We Value The Difficult

(I am taking a philosophy course. It caused my brain to think. Also, sorry about the more or less two months of inactivity on the blog; family and life have proved to me, once again, that I should really have a backlog of posts.)

     Why are the things that are most critical the most difficult to do? Why is it that the important subjects such as math and philosophy give us headaches? Why is it that unhealthy food can taste so good?

     Is it to give those things value? This does not necessarily imply a consciousness directing these things to be difficult; I can imagine mechanisms of the mind and evolution that would also accomplish this without outside interference.

     Whatever the root cause, I think it is good that we must work for important things. We value the things that give us tribulation; we value the things we work for. It is as parents raising children; they may rate each moment of child rearing as an unhappy moment, (fixing dinner, cleaning up after a mass, trying to get them to bed) but they also (usually) rate children as a great source of happiness.

     I have worked some dreadful hours doing tedious projects to accomplish goals that I doubted were important; I treasure those experiences, not because I'd be willing to do them, but because I pushed myself and learned something of what my limits are, and what my limits are not.

     Things we have to work for, we value. Perhaps this is so that we will work for these things; we desire fat and sugar so much because it was so difficult for ancestors to get - if they didn’t desire it so greatly, they would have died out from the lack of vital nutrients.

     It’s similar for many other things. We have to expend effort to get a return. This is true in the physical world, and perhaps our minds are structured that way fundamentally. Perhaps math is so difficult to so many people because it is so important. Perhaps philosophy gives people so many headaches because it is important.

     This, of course, does not mean that everything that is difficult is important. It would be difficult to create a Death Star, but do we really need one? We don’t even know whether there are other planets sustaining life in the universe, not with 100% certainty. (I suspect that there are at least a few.) We are certainly not at war with any of them, and, I imagine, most people on this planet wouldn’t want to just destroy an entire planet filled with life, anyway.

     But perhaps even when difficult things are not important, they can still be the source of things that are important. Take the book Contact by Carl Sagan. (And to some extent the movie, though I don’t think the movie portrayed this very well.) Constructing the orb spawned entire new industries. Nations were forced to work together. A whole philosophy of peace sprung up around this monumentally difficult task.

     What difficulties have you faced in your life that have shaped you? If you had not experienced them, what would be lost? What would be gained? Should that experience be eradicated from the world?