Life is Hard, But You're Harder

Why accepting life's inevitable struggles is the first step to real strength

We're all going to face loss.

Real loss.

The kind that changes everything and leaves you wondering how you'll ever feel normal again.

We'll watch people we love get sick. We'll experience betrayal from people we trusted completely. We'll fail at things that matter deeply to us. We'll face our own mortality, probably sooner than we'd like to think about.

These are experiences that are part of being human.

And somehow, despite knowing this intellectually, most of us go through life shocked when difficulty actually shows up. We treat hardship like it's some cosmic mistake, like we were promised smooth sailing and someone broke the contract.

Expecting life to be easy is the source of most of our suffering. Not the events themselves, but our belief that they shouldn't be happening.

Marcus Aurelius wrote:

"At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: 'I have to go to work — as a human being.'"

He understood that struggle isn't a bug in the human experience. It's the fundamen…