What To Do If Your Life Is One Big Struggle With No Light At The End of the Tunnel?

Whether you’re reading Stoicism, Christianity, or basically any other ancient philosophy or religion, they each posit that struggles aren’t something we ought to shy away from. Within each view point, struggles create character, they provide meaning, they make us tougher, more resilient, even giving us gratitude for that which we’d ignore if things are only easy and good.

But, what if your life is only struggle?

What if, day by day, month-by-month, and year-by-year, you seem to be further away from where you want to be? You’re not only fighting an uphill battle, but the hill is growing faster than you’re moving up it.

What then?

What’s the point if, after every ray of light, glimmer of hope, you’re met with another obstacle in a seemingly endless cycle of trials?

Where’s the good in pure struggle without victory, without hope, where life keeps on piling on in continuous and relentless fashion allowing you mere moments to breathe before it piles on some more?

I got a message the other day from a guy in response to a post I made on social media, where I talk about ‘pitying the man with no adversity’. He asked, what if there’s only adversity? No victory, no light at the end of the tunnel, no hope?

I’ve felt like this. I know this feeling.

We only have access to the present and the past. We have no clue what the future holds. Our view of the past is a story that we tell ourselves. It isn’t objective. It’s pieces of truth and pieces of fiction, of perspective.

We get to choose that perspective, but few do.

Most will see the things done to them. They’ll see trauma, they’ll see what their parents did wrong, bad friends, bad breaks, bad teachers, a bad lot in life, and they’ll take this perspective to shape their present.

They’ll view their story of the past and apply that to what they think the future will look like, too. So their entire existence is as they view it’s always been.

Even still, what if this isn’t mere story, and struggle really is all there is? What does one do, then? And, more importantly, how does someone thrive when everyday seems like a continual, monotonous uphill battle?

How you see yourself

Life can be brutal. And, it can be far worse than what we’re going through. There’s always worse. You have to be careful as to how you see yourself in relation to the life you’re living.

I’ve read enough history to know that no life is without it’s struggles. And, often, those who end up achieving the most, have the most resistance in their lives.

Still, our struggles don’t seem like some grand quest with lofty trials thrown our way. They often seem like utter crap, where things just don’t work, where things just don’t go our way.

This crap compounds. Like the Chinese water torture, drip by drip weakening our resolve, clouding whatever hope once existed, until we’re a shell of the wide-eyed optimist we once were.

You have to be vigilant. 

Not just careful.

You have to fight the struggles you face, but also the spiritual and mental battle, the water dripping constantly, the tiny little battles lost that weakens your spirit and your sense of hope for the future.

This battle is more important than the actual pursuit you’re engaged in. 

Churchill said, “Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.”

Victimhood removes all enthusiasm. When you see yourself as being ‘hard done by’, as being unlucky, hope becomes despair, ambition morphs into depression, and the actions that will create what you want and bring you out of the struggles, seem pointless.

I don’t know the method by which one holds on to enthusiasm while being blungeoned by life. I don’t know the practice one can keep to keep hope alive. 

But, by keeping despair at bay, by removing any victimhood and self-pity, and choosing to see these struggles as challenges, not as curses, enthusiasm is all that’s left.

Every man loves a challenge. Most challenges are immediate and in our face, it’s the ones that span years and decades that we have to choose to revel in and continue to see as challenges, not as curses.

In one sense, you have to have faith, an overarching faith in yourself, in your life, that the sun will rise, that the work and discipline will be worth it.

In another sense you have to detach, completely, from outcomes. You have to focus only on the work, on the day, on the minute. You have to detach from the dream and fall in love with the puzzle you’re trying to solve.

The puzzle of improvement, growth, evolution, success, event the puzzle of trying to survive.

You also have to see yourself as capable. You’re doing anything and everything to find the right thing to do, and you have to know that when you find that right thing, you’re capable enough to see it through. Which is true.

Especially if you’ve been working, trying, tinkering for a while. You build up skills that defeat talent and innate ability.

This isn’t a trick. It isn’t lying to yourself. It’s the truth. 

If one man can do it, so can you.

Most importantly, however, you cannot pity yourself. You cannot wish things were different. You cannot feel sorry for yourself in any way. No matter how long the struggles have existed, you have to fight, you have to still see them as worthy challenges and you as a worthy opponent.

Be in the moment, not the past or the future. Despair doesn’t exist in the present, it exists in comparing the present to some made up future based on our made up past.

This is your battle. One that you fight daily. Forget about the end of the battle. Forget about what that end may look like. Confine your existence to today, and love that you have a battle to wake up for, even if it doesn’t seem grand, even if it seems monotonous and never-ending, love the struggle. 

This is what life is.

Few accept it. 

Most wish it were different. 

Most long for an existence without some long, drawn out battle. And, as a result, most miss the opportunity to defeat a worthy opponent, to outlast and outwork the daily onslaught, and in doing so, become who they were put here to become.

How you see time

One of the issues with ambition is that it focuses your mind on the future. It makes you want what doesn’t exist now. 

You feel despair daily because you still haven’t got what you want to get, and your entire life exists in comparison to what you want to have.

The good aspects of your life are darkened by the fact that the things you’re focusing on don’t exist in your current reality.

I have not been able to escape ambition, and I do think forms of it need an escape.

It forces us to focus on outcomes. 

Outcomes are a distraction. 

They create that gap between where we are and where we want to be. A gap that’s only filled by doing work, with effort and discipline.

That gap is where all of our focus should be. Not the outcome.

This future-focused ambition needs to be dropped and replaced with the overarching ambition for one’s life and how we want to live. We are not lazy. We want to improve. The ambition to be our best, regardless of outcomes and what we have to show for it, is pure and good.

We have to go through this gap between tasks, effort, and work, to get to the goal regardless, but focusing on the outcome takes us out of this gap and makes the work we have to do seem pointless because it hasn’t created what we want… yet.

Spending time in the future makes the time we’re spending now, worse.

You might think that you need to dream to have the drive to do the work, but you don’t.

You simply need to do the work. You simply need to struggle. You have to love the ambition that is trying to be the best man you can possibly be in every area of life.

The ambition of who you are, not what you have.

Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself, "The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."

This gap, this impediment, this process and path, this is the way, this is life. This ought to be our focus.

Detach from outcomes. Focus on who you are, the skills you have to develop, the grit and resilience you have to acquire. Focus on getting better, not getting better things.

How you see struggle

The point is not that struggle itself is good, but that struggle builds us, if we let it.

Struggle can make us tougher, more resilient, even more skilled and better at what we do. It can force us to improve, to actually get better, to become more disciplined, more skilled.

It can also make us more positive. When we’re forced to find and search and even create ‘the good’ where many would only see the bad, we become happier humans, more resilient and antifragile humans who are happy no matter our circumstances.

We become enthusiastic no matter what our surroundings may be.

This is the height of what a man can be, unswayed by circumstance, unbothered by failure, unrelenting and unwilling to quit no matter how grave and uncertain his reality.

We all get discouraged, we all have periods where we lose faith and hope and enthusiasm.

We have to see this as it is, weakness.

It is not us. It’s not who we are, and it’s certainly not who we can and ought to be.

Taking pride in struggling well is something to hang your hat on.

Be one of the few humans on the planet that doesn’t get sad or overcome by self-pity when the struggles pile on. Be one of a handful of humans on the planet who remains happy even though everything around him burns.

Be great, regardless of circumstance. 

We lose this opportunity when we look at how others appear to be living, when we compare our lives to those around us or on the screens we hold in our hands.

We lose this opportunity when we compare where we are to where we want to be.

When we wish.

We cannot wish for a life without struggle.

We cannot wish for our struggles to end before their time. Their time is their time, all we can do is work and improve and stack worthy tasks on top of one another without losing the enthusiasm for the work we do.

We cannot wish to control that which is not under our control. 

We can only take command of that which we command.

The work. The mindset. The reaction to the events. The emotions. The hope, faith, and worldview that enables us to move forward one step at a time.

It is a sad existence to have one’s level of happiness be determined by one’s surroundings.

Keep in mind, I am writing this to myself, too. This is a slap in my face as well. I ebb and flow with how things are going. It is not how we ought to live.

The thing about discouragement

Discouragement often comes when we do a lot of work but the results just don’t seem to be coming.

Of course, ‘results’ are subjective, especially if we’re comparing them to what we ideally want, which is a never-ending moving of the goal-posts.

What we have to get better at is rewarding the work, feeling good after a task has been completed, regardless of the outcome of the work we did.

We need a dopamine spike after a task, not after what accomplishing that task might bring us.

The work has to be the reward.

We have to be consumed by the present, by the journey, the process.

This is how we opt out of discouragement, by doing things. When you’re not stacking tasks, you’re studying, learning. When you’re not learning, you’re playing, or building your body.

You are not in your own head.

You are not ruminating.

It’s the practice of constantly thinking about our struggles, our lot in life, the distance between where we are and where we want to be, that amplifies the negatives. They consume our thoughts and therefore our lives, and soon enough they’re all that exists.

Discouragement is a choice. It’s a choice to ruminate.

In a sick and perverse way it feels good to feel sorry for yourself. It removes responsibility. Our minds are disgustingly creative have making us feel like it’s not our fault. Of making us feel like victims. It’s intoxicating. 

Every day lives are ruined, potentials are erased, by people choosing victimhood over responsibility, by ruminating instead of buckling down and working.

Be careful, be vigilant. 

Don’t ruminate. Don’t spend time thinking about yourself, your life, where you want to be, where you are. Just get after it. Move. Act. Risk.

You can choose your mood…

Finally, there’s the idea of mood, of our disposition. 

As men, we feel the weight of the world on our shoulders, and we let that weight affect our mood.

And, well, it’s a heavy weight. Our backs can be completely against the wall. There can be very little hope in our circumstance.

Our entire world and everything we care about within it, is at risk of being lost. Not an easy thing to just brush off, is it?

Let’s face it, when struggles continue and they compound and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel except in some corner of your imagination that you go to every now and then when you’re alone, it can weigh on us, it can feel suffocating, the pressure can be relentless.

On top of that, we feel as though we have to wear that pressure internally and externally. 

It’s as though if we aren’t impacted by this continual struggle, that we don’t care. And if we seem like we don’t care, it’s as if we’re not trying hard enough. 

We feel we have to be in a horrible mood when things are horrible because that shows skin in the game. 

Imagine if things are going absolutely horrible, you’ve had decades of struggle, no light at the end of the tunnel, and you’re somehow happy?

People would assume you’re lazy, they’d question whether or not you’re giving it your all, heck, your wife might even do that.

But, who bloody cares about other people and what they think?

That’s the first thing. You shouldn’t ever give a rat’s arse about what others think, how they perceive your situation.

Second point, a stressful demeanor and a bad mood makes work less effective. Meaning, the things we have to do to get out of the struggle are made less effective and efficient with stress, with weight.

Stress is a choice. It’s a response to an event or circumstance. We can choose any response to any event we want. And choosing to be happy even while your world seems to be burning, is the better response.

To exemplify this, we turn to history and the story of Stilbo from Seneca’s Epistles…

When Demetrius the Besieger sacked the city of Megara, he asked the philosopher Stilbo whether he had lost anything in the destruction. Stilbo's answer: "Nothing. I carry all my goods with me." 

Here’s what he’d lost when he gave that response: his homeland was captured, his children and wife were lost, and he emerged from the general destruction alone, yet happy. 

This is insanely extreme. But, an example nonetheless of how we can choose our mood, and how we don’t have to adopt a mood to show others anything.

Here’s the other thing…

Our mood propels us to work better. A good mood brings creativity and energy, it brings a lightness, whereas brooding stressfully only compounds the negatives that may exist in our surroundings.

The choice is a simple, yet insanely difficult one; to choose to be happy even though it seems as though something as light as a feather could crush us.

When you think about it, we don’t really have an option.

We can let stress pile on us. We can pity ourselves, wish things were different, ruminate and brood.

Or, we can love the challenge, be happy, commit to improving daily no matter our circumstances, and enjoy the process.

It’s a two-headed coin. Both deal in reality, but we get to choose which reality we want to live in.

It takes work, practice, journaling, a constant battle to stop your negative thoughts in their tracks and move your way of thinking back to a worldview that helps you live better, but it seems to be the better way to operate. 

If you notice, I didn’t, at a single point in this article, write about how things will get better, how there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

We are the lever that turns on the light.

It isn’t a light that depends on outcomes, on results, on something to show for our struggles. It’s an internal light, a process-focused light, a light of self-improvement not circumstance improvement.

And, if our happiness, meaning, and joy depends only on good circumstances, we’re going to live a fragile life where our happiness depends on things outside of our control.

It’s a weak existence.

Constant and persistent struggles have many a purpose.

It forces us to get better, tougher, more skilled, to focus on the present, to alter our ambition, to detach from outcomes, and so forth.

But, maybe the overarching purpose of struggles are for us to fundamentally understand and know that our happiness is independent from our circumstances, completely so.
That is toughness. That is grit. 

The man how can withstand anything with a smile on his face, not because he's bottling things up or hiding what he's really going through, but because the degree to which he enjoys life is not dependent on any circumstance.

That is a man.