What would life be like if it were ridiculously easy?

“Unbearable,” say Elon and Kierkegaard and everyone.

“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” -Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942

If you listened to Elon on Rogan this week you heard some of the worst cognitive dissonance sent across the airwaves in recent memory.

There sat a man who famously lives in a tiny house in a desert near his rocket factory or sleeps on the floor of his car factory, schedules his time in 15 minute increments for 14 hours a day for the past 35 years, and has more responsibility and demands on his time than the bottom 63% of the U.S. population combined, talking about how blissful it was going to be for everyone after AI and robotics took care of nearly all work that needed to be done and we could just relax.

What?

If lack of work leads to bliss why didn’t Elon quit at 20 million or 200 million dollars? I’m fairly certain he’d still be able to serially knock up good looking 20-somethings and do whatever drugs he wanted to do with a mere 20 billion rather than 200 billion or 2 trillion. Why does he keep working? And what connection does his ridiculous work ethic and his ridiculously hard-earned continuous success have to the fact that he always seems like he doesn’t have a care in the world?

For all of Elon’s genius, dude needs to read more Kierkegaard:

“Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I conceived it as my task to create difficulties everywhere.” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 1846, p. 459 in the Swenson/Lowrie translation)

The previous passage was authored by “Johannes Climacus”, one of Kierkegaard’s half a dozen pseudonyms, many of whom argued competing positions in an attempt to ensure his reader could never rest easy thinking they knew what he was actually saying.

“The task must therefore be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted,” he says elsewhere.

The sentiment has been expressed so many times throughout history that it risks sounding like a cliche, although it is undoubtedly true. Here’s a sampling generated by my hard-working co-author, ChatGPT, hence the “em dash:

Seneca — “Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.” (Epistles, 78.19)

Epictetus — “The greater the difficulty, the more glory in surmounting it. Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.” (Discourses, I.24)

Marcus Aurelius — “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” (Meditations, 5.20)

“We glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope.” (Romans 5:3–4)

The Dhammapada (Buddhist Canon) — “Easily done are things not good and unprofitable to oneself; but what is good and profitable is supremely hard to do.” (Verse 163)

Confucius — “The gem cannot be polished without friction, nor man perfected without trials.”

Friedrich Nietzsche — “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” (Twilight of the Idols, 1888)

Viktor Frankl — “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal.” (Man’s Search for Meaning, 1946)

Helen Keller — “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened.”

C.S. Lewis — “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.”

Fyodor Dostoevsky — “Suffering is the origin of consciousness.” (Notes from Underground, 1864)

Jordan Peterson has convincingly argued, using what should be called the “Peterson Method” if it isn’t already, that ancient wisdom and modern neuroscience point to the exact same lesson. I remember seeing him live in 2019 when he was only first coming to prominence. He explained to the huge, rapt crowd at the Chicago Theater that the meaning of life was to be found in “taking up your cross and marching uphill towards the City of God”. He explained quite cogently that neuroscience had identified the region of the brain that was active when subjects reported feeling fulfilled, happy, etc. It wasn’t active when they were in beach chairs getting blow jobs from AI robot girls, but rather when they were making progress toward a goal difficult enough to be worthy of their sustained effort.

Who woulda thunk?

And it’s not just us. I remember reading an article many years ago about how people were adopting sled dogs as pets and finding they were prone to depression. Someone realized if they put a heavy vest on them and had them carry it around all day, their joie de vivre returned almost immediately…

In the famous Mouse Utopia experiment, mice were given all the food and space they wanted and they fairly quickly killed themselves through narcissism, autism, lack of breeding and laziness.

The inverse is also demonstrably true. Take for instance the generation who foolishly followed their Boomer teachers’ advice and who “followed their bliss”. This quote was made famous by Joseph Campbell, who did amazing work, but was completely wrong on this one, and should have known better. His most famous work is about a bunch of dudes who went through hell to get to heaven. Of course this, not the blissful path, is the Way.

Because of all the blissful paths taken recently, be it “gap years” that last a decade, lattes with warm whipped cream on them, decades in college having neuroses reinforced by lazy professors, fentanyl, porn, or any of the other ways we’ve avoided taking up our crosses and growing up, we now find ourselves in a deep mental health crisis, a political crisis, a meaning crisis, a physical health crisis, a legitimacy crisis, and a real existential crisis (as in we may not exist much longer), all at once. .

Hard times make strong men. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men. Weak men make hard times.

So back to the problem at hand. What do we do when AI and robots make our lives so fucking easy that there isn’t a real need to get up in the morning? I’m quite certain that it won’t be, by default, blissful.

I can imagine a few situations coming to pass:

1. We artificially generate problems the way you might imagine the ladies in the rest home Bingo Club Administration Committee generating mountains of drama each week around which color Bingo cards to buy and which room to hold the club in, simply to have something to do. All of us have met a rich kid or ten who manifests some mental health problems or legal problems or some other kind of drama just to have something to struggle against. Count me out for this scenario. I’ll be on a mountain with a shotgun shooting the robots who come to help feed me.
2. We could set up a much more productive order in which “higher” employment opportunities were made possible by our AI robot benefactors paying our rents. One model for this might be something like the artists of the Renaissance era making great works while being bankrolled by the Medicis, except the Medicis would be made out of steel and silicon.
3. We devolve into Mouse Utopia and that’s the end.
4. The ease we’re about to experience ushers in an equally uneasy time, which makes us stronger than we can even imagine. That’s if we survive.

The second situation, of course, is how the AI proponents like Elon advertise the future, but I’m not at all convinced this is a given. In order for this to be the future, we’d all have to become artists. Real artists. Not rich kid artists who put poop on a canvas their daddy bought them and congratulate themselves for being edgy and then go get wasted, but artists like Michelangelo. How many of us could become Michelangelo, given unlimited resources and time?

We’re gonna find out.