What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him. –Viktor Franklquotes

I nearly titled this section Challenge or Strive or Vitality because they felt cleaner coming out of the mouth. They call up images of intensity, growth, and great effort.

Instead, I deliberately chose Struggle, it’s the word we use when our Body is tired, our Mind is foggy, or our Spirit is broken.

Here, struggle is not a sign that something has gone wrong but that an attempt is being made to achieve something in the face of difficulty or resistance, which I think captures a broader wave of thinking in our modern culture. It is the price we pay of becoming real.

The question is never whether you will pay it, you will. The question is whether you will pay it deliberately, in small honest installments, or whether you will let it compound into something that owns you.

Yes I want challenge.  Challenge is a clear obstacle. Yes I want vitality.  Vitality is easy energy and strength.

These are important qualities to cultivate, but they are too ordered for the point I’m trying to make.  Struggle strikes that imperfect balance we’re seeking for the chaotic resistance we encounter everywhere. It is the name for the day to day effort required to navigate the complexity of life.

What do I mean by struggle?

There are many levels to it and we’re going to try to pick them apart. 

Struggle is born of parts pain, parts fear, parts suffering, parts discomfort, parts power disparities. Struggle can be found through casual ignorance, or avoidance, and shows up in the great unavoidable chapters of life - grief, regret, illness, endings.

It ranges from the mundane to the unbearable: the email you don’t want to open, giving a speech to a crowd, the private war with a habit, or the contemplation of our finite lives. 

It can be the cheap kicks that promise relief and deliver fog: shopping, scrolling, TV, gossip, alcohol, and the engineered comfort of salt, sugar, and fat. It can be anxiety and depression. It can be racism, sexism, and economic inequality. It can be trauma.

All of that sounds negative because much of it is. And yet we all face our own personal mix of these realities. We cannot escape them.

• “We gain the strength of the temptation we resist.” – Ralph Waldo Emersonquotes

• “The nearer a man comes to a calm mind, the closer he is to strength.” – Marcus Aureliusquotes

At the same time, struggle can also be the most ordinary, constructive thing in the world. Any act that improves who you are today over who you were yesterday. Anything that beautifies the world around you. One more rep. One more page. One honest conversation. Picking up litter. Lending a hand. Repairing something you were tempted to discard, inside yourself or around you.

So how should we view struggle? And why is it foundational to our life’s bedrock? 

I want you to see yourself as a resilient, flexible, and robust person first and foremost.  Struggle is one of the main ways that resilience is built if you learn how to dose it, interpret it, and recover from it.

There’s a lesson in biology, in a controlled environment where trees are given everything they need (sun, water, nutrients), but are not provided the natural stresses of nature, the trees die before they fully mature.  In nature, trees are subject to winds and storms which provides constant feedback during the tree’s growth.  This creates what is called ‘stress wood’ which actually strengthens the tree, allowing it continue balanced growth without going too far in any direction that would ultimately hurt it.

The point isn’t that suffering is good. The point is that some resistance is formative and balancing. Struggle, properly chosen and properly recovered from, is how robustness is built.

Struggle contains both suffering and growth. That’s the first reason people get it wrong. They see one and deny the other. They treat struggle as either purely noble (“the grind”) or purely tragic (“this shouldn’t be happening”). Reality is messier. Reality is struggle-shaped.

Let’s make it useable.

Let’s reorder the kinds of struggle.

1. Necessary struggle - This is the friction that comes with being alive: limits, loss, entropy, aging, uncertainty, other people’s wills, the fact that you can’t control everything. You don’t “win” against necessary struggle. You learn to carry it through recognition and experience.
2. Chosen struggle - This is voluntary difficulty in service of something you value: training, craft, study, building a relationship, creating a home, making something beautiful, taking responsibility. Chosen struggle is where strength is forged.
3. Manufactured struggle - This is struggle you create, often unintentionally, through avoidance, distraction loops, status theater, needless conflict, and self-deception. Manufactured struggle feels like motion, but it produces little, burning energy without building capacity.

Here’s the hinge: you cannot eliminate struggle. You can only choose (and learn to recognize) which kind you’re paying. Chosen struggle reduces Necessary struggle later. Manufactured struggle increases it.

In practical terms: struggle is any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity. It’s an act toward our higher nature as mature responsible adults lifting us, slowly, toward a fuller life. Struggle leans into the idea that challenge, risk, and discomfort have a vital role in transformation.

What’s the ideal that I want to nudge you towards?

The whole-hearted embrace of struggle, bear hugging each issue, subduing and harnessing it into service. Rising to meet each challenge, processing it into something useful, and seeing the results slowly start to pile up as a balm for the soul.  

Imagine cutting wood. Each log is a challenge in your life and you use your faculties to break them apart.  It’s hard, it’s blistering, you have to sharpen your axe, it may take much longer to finish than you expected.  But, you’ll see the split wood start to pile up and it will become the fuel that sustains you through winters both real and metaphorical. The expended effort coupled with self-satisfaction will make you sleep like a baby.

Let me translate that again for you: There is this necessary thing in life, here it’s getting wood to keep warm in a bitter winter. In order to make the necessary useable, it has to be made into appropriately sized pieces, here chopped wood fits in the stove and burns better. The task requires some preparation, here sharpening your axe. It will require effort, here the physical task of chopping, stacking, and carrying wood. It will require a sacrifice, here a blister, a splinter, or a sore muscle. But, it offers a reward, here a pile of wood, a warm home, and sleeping like a baby.

Everything in life is like this. I’ll repeat again, everything in life is some version of this. The thing might not be as necessary, the thing might be easier or harder to make useable, the task might require almost no preparation or a huge amount. It will require effort be it mental, physical, moral, or spiritual. There will be a sacrifice be it time, pain, or trade. But, there will be a reward and the greater the embrace of struggle the greater the reward can be.

I can hear some of your brains revolting.  You push a button or twist a dial to have a warm home. You’re already overworked, underpaid, with an asshole boss, you’re bone tired, dealing with a chronic health issue, insurance complications, no help from your kids or significant other, sabotaged by your parents, an expensive bill is coming due, and no change on the horizon.  Holy shit, I hear you.  Who am I to suggest struggle is a good thing?

I can hear other brains saying, there’s enough struggle in the world, given the choice I’d escape to some cabin in the woods or play video games all day. 

Another subset of brains stopped reading a while ago, this text is too incongruous with the current shape of their brain and they aren’t in the right place to incorporate it, they couldn’t struggle through.

Remember - we’re still building Bedrock. We’re orienting our Mind, fueling our Body, and lifting our Spirit. Struggle, and the ramps of Discipline and Nurture, is likely the most difficult mental shift in this whole book. Accepting Struggle is the foot in the door that makes the rest of the upward evolution possible.

Remember - reality is struggle shaped, you are going to pay it and option presented here is to stop wasting it and start using it as a tool and a currency that will buy you something back.

Struggle is information before it is an enemy. If you treat it as a defect, you’ll numb it, appease it, or rage at it. If you treat it as a signal, you can steer.

Name the kind - necessary, chosen, manufactured. If you don’t name it, you will reach for the wrong tool and call the failure “proof.”

Shrink the installment until it becomes possible. Struggle wins by scale. Pay two minutes. Pay one sentence. Pay one honest swing of the axe.

Engineer the terrain. Reduce friction for the right thing. Increase friction for the wrong thing. You are not only a mind—you are a creature in a habitat.

Translate emotion before you obey it. Anxiety often means uncertainty. Anger often means boundary. Shame often means repair. Grief means you loved something real.

Rehearse before the storm. Repetition turns chaos into a known test. The day you need strength is not the day to meet the tool for the first time.

Recover on purpose. If you never recover, struggle stops shaping strength and starts carving ruts. Pay in rest, food, sleep, sunlight, stillness—whatever returns you to yourself.

Ask for help early. If a struggle has looped for weeks, it’s no longer a private contest. Strategy, accountability, care, community—reality includes support.

Watch for the shadow: Entrenchment. The moment you’re repeating the same suffering without learning, without truth, without recovery—that’s the moment to change the pattern, not just try harder.

Want it even simpler? Use The Gap

1. Spot the thing
   A challenge appears. Notice it without immediately fighting, fleeing, or numbing.

2. Pause in the gap
   One breath. This is the choice point. It’s small, but it’s where agency lives.

3. Name it cleanly
   What is this, really? And which kind of struggle is it—necessary, chosen, manufactured?

4. Choose the next honest installment
   Not the heroic overhaul. The next swing of the axe.

5. Close the loop
   What worked? What didn’t? What will I try next time?

This is where the next chapters fit. Discipline is how you keep paying the installment even when you don’t feel like it. Nurture is how you recover so that chosen struggle doesn’t become damage.

Two examples (one extraordinary, one ordinary)

In 2008, Michael Phelps dove into the Olympic final and his goggles filled with water. He was effectively blind. The mind’s default in that moment is panic: This shouldn’t be happening.

But he had rehearsed chaos. He counted strokes. He executed a rhythm built in training. He converted an unexpected catastrophe into a known problem with a known tool.

The lesson isn’t “be Phelps.” The lesson is: rehearsed struggle becomes usable under pressure. That’s what Discipline buys you.

Or.

You’ve been carrying a small resentment for weeks. It’s living rent-free in your mind. You replay it in the shower. You tell yourself: If I bring it up, it’ll get worse. If I let it go, I’m weak. If I wait, it’ll resolve itself.

Sometimes that is a manufactured struggle, an avoidance turning into a loop.
But sometimes it’s something quieter and more dangerous: depletion.

When you’re underslept, underfed, overstimulated, and running on fumes, everything feels like a threat. A neutral tone sounds like contempt. A small request feels like an insult. You don’t just avoid the conversation—you avoid life. And then you call it “who I am.”

This is where Nurture matters: not as softness, but as maintenance. If you don’t restore your capacity, you lose access to your best tools. You can’t negotiate well from an empty body and a frayed mind.

The Gap here might look like:

• Spot it: I’m looping—and I’m depleted.
• Pause: one breath.
• Name it: This needs two installments: restore capacity, then speak.
• Installment (Nurture): water, food, a walk, sleep, a calmer hour—enough to return to yourself.
• Installment (Chosen struggle): “Can we talk tonight? I want to clear something small before it grows.”
• Close the loop: What went well? What didn’t? What will I do better next time?

The Shadow: Entrenchment

There is a kind of struggle that doesn’t make you stronger. It makes you smaller.

Entrenchment is what happens when you repeat the same effort without learning, without recovery, or without truth. The rut deepens. The story hardens. The world narrows. You begin to confuse coping mechanisms for identity.

Entrenchment often wears respectable masks:

• “I’m just tired.” (for years)
• “That’s just who I am.”
• “I’ll start when things calm down.”
• “I’m too busy.” (but somehow never too busy for numbness)
• “I’m waiting for motivation.”
• “I’m being realistic.” (when it’s actually fear)

Entrenchment is not solved by yelling at yourself. It is solved by returning to Mind:

• Struggle: stop lying about what’s happening
• Discipline: pay the installment even when the mood isn’t right
• Nurture: recover so you don’t mistake depletion for destiny

Sometimes entrenchment can be a signal that you need outside help from medical care, therapy, community, a change in environment, a different job. Struggle is not a religion of lone-wolf suffering. It is a call to messy reality, and our reality includes support.

And here’s where I’ll say the thing I still believe is true, even if I can’t fully prove it in a paragraph: the need is ancient. Across cultures and across centuries, humans keep reinventing frames that can hold pain. We do it in stories, rituals, art, vows, philosophies—because without a frame big enough to contain suffering, suffering becomes only chaos. With a frame, struggle can become instruction. Sometimes it even becomes devotion.

I think there is a reason all major religions have a core suffering element that is integral to its teaching. Christianity deified it, adherents wear the cross, a device of torture, as a symbol of their belief. Buddhism declares suffering its First Noble Truth. Judaisms major holidays are celebrations of endurance and freedom from past periods of suffering.  Hinduism identifies five klesha or causes of human pain and suffering and sometimes even attribute it to deeds done in a past life. Stoicism acknowledges suffering while rejecting its dominance. Modern philosophers such as Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote, “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.”

If you don’t like religious language, translate it. Craft a story around Struggle that provides an explanation and offers some prediction and intervention.

Why does this matter so much?

Struggle will come for you in a thousand forms. You can spend your life trying to eliminate it and be shocked, again and again, that it returns. Or you can make a different pact:

• I will not worship struggle.
• I will not flee it.
• I will learn to name it.
• I will learn to choose it.
• I will pay it deliberately.

Because the point isn’t to suffer. The point is to become the kind of person who can carry what must be carried and continue to build.

In the next chapters, we’ll sharpen the tools that make struggle usable:

Discipline is the structure that keeps your payments consistent.
Nurture is the sustainability that keeps your payments humane.