When you really think about it, life isn’t all that difficult. However, there’s certain aspects of life that may be harder to deal with when compared to other life situations, depending on several factors.
Daily Life Tasks (not in any order):
Wake Up
Get dressed
Go to Work or School
Eat Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner (along with snacking as well)
Shopping to provide for yourself or for everyone (not an everyday task)
Enjoying your free time outside of work (from staying home to going out)
Doing chores (from cleaning your house to maintaining your vehicle)
Managing your finances
Personal Hygiene
Sleeping
Even though there’s more life tasks (than the ones I posted above) the increased responsibility as we get older connects to people believing that life may be complicated at times, when in reality, it gets easier when people can handle life tasks at a better rate than before.
In simpler terms, when people learn through various life experiences, their lives may improve in that area of their life.
On an extra note, easier life tasks (such as personal hygiene and eating) are more common sense based, when compared to more complex life tasks (like managing your finances and dealing with your career path).
Wow! It sounds like you have a pretty bland, boring, stable, and healthy life.
You have financial security, a good place to live, no complicated family issues, no bad relationships, no work issues, and no psychological or physical problems. Apparently you don’t even know anybody whose life is not like this.
That’s pretty unusual.
I think you’re quite young. In due course, you’ll find out that life is not quite so simple or regular.
I would rather not have to go to work/school, do chores or maintain personal hygiene if I had my druthers. I’d rather hang out with hot chicks in hot tubs, get massages, travel to exotic places and drink most of the day. In fact the only reason I go to work is so that I can do those things when I can, which isn’t nearly often enough.
Balancing what I have to do and what I want to do is complicated. I’ve seen people who have accomplished my goal and it keeps me motivated,
Note that “complicated” is not the same as “difficult.” I suspect that many people in the past, and in third-world countries today, have lives that are far more difficult than most of ours, yet far less complicated. They have fewer options, fewer choices, and less variation from one day to the next.
To take just one example, some people’s lives were simpler because they hardly ever encountered anyone outside their monkeysphere.
One reason is because, socially, life can be super complex. Social rules, norms, customs, getting a message across the way it was intended, trying to figure out what someone else is thinking, what to do to influence them, etc. is very tough.
I’m just going to talk about this one item, because this is, for many people, an enormous factor that makes their lives complicated.
This article, from January of this year, showed that many Americans were effectively living paycheck-to-paycheck. It quotes several different studies, which stated:
50% of Americans whose annual income is under $50,000 live paycheck-to-paycheck
74% of all American workers live paycheck-to-paycheck
3 out of 10 Americans have no emergency savings at all
(Yes, I know, the first two points somewhat disagree with each other on the percentage, but the general point still holds.)
And, that was before COVID-19, which has resulted in much higher unemployment, and depletion of savings for many people.
If you’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, have little or no in the way of emergency savings, “managing your finances” becomes financial triage:
Which bills do I absolutely have to pay this month, and which can I let go late?
How can I afford Christmas presents for my kids?
I need my car to get to work, but how do I pay for the repair it needs?
And, that is how life gets complicated, with no good ways to un-complicate it, for many people.
You forgot “juggle extremely stressful, no-fail job, followed by job change, with wife’s year and a half cancer battle, including something like 30 consecutive days of in-patient chemo treatment with three or four spinal taps distributed throughout, while a few patients in the wing died every few weeks”. Having said that, I suspect that the majority of folks have far more complex and unpleasant lives much of the time.
I’m not complaining about my life as it did recover from that mess and it’s not a bad gig; but it’s still complicated.
I did notice that the OP’s list was comprised of purely functional activties, and no mention of interpersonal relationships, which, as you and @Velocity have noted, are also a huge factor in making life “complicated.”
Speaking for me, personally, the complications in my life are nearly all based on relationships:
My wife lost her father to cancer a year ago. She’s depressed from that (and from the social isolation brought on by COVID), and her physical mobility has declined dramatically. Yet, she doesn’t want to talk about any of that, and refuses to go to a doctor.
My wife’s mother and stepfather abhor each other, and still share a house, despite regularly getting into verbal (and even physical) altercations.
My parents are both over 80, and at high risk if they contract COVID. So, my visits to them this year have been limited to a handful of outdoor visits. They’re desperately bored and lonely, my mother in particular – she misses me tremendously, and she’s had two siblings die this year, without her being able to see them before they passed.
My sister lives with our parents, and she’s depressed and stressed from having to ride herd on them, so she calls me because she needs to vent.
My niece, who is 28, just got divorced for the second time, and she’s been engaging in all sorts of risky behaviors, because she’s depressed and heartsick.
And most of them come to me to talk and vent and cry, and there are no good answers for any of it.
Another way life becomes complicated is when we consider purpose. If the only thing that mattered was carrying out the will of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Jeebus, or Og, or Cthulu or whatever, then the course of all our actions would be a fairly straightforward matter; those actions, thoughts and beliefs that align with that Superior Being’s ethics are good and those which do not are not good. However, not everyone worships at the altar of such a being, imaginary or otherwise. To what end are these folks’ lives devoted? Why bother washing behind one’s ears, managing one’s finances, or even wearing clothes? Is every action in our life transactional? Are we responsible for feeding other people or looking out for their emotional well being if the meaning of life, the universe and everything isn’t 42?
An acquaintance of mine was a military sniper. He was fond of quoting a colleague who always said, “It’s not the conditions; it’s the decisions.”
Fair enough. Maybe most of the time.
But life, and/or other people with malicious intent, has a way of throwing curve balls at us – curve balls that truly leave us without optimum decisions.
I think of it as driving along and hitting a patch of black ice. Maybe your car stays straight, and you sail through with a bare minimum of fanfare and drama, and with no harm.
But maybe your car spins out wildly, and you go through the guardrail and off the bridge into the tarmac 25 feet below.
Life … can throw no end of curve balls at you. And those curve balls can carry no end of implications, big and small. And some of those curve balls … are simply un-hittable.
I think people believe that life is complicated because their experience of it is that it is complicated. Beliefs don’t come to be in a vacuum.
In your list of things you do every day, there are assumptions that aren’t necessarily a given in “most people’s” lives.
A bed to sleep in
A place to live
Clothes
Work or school opportunities
Enough food
Money to manage and shop with
Free time when you’re not struggling to survive
Personal physical safety
A place to bathe
Just taking the last item, my city has recently set up places where homeless people can shower so they can look for work. I’m guessing you’ve never had to scrounge around for a place to shower?
And I haven’t even addressed personal relationships.
Suggest you read about the origins of Buddhism. A young prince was sheltered by his family from knowing about the ordinary suffering of people outside the palace walls. He was protected from ever encountering sickness, poverty, death. One day he ventured out… and the rest is history.
Wake Up
---- get out of bed, and step in some cat puke. Clean it up. Did the healthy cat just get a hairball, or does the old sick cat need to go to the vet?
Get dressed
---- in the clothes I’d go to the vet in, or the ones already stained with tractor grease that I was planning to change the oil on the other tractor in?
Go to Work or School
---- decide whether I need to call the vet. and bring the cat in. Try to decide whether the rain won’t get here until tomorrow, in which case I should be trying to catch up the current direct-seed list; or will get here today, in which case I should catch up some of the paperwork and change the oil in the other tractor; or won’t get here until late in the week, if then, in which case I need to set up irrigation on the new transplants. (Hint: whichever plan I start on, the weather will probably do something else.)
Eat Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner (along with snacking as well)
---- and cook at least some of them, and decide what needs to come out of the freezer to thaw, and did enough of those peas come back from market to freeze some or should I just eat them?
---- and feed the cats, and is the sick one eating?
Shopping to provide for yourself or for everyone (not an everyday task)
----- really ought to wait till it rains. But if it doesn’t rain by . . . when, Thursday maybe? I’m going to need to go anyway. But right now the weather report’s great for Thursday, maybe I should go sooner? Or can I wait longer?
Enjoying your free time outside of work (from staying home to going out)
— I’m a farmer. There is no time outside from work. That’s not to say that I don’t take some anyway (right now, for instance); but there’s always something I ought to be doing.
And a lot even of people who work standard hours have more things they need to do in their off-work hours than they can fit in easily.
Doing chores (from cleaning your house to maintaining your vehicle)
---- and fixing the unexpected leak in the plumbing; or giving up and shutting off that water line and calling the plumber and figuring out a workaround for there being no good way to use the kitchen sink till the plumber shows up. And dealing with the unexpected weird noise the car is making, and does that mean it isn’t safe to go do the errands with it? And figuring out why the vacuum won’t work. And why has the living room light taken to blowing out light bulbs, and the right front stove burner taken to turning itself on Very Very High when it was supposed to be on simmer, and what happened to the right size plumbing wrench, and why did three of those things go wrong on the same day and why did a friend I haven’t heard from in three months pick that day to call and want to talk for two hours on the phone?
Managing your finances
---- ooooh boy. Not even going to get into that one. That plumbing bill on top of the car repair sure isn’t going to help.
Personal Hygiene
— and why is there not enough hot water?
Sleeping
— yeah, ought to go do some of that. Whoops, the cat puked again, and this time it was on the bed.
Did you notice I didn’t even include, say, a three year old and a teenager in there? Or any significant health problem other than the cat’s?
Well, yeah ok but the cat didn’t puke in my bed. The cat puked in my 11 year old’s bed. The one I have to ride herd on every night to get through a shower, with soap, and water. Who I have to physically search some nights to make sure he isn’t sneaking a device of some sort to to watch youtube videos or play games on till the wee hours. That’s after a work day that could have been anything from 6 to 12 hours of labor. Oh, yeah, can’t forget school stuff like photos, permission slips, homework, who will watch him and make sure he does his school work during remote learning days while I’m at work and do they know the ins and outs of the system?
Thankfully, that’s only on alternate weeks. The other weeks he spends with my hostile exwife, his mom. Yeah that’s a real pleasure to interact with her.
Sure, none of these things alone are terribly complicated, but that stuff piles up in a synergistic way to be complicated
In my case, neither of the cats puked, but my dog took a HUGE, very soft dump on the carpet in front of the fireplace. She never does that. The last time she pooped in the house was one time when I locked her in for eight hours when I was on jury duty. I wonder if she tried to wake me up? An opened door in the kitchen seems to indicate that she went to the back door. I discovered this at 5 am… just what you want to do in your jammies two hours before sunrise.
From other posts, the OP is in college and appears to be male and a little socially challenged.
That is indeed a very simple life, or at least can be. There’s a reason the “perpetual undergrad” is a thing; it beats the heck out of the “real world” when it comes to easy and to simple. If only failing to graduate also put aging on hold.
We were all clueless 20 yos once. He still is. I’ll give him some slack.
I was clueless at 20 yeah, so sure a little slack. But I was also married and expecting my first child at 20, had bought my first house, started a business, hired employees etc. So, only a little slack.
On retrospect, I wouldn’t say clueless so much as inexperienced.
