Whoever has taken an Economics class should have heard the phrase, “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” It means that everything has a cost. To achieve anything, you must give up something else. In today’s happiness-obsessed culture, sometimes we want happiness with no costs, all benefits. We want the rewards without the risks, the gain without the pain. Ironically, it is the unwillingness to sacrifice anything that makes us more miserable.
Just like anything else, happiness has costs. It is not free.
Everybody wants what feels good. Everyone wants to live a care-free, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing relationships, to look perfect, be popular, well-respected and admired. It’s easy to want that. Everyone wants that. Then, what’s the point? The important question is not what you want in life but it’s more interesting to know what pain do you want to sustain? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives end up.
Everybody wants to have an amazing job and financial independence, but not everyone is willing to suffer through 60-hour work per week, long commutes, tons of paperwork, corporate hierarchies and an infinite cubicle hell.
Everybody wants to have an awesome relationship, but not everyone is willing to go through the tough communication, the awkward silences, the hurt feelings and the emotional psychodrama to get there.
Happiness requires struggle. Basically the good feelings we all want as human are more or less the same. Therefore what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we are willing to sustain.
Some people want an amazing body. However you don’t end up with one unless you legitimately love the pain and physical stress that comes with living inside a gym for hour upon hour, unless you love calculating and calibrating the food you consume, planning your life out in tiny plate-sized portions.
Some people want to start their own business. However you don’t end up become a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to love the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether it will be successful or not.
We’ve been told a hundred times before that “Nothing good in life comes easy.” The good things in life we accomplish are defined by where you enjoy the suffering, where we enjoy the struggle.
I’ve always love the idea of being a tennis player, yet I’ve never made consistent effort to practice regularly. The truth is I don’t enjoy the pain that comes with swinging the racket until my arms go numb and heat of the sun during afternoon practices. For me the cost outweighs the benefit and that’s fine.
On the other hand, I am willing to grade exercises and exams, to study again and teach the same topic repeatedly, to deal with different kind of students, to get lost in Econometrics to find significant result over and over and over again. That’s because those are sort of pain and stress I enjoy sustaining. That’s where my passion lies, not just in the pleasures, but also in the stress and pain.
There is a lot of self-development advice out there says “You’ve just got to want to it enough!” Well that’s only partly true. If you want the benefits of something in life, you have to want the costs as well. If you find yourself wanting something month after month, year after year, yet nothing happens and you never come any closer to it, then maybe what you actually want is a fantasy, an idealization, an image and a false promise. Perhaps you don’t actually want it at all.
You can’t have a pain-free life; it can’t all be rainbows and unicorns. Choose how you are willing to suffer because that’s the hard question that matters. Happiness is an easy question and pretty much all of us have the same answer. The more important question is the pain. It matters because that answer will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that can change your life. It’s what makes me me and you you; it’s what defines who we are and how we become.
Ceteris Paribus 
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