I was re-reading Seneca’s On Providence this morning. I’ve read it a bunch of times before, but it hit hard again.
Every time I feel complacent or start complaining too much, I go back to the Stoics. They remind me of something I’ve always felt: Hardship is good.
Most people think happiness comes from comfort. From eliminating struggle. From making life as easy as possible.
But comfort is overrated. Life without challenges is not life at all. It’s an early death.
Hardship as training
Even as a child, I had a sense that hardship was good. My parents always offered to drive me to school when it rained. But I detested that. I would just put on a rain suit and go to school on my bike in rain, snow, or storms.
Throughout the years, my parents brought me to school a handful of times, and that was when I was sick. And even then, I put my bike in the car so I could cycle back myself. I just didn’t want to be weak.
On top of that, where we lived in the Netherlands, you would hear it all day from your friends if you didn’t come on the bike. We would say, “Are you made of sugar or something? Wuss.” That was my generation. I’m not sure it’s still like that today.
I was talking about this with my wife the other day. We just found out we’re expecting a boy. I told her I hope he never wants us to drive him to school. Not because I wouldn’t want to, but because I think it’s character-building. Then I said I don’t know about this generation that loves comfort. I wouldn’t be surprised if the making fun of you for having your parents drive you to school is no longer around.
Seneca saw this clearly two thousand years ago.
“Excellence withers without an adversary. The time for us to see how great it is, how much its force, is when it displays its power through endurance.”
Strength only grows through resistance. Seneca said that wrestlers don’t train with weak opponents. They demand to fight the strongest. Otherwise their skill rots.
Life is the same. Prosperity makes you soft. Struggle makes you tougher.
Fail. Fail again. Then win.
The pattern of life is often the same:
Fail.
Fail again.
Fail some more.
Then win.
That’s how you build endurance. That’s how you learn to fight back after setbacks. That’s how you build a spine that doesn’t bend at the first sign of adversity.
Seneca again:
“Prosperity that is undiminished cannot withstand a single blow; but the man who has struggled constantly against his own ills becomes hardened by suffering and no misfortune makes him yield. Indeed, if he falls, he still fights on his knees.”
The person who only knows good times crumbles the first time things go wrong. But the person who fails often, who gets knocked down, who knows pain, becomes unshakable. That’s the type of person I want to be.
Always have a fight in front of you
One way to practice this is to always work on something massive. A project you can never finish. For me, that’s writing.
I’ve been at it for more than a decade. And I can say I’ve improved. But every time I get better, I realize how much better I can get. There’s always something to improve.
There’s no finish line. That’s the point.
When you commit to something endless, you train your endurance. You accept that you’ll never be “done.” You learn to love the process of fighting uphill.
Shun luxury
Another way: Avoid luxury.
Marvin Hagler, the famous boxer, once said: “It’s tough to get out of bed to do roadwork at 5 a.m. when you’ve been sleeping in silk sheets.” He was right. Comfort kills drive.
Seneca warned against it too:
“Shun luxury, shun good fortune that makes men weak… unless something happens to remind them of their human lot, they waste away, lulled to sleep, as it were, in a drunkenness that has no end.”
Luxury is a trap. It feels good at first, but it slowly eats away at your strength. It makes you fragile. The less you can tolerate discomfort, the less you can tolerate life.
I’ve always kept my life relatively simple. Not because I can’t afford more comfort, but because I don’t want to lose my edge. I don’t want to grow dependent on silk sheets.
Hardship is a gift
Here’s what Seneca said about parenting:
“Do you not see how differently fathers and mothers show their love? The father orders his children to be roused early to pursue their studies, not allowing them to be idle even on a holiday, and wrings from them sweat and sometimes tears; but the mother wants to cherish them in her embrace and keep them out of the sun’s glare, and wishes them never to know sadness, never to shed tears, never to toil.”
It’s not about the role of the father or mother because sometimes it’s reversed. The point is that it’s the parents’ encouragement to do hard things that builds strength.
Harship is not here to crush us, but to build us.
This is how I want to raise my son. Not sheltered, but tested. Not protected from every difficulty, but prepared to face them.
If you think about it, hardship is really a gift. But you never think that way when you’re doing the hard things. You think to yourself, “I wish it were over.”
But afterwards, you always look back, and say, “I’m glad I did it.”
Adversity as medicine
The hardest lesson Seneca teaches in On Providence is that even the worst tragedies can be of benefit. Poverty, exile, sickness, disgrace. He compares them to surgery. Painful, yes. But often the only way to heal.
If you never face adversity, you never test yourself. And if you never test yourself, you never know your strength.
Demetrius, a Stoic philosopher Seneca admired, said it best:
“Nothing seems to me more unhappy than the man who has no experience of adversity. For he has not been allowed to put himself to the test.”
That’s the real tragedy. Not suffering. Not loss. But living a life so easy that you never discover what you’re capable of.
The early death of comfort
So here’s the lesson Seneca shared: Hardship is the way forward.
Do the hard thing. Get up early. Take the long route. Do your thing regardless of the weather. Take on the project you can’t finish. Resist luxury.
Fail. Fail again. Fail some more. Then win. That’s the rhythm.
Life without challenges is not life. It’s an early death.
