No, Everything Doesn't Have To Suck | #291

March 17th, 2025: Greetings from Austin! I had a ton of fun with today’s post. I think you’ll like it. Please share this if it makes you smile or laugh.

Every Single Thing You Want Is _______?

Scrolling the feeds last week, I encountered this post from Sahil Bloom

He posted it with the phrase, “Everyone needs to hear this.” Of course, he’s posting this for social media likes, and it’s perfectly designed for maximal reach. Still, even if it’s meant for virality, it is hard to imagine that there are people out there who have somehow escaped the “you need to grind harder” propaganda and need to internalize this truth more deeply.

The idea that you should try harder, grind more, and push through hard things is so pervasive that it would be nearly impossible to find someone on this planet who hasn’t spent time beating themselves up with the thoughts, “Am I working hard enough?” or “Maybe I just need to push harder.”

Yet, when I reposted the image with a simple response: "I literally learned the opposite lesson in my 30s," some people lost their minds.

How could you be against hard work?

This is the problem with today’s culture!

This is crazy, don’t follow this person’s advice.

I tried to reason with them, arguing that I was only claiming that things like work don’t have to suck, that it’s worth considering that you can enjoy things.

Someone said it was a “dangerous idea.” Another person argued that I was just sharing that sentiment after “extreme success” (please show me the riches lol). One more said that it should come with a “warning label.” They argued that 999 out of 1000 people would likely have to grind and suffer, and I was the 1 person who somehow broke free from this predicament, and that telling people that they should consider work doesn’t have to suck could ruin someone’s life. In that scenario, someone would theoretically be consuming a post by Paul Millerd, then decide that doing things they enjoyed was a good thing to consider, and then next thing you know, their life is in shambles.

It’s also worth noting that these comments were on X.com, which I know, I know, I should probably just stop spending any time over there, as the collective IQ continues to decline. However, it’s a bit too tempting to poke at super successful people who are weirdly worried about how much pain and effort people are experiencing in moving toward their goals. It’s probably not a coincidence that the laoban of said site happens to be going through a mid-life crisis, glorifies the grind and puts power, business, and now “owning the libs,” ahead of everything in his life, including his 14+ children.

The grind worldview, one espoused mostly by men but also some hustling madames, is in no danger of being undermined lest these people worry. But the people who project this kind of panic are increasingly cult-like. It’s very bizarre. You’d think that people committed to getting through hard things could handle a gentle suggestion of alternative life strategies.

Here’s the truth that these people hate: You can like your work. Projects can feel light while still being challenging. You can spend many hours on things because you care about them and not because of some extrinsic goal. And you can do things without overcoming anything or feeling the need to denigrate others who are not grinding hard enough.

Struggle = life is the default assumption, but it doesn’t have to be the only option

I am enthusiastic about sharing this alternative perspective because I went more than 30 years without knowing it was possible. Before I quit my job, every decision I made assumed that I would have to struggle.

This is because a less intense version of the hustle playbook has been preached to most people around the world for the past 50+ years. As a kid, I was told about 3,482 times before I entered the workforce that eventually I needed to “learn how to work hard,” and reminded by many that thinking work could be enjoyable was naive. I am writing this from the U.S., where people describe Sunday gardening as “productive,” policies that improve things like homelessness are scrapped because you just can’t give people “something for nothing,” being laid off is still something people hide from their friends and family, anxiety about getting your kid into the right preschool is normalized and where busyness is often a badge of honor.

On top of this, it’s already an immensely popular message. I meet the members of the hustlerati in the saunas in Austin. They are maxxing their HRV on Whoop, crushing podcasts on 2x, drinking water through $5,000 water filters, harvesting their own meat, doing ultra marathons, working every day, doing exactly 11 minutes of ice bath per week, and of course, waking up to Jocko’s voice.

We are at 0% risk of people not being aware that struggle, hard work, and grinding are available as options. This is the default perspective on work, it’s the water in which we swim.

I would go further and argue that this general orientation toward work does immense harm to many people who are simply not wired to be putting work and achievement at the center of their lives.

It causes the things that the grinders theoretically are afraid of: acedia, cynicism, nihilism, depression, health issues, dysfunctional relationships, and even death. But these are often dismissed as “normal,” because they are simply common. I suspect that for every 1 person crushing it in their personal hustle olympics, another 5 are stressed or beating themselves up for not keeping up.

But despite all this, their ideas don’t scare me, nor do I think they are dangerous and don’t even need warning labels. The hustle playbook works spectacularly for a certain kind of person and I wish they would simply celebrate that, pump out some more GDP for us to enjoy, and stop being so weirdly concerned about the effort levels of others who don’t have an ounce of interest in building a holding company of cash flowing assets.

You are allowed to enjoy things

For the last 7-8 years I’ve been working at a modest pace on stuff I’ve cared about, never come close to burning out, have opted out of pushing harder at almost every opportunity, and have changed course several times when I felt I was grinding toward things that didn’t matter.

As an example: my book, nothing about it sucked. There was no pain. Sometimes I would get stuck on a word or paragraph, but I would just take a break or return to it later. At no point did I ever push through a metaphorical wall or lock myself in a cabin in the woods and then self-coerce myself to finish it. Maybe if I were working with a traditional publisher and they tried to change something I didn’t want, that might have sucked, but I didn’t experience that. The whole reason I attempted a book was because I had been having fun writing with no goals for a couple of years and wanted an interesting challenge. Throughout the process, I simply stayed connected to the same feeling of enjoyment.

When things didn't feel right, I stopped. Now I want to keep writing books because it's satisfying. I could make this more complicated and start telling a story to myself and others about how I sit down each day, push through the pain, and heroically arrive at a book many months later. And I suspect that because this is the dominant story with writing and work more broadly, a non-trivial number of people follow this approach and it turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy. But my experience with writing and work more broadly is not even close to that. Writing is pleasant, and when it’s not, I stop. I do face challenges, but it is in no way painful, it’s simply the experience of being at the frontier of my capacity with something I like doing.

Over and over again people are surprised that they have never thought to consider the question, ”What if work could be enjoyable?”

We are still early.

Two weeks ago I was hosting a lunch discussion at an event around work with a bunch of young people. I asked people to share the work scripts that they grew up with. A few I remember:

“If you aren’t struggling, it’s not worth doing.”

“You need to have a stable job.”

“Work is about sacrifice for your family.”

I then asked people how they might have looked at work differently if they were raised with the idea that “work could be enjoyable.”

Laughter all around. Smirks. People find it funny because it’s so opposed to everything that most people are told. The idea that work doesn’t have to suck is still niche, and of course, not dangerous.

There is far more alpha to be realized by encouraging as many people as possible to consider the idea that work doesn’t have to suck.

I wish I had read an article like this when I was 25. I wish someone had sat me down and said, “Paul, you keep jumping from job to job, trying to find a path that suits you in an environment much better suited to people that love the grind, maybe you should question your assumptions about work?” This is still somewhat shocking as a first-gen college student from New England, where puritan grind is in our soil.

I never felt good on the achievement path. And contrary to the hustlepreneurs who are more successful than me, worried that I am espousing different tactics after grinding and achieving worldly success, that is not my story. I left with a number in my bank account that would make the least ambitious hustle bro shudder with terror.

But of course, quitting and searching for a new path was never about money. It was a search for a different life path, not a different work path. The kind of benefits I’ve experienced are invisible or impossible to imagine for the most driven people. They can tell people, “push harder,” and everything will work out, while I’m usually having to say, “here are some clues, you’ll have to figure things out on your own terms.”

You’d think the grinders would love this sort of curiosity-driven agency. Alas.

I still did have to go through some “suck” but it wasn’t the actions I was avoiding, it was the emotions I was avoiding

The “suck” that I did have to go through was facing my emotions. And so perhaps Sahil is right. To get to enjoying my work, which I now so clearly want, I had to do the painful thing of facing my fears by stepping into the unknown. But the confusing thing about that discomfort was that as soon as I stopped trying to avoid my emotions and let them wash over me, I realized that the much harder thing in retrospect would have been staying on my previous path. So to the grinders, I should have turned around and gone back because that would have been the harder thing to do. Which is obviously silly.

So perhaps I might edit Sahil’s post to:

“Everything you want is on the other side of uncomfortable emotions you don’t want to feel.”

And I suspect this is what grinding is all about for a non-trivial number of people: avoidance of the scary feelings. And in a culture where achievement buys status, who is to blame them?

This also helps explain why the idea of "enjoying your work" feels dangerous to some. It’s not an alternative approach to work, of which there are already many, it’s a direct assault on their entire worldview and personal identity. They generate worst-case scenarios as a defense mechanism:

• “If everyone took your path, society would fall apart” (we are nowhere close to this)

• “If people think they can just enjoy life, they’ll waste their life” (I generally trust people are not going to blow up their lives at the thought of work not sucking)

• “People without resources can’t take your path!” (Again, mine is still a niche view, one that is hardly popular)

• “If everyone adopts this, society would fall apart!” (Quite a slippery slope)

Sir, these are your insecurities, not mine.

The interesting thing is that when people enjoy what they do, they seem blissfully uninterested in other people’s effort levels or general approach to work.

Over and over again, I’ve seen that when people find work they enjoy, things that want to commit to over the long term, they stop thinking about themselves as a part of a zero-sum rat race and instead worry much more about how to build their life around doing the good work they want to keep doing.

The great thing is that the grinders can adopt this spirit too.

Grind on the commons. Grind on your local community. Grind by spending more time with your family. Grind through a wonderful book. Grind out a volunteer event. Heck, even grind on a weird solo creative project without vast teams of financial capital or contractors helping you optimize every single part.

I’ve been writing about alternative paths for years. It continues to amaze me how many already successful people get triggered by the notion of lighter, more joyful paths to a full life.

I am wildly happy for people who grind and are thriving. I wish I were wired like them simply because the world is a magical place for grinders.

But most people are not like that.

Most people I know are doing things that aren’t a grind. Most people are not trying to accumulate as many assets as possible. Most people are doing normal jobs and normal things at a normal pace. And the bigger risk I suspect is not that these people are not grinding hard enough, it’s that many have never considered being nicer to themselves for not being able to keep up.

We don’t have a scarcity of grind.

We have a scarcity of optimism, earnestness, kindness, sincerity, curiosity, delight, aliveness, and exuberance.

We should worry more about those than the marginal benefit we might get from extracting 1% more effort out of the population.

Sahil’s post says "Every single thing.” The wording is meant to trigger and spread. It’s an effective post. But I don’t even think it captures Sahil’s true orientation toward work and life which actually seems quite balanced. He did respond and say we should do a pod about it, which could be fun. I’ll keep you posted.

Of course, the post triggered me. But I am the underdog in this fight. We live in a hustle culture, not a “do work that feels good culture.”

We have plenty to gain by tipping the balance toward more joy and less pain.

There’s no need to be scared of others not grinding all the time. The final aim of humanity is not to accumulate assets. Most of the joys in life are slow and beautiful.

So remember:

feel free to share this, but…

Be careful out there, the hustle police are watching 👮

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Leisure Wine Retreat In Transylvania?

An internet friend, Vizi Andrei posted a story on Instagram about a retreat he’s hosting in Romania oriented around slow living and developing a new philosophy of leisure. He’s running two, June 14-16 and July 8-10.

I’ve mentioned him before here, about his contemplative book The Sovereign Artist. He is worth following.

I messaged him and said I wanted to share it with people. I feel like it’s a good fit for this issue 😂. I have no affiliation other than just hoping I can attend one in the future.

What started out as a fun experiment two years ago is now an undeniable reality! I’m hosting a few more retreats this summer at the intersection of wine, art, beauty, history and philosophy.

The truth is—I’m not a big fan of retreats. They’re largely very commercial and ultra expensive. Yet this is precisely why I decided to give this project a shot! I was faced with two options: complain about retreats or create better retreats.

The goal of this retreat is to challenge you with a new philosophy of work and leisure. An avant-garde Dolce Far Niente. We will discover higher pleasures, the art of procrastination, how to waste our time, the real meaning of slow living, and grasp what the Romans meant by Otium.

If you want more details, you may message Vizi on Instagram, Substack, or send an email to viziandrei@outlook.com with the word RETREAT

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This is still fun, so I keep writing.

Which I’ve been doing since 2015. I’ve somehow figured out how to hack a living doing things like this too. Without grinding :-)

If you like what you read here, you’ll probably enjoy my books The Pathless Path and Good Work. If you’d like to meet others on “pathless paths”, you can join The Pathless Path Community.

Some things I endorse: Crowdhealth, an alternative to US health insurance, Kindred, a home sharing app, and Nat Eliason’s Build Your own AI Apps course.

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