Photo by Joshua Gresham on Unsplash

When I was growing up, I used to believe that life would get easier. I thought once I graduated college and got my first job, the rest of my life would fall into place, and I’d live happily ever after. I thought that struggles would slowly disappear as I figured out life. What I learned, and continue to learn, is that this is a very unrealistic way to think. Let’s put it into the context of playing a game.

Imagine that you’re playing a game on Mode A. As the game progresses, your character gets stronger as it learns more skills, and you get better with more experience. On Mode A, the enemies stay the same strength from level to level, which makes the game not very challenging, and you finish it with ease.

You decide to play the game again, but on Mode B. In this mode, as the game progresses, the enemies level up to match your skill. At some levels, you have to find different methods to defeat the enemy because they are stronger than you. You have to adapt different strategies and upgrade to continue the game. It stays challenging though the end, but you still beat the game.

Which mode is better?

While Mode A was easier, it’s probably more fun to play in Mode B. It makes more sense that the enemies would get stronger as the game progresses, right? You’d feel more satisfied at the end, and beating the game in Mode B would be much more rewarding. You might already know where I’m going with this, but which mode is life in?

Yeah, life is in Mode B.

What I learned is that expecting the hardest, most realistic game to be played in Mode A is kind of delusional. For one, it doesn’t actually exist, and second, even if it did, we’d likely get bored. It’s not challenging enough to keep us interested and the reward wouldn’t actually feel like a reward. It’d feel kind of like receiving a participation trophy. Yeah, it’s cool to get a trophy, but it’d probably sit in the back corner of your trophy case, if at all.

I thought that as I overcame more difficulties and struggles, the next time would easier. In some ways, things did become easier. What I didn’t realize was that there would be different struggles. That as life progressed, I became stronger in some ways, but life challenged me in other ways.

For a long while, I thought I was living incorrectly. If I was living life the right way, wouldn’t things become easier overall? Wouldn’t working become less stressful, relationships become more manageable, and I’d make less mistakes?

As life became harder, I kept thinking I must have taken a wrong turn somewhere. I moved jobs, moved cities, ran away relationships, all because I did not understand that life was in Mode B. As you level up in life, life levels up with you. At each new level, there are new struggles and challenges. That’s just life, and we must learn to accept this.

What’s funny is that even if we accept something, we often forget. One of the few certainties of life, is that it will always remind you that leveling up comes with leveled up struggles. Biggie Smalls understood this as he wrote “mo money, mo problems.”

Writing this article was a reminder of exactly that. Well, not exactly, since I don’t have mo money problems … yet. I hoped that as I wrote more, writing would become easier. I hoped that over time, I’d be able to write just a little bit better, faster, smarter. While I do feel that this has happened on occasion, I am also reminded that just because I’ve written more, doesn’t mean that the struggles of writing disappear. I just get hit with different types of struggles. One week it’s not having enough content, the next week too much. Then there’s the dreaded writers block that can happen at any time. But what I learned is that the more you write, the more writers block you run into. And the more you live, the more struggles you’ll face.

Oddly enough, every time I get a reminder that struggles are here to stay, they get a little easier to bear. I was reminded that, yes, I will struggle, which is completely normal. And while I felt really shitty about myself struggling and banging my head against the keyboard, I felt the best only after overcoming it. How funny life is, that more often than not, the best highs come after the worst lows. Like Harvey Dent said in The Dark Knight, “the night is darkest just before the dawn. I promise you, the dawn is coming.”

So whenever you’re struggling, feeling down about life, remind yourself that it’s normal. You are facing a challenge and life is saying you’re close to leveling up. Keep going. And when you do overcome that struggle, don’t forget to celebrate and feel that moment. Like I wrote in It’s Okay to Have Negative Thoughts, hold the accomplishment in your attention. Let yourself feel the celebration! Then, go chase after the next struggle and enjoy the difficulty because you know that what comes next is your next level.