce. And scarce surely ain’t easy.

Our lives are already hard by default. We’re born, we struggle to survive, we lose our loved ones, and then get ill ourselves. And on top of all that, we go out and seek whatever makes our lives harder, for no reason at all.

Because have you ever tried learning to cook? Not trying to scorch the meat is hard. Making sense of the techniques is hard. Seasoning a cast-iron pan is hard. And still, people move on to becoming Michelin-star chefs.

I’m also aware that there are schools of thought that champion the philosophy of self-love. These perspectives state that nobody should ever go through hard times, and we’re all entitled to a happy life. But what this story is getting at is that perhaps we shouldn’t be so averse to hard. Because everything is hard. And hard makes us stronger.

Maybe playing Quake didn’t directly improve my life, but it taught me how much effort I had to dedicate to a pursuit to ever become decent at it. It showed me that even the things in life I deem most enjoyable can also be a chore when you start taking them seriously. It also taught me that I have so much more in the tank than I think I do.

Finding what’s hard and overcoming that is how we find our place in the world. I may not understand why it’s so important for you to write the letter ‘r’ perfectly in your calligraphy classes, but I see your frustrations when I try to break my five-kilometre pace and come up one second short.

So yes, seeking the hard may suck, but it makes us better people. And if we all realised that truth, life would be so much easier. But asking that of everybody is, in its own right, hard.