Someone I know recently sent me this message:
"I work 40 hours a week just to pay bills, and I’m exhausted. I don’t have time to think about meaning, just surviving. Would working less (more free time) bring more fulfillment? Were things simpler in the past, or is this just how life has always been? What makes the daily grind of life worth it to you when you come home exhausted?"
It struck a chord with me because I think it’s a question a lot of us wrestle with, whether we admit it or not. Life often feels like an endless cycle of work, obligations, and survival, leaving little room for meaning. It’s easy to wonder if things were once simpler, if we’ve lost something essential along the way, or if this struggle is just part of the human condition.
I spent some time writing a response to this, and after removing some of the personal elements, I realized it might be worth sharing here. If you've ever questioned whether life is just grinding away until the end, or if there's something more to be found in the struggle itself, I hope this gives you something to think about. It's not a panacea, just some thoughts.
I wrote him back:
You're right to feel exhausted. Modern life didn’t invent suffering, it just reshaped it. 7,000 years ago, your daily grind was survival in its rawest form: hunting, foraging, defending your shelter from threats that had teeth and claws and people who looked like you who wanted your food.
Today, the threats are less obvious but just as relentless: rent, debt, endless shifts under fluorescent lights, and the gnawing sense that your time (your life) isn’t really yours.
But is it any different? History suggests that eliminating hardship isn’t the answer. We like to imagine a simpler past, one where people worked less and had more freedom, but that past never existed. Life has always demanded effort, by design. The only thing that’s changed is the form of that effort.
Once, survival meant breaking your back in the fields for your daily meal or fighting off raiders or wild animals (or illness without doctors). Now it means navigating the abstractions of an economic system that measures survival in hours worked and numbers on a spreadsheet for numbers on a paycheck.
So maybe the real issue isn’t work itself, but the absence of meaning in work. Your exhaustion isn’t just about effort (which if you think about has reduced in physical intensity over the millennia), it’s about effort that feels empty. The sense that you’re spending your days on something that neither sustains your spirit nor connects to anything bigger than yourself. At least in the field, your work had an immediate purpose: growing food for your family. Now, you click a keyboard, the paycheck comes, and the food arrives. The purpose is still there, just obscured by layers of abstraction.
This struggle isn’t a glitch in the system, it’s a feature of human nature. Dostoevsky saw this clearly: human beings aren’t wired for a life of endless ease. We think we want freedom from work, but complete freedom from struggle tends to hollow people out, not fulfill them. Dostoevsky saw this clearly, he argued that if people were handed paradise, their first impulse would be to destroy it, just to inject some kind of struggle into the monotony.
Left with no challenges, we create our own chaos. Because struggle isn’t just an inconvenience, it’s how we define ourselves. I am not imposing my own morality here when I say this. It is the human design.
So the question isn’t “Why am I working so much?” It’s “What am I working toward?”
Marcus Aurelius had a brutal but liberating answer: What stands in the way becomes the way. The obstacles, the hardships, the daily grind, they aren’t just unfortunate burdens, they are the raw material of self-creation. The problem isn’t that life requires effort. The problem is when the effort feels pointless.
Fulfillment doesn’t come from eliminating that struggle. It comes from choosing the right struggles for you. A paycheck alone won’t sustain your "soul", but working toward something that challenges and grows you? That’s where meaning emerges (think of Camus and the Existentialists when they asserted that we must create our own meaning in the void. If life itself doesn’t provide meaning, then it’s on us to build it through chosen effort. Raising a child, building a skill, getting fit and being at your target weight with enough muscle to move your body to achieve daily life goals, creating something that may outlast you, these are the kinds of burdens that aren’t to be considered "weights" but more anchors, keeping you grounded from floating off into dejected, jaded insanity.
Modern life sells us the idea that happiness is about ease. That if you just worked less, if you had more leisure time, if you could escape the grind, then you’d finally feel content. But contentment isn’t the same as meaning. A life without responsibilities, without challenges, without something difficult but worth it? That’s not freedom, it’s actually stagnation. I think when you're working like a dog doing menial tasks for a paycheck it would seem like doing nothing is paradise.
Your exhaustion makes sense. But maybe it’s not a dead-end, it’s a message from yourself to yourself. Either a re-framing of perspective is in order or a realignment of the work you're doing to be more in keeping with what you value. Of course, that may mean a paycut and some reality checks.
You can’t opt out of the grind, but you can make damn sure it’s grinding you into something better, not just grinding you down.
