A great way to ruin your life is to equate happy with easy.
It sounds harmless. Who doesn’t want an easier life? But once easy means happy, hard has to mean unhappy. So every hard thing gets refused and every easy thing gets embraced. Not occasionally, but every time.
The early alarm for prayer, working out, or the extra hour of study? Hard, therefore unhappy. Hit the snooze button. The friend who tells you the truth instead of what you want to hear? Difficult. Unhappy. Time to find other friends who can make you happy; that is, make things easier. The hard conversation with your spouse? Unhappy. Skip it. While avoiding these things, you plunge yourself into scrolling, snacking, streaming. All these pleasant acts promise happiness and ask nothing in return. So you gobble them up.
Now ask, what kind of life would this produce? How would this person’s character, productivity, knowledge, or relationships be after years or decades of this lifestyle?
It’s not a stretch to imagine that a life spent dodging every single thing that would have grown you, strengthened you, or built something lasting won’t work out well. Likely, a life committed to ease will end up with a pile of ruins and a drawer full of worthless, dull trinkets that glimmered like gold when you first grabbed them.
A Goose Chase With No Goose
A while back I gave a talk called “A Wild Goose Chase: The Pursuit of Happiness” (you can read it here). My argument was that most of us chase happiness with the same formula: “If I just have ______, then I’ll be happy.” Money, experiences, success, legacy. We fill in the blank differently, but we all use the same equation and we all come up empty. We’re on a goose chase with no goose.
Equating happy with easy is that same dumb chase in its laziest form. It doesn’t even ask for money or success. It only asks for immediate comfort, the kind that leads us to an even worse goose than the rest.
Happiness Is a Second Thing
The problem, as I argued there, is that happiness is a second thing. First things are roots and second things are fruit. You can’t grab the fruit directly. You get it by tending the root. C.S. Lewis said it well: “Put first things first, and we get second things thrown in; put second things first, and we lose both first and second things.”
The person who chases easy is chasing a second thing. However, the roots that produce real happiness are almost always hard: character, faithfulness, love that costs something, and a life ordered toward God. These are what make a human being whole and they never come cheap, easy, or comfortable. Like a strong body, happiness only comes after a good amount of boring habits, sweat, and pain.
I’ve told the story of a philosophy professor whose teenage daughter was upset when he wouldn’t let her go to a party. “Why don’t you want me to be happy?” she asked. He answered, “You are too young to be happy. You first need to learn to be good, and then you’ll be able to be happy.” That’s the ticket. Good first, happy second. Root, then fruit. Hardness unto happiness.
Hard Is Not Your Enemy
Scripture never pretends the good life is the easy life. “For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:11). Paul says suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, and character produces hope (Romans 5:3-4). James does too (James 1:2-4). Of Jesus we read, “for the joy that was set before him endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2). Christ’s greatest joy was on the other side of the hardest thing he ever did.
So the next time something is hard, don’t read it as unhappy. Ask a better question: is this hard thing a first thing? Will it make me more faithful, more loving, more whole? If so, the difficulty isn’t a sign you’re headed away from happiness, but a sure sign you’re headed toward it.
What hard, good thing are you avoiding to maintain your happiness (i.e. ease)? The gym? Reading a book instead of consuming a reel or two (or 100)? A conversation? An apology? Willingness to look at the log in your eye instead of the speck in hers? The paper that needs to be written by you instead of AI? The difficulty of sitting by yourself with your own thoughts without screens to kill the pain? Going to that church group a second and third time instead of just dropping in the first time? The land of happy is reached by the road of hard and ease is often a detour in the opposite direction.
Are easy things necessarily bad? Not really, but the next time something is easy, make sure it’s real gold before you pocket it. Not everything that glitters is gold. Comfort is often poison dressed as medicine.
