Do you ever feel like the ideas in your head never quite materialize in the world as simply as you imagined they would? Or that your perfect plans must get thrown out before you can get going?
I feel that way often. It took me years to realize why and even longer to come to terms with it in a healthy way.
Hassle is at the root of our feeling that the real world is somehow messier and more frustrating than we think it should be. It is annoyance, nuisance, struggle, and inconvenience, all wrapped up in one.
Hassle is trying to make dinner and realizing that you need to run out to the grocery store for one key ingredient you forgot. It’s trying to pay a bill online only to realize that your credit card has expired. It’s scheduling a dinner date with friends only for your kids to get sick on the day of the event.
Honestly, hassle is ubiquitous and can make you downright jaded about life—frustrated that nothing ever goes your way.
What to Do About Hassle
The solution to hassle is to live with it—to accept it as part of life. Maybe that’s easier said than done, so I offer you the following tips:1. Lower Your Expectations
One of the best parenting tips I’ve ever stumbled upon is to keep my standards but lower my expectations. Kids are a blessing and oftentimes a great joy—unless you expect them to act like mini-adults. Then, parenting feels hard. This wisdom applies to any aspect of life. When you expect things to go great, any frustration feels like a loss. But if you bake a certain amount of hassle into your expectations, you may be surprised at the upside.2. Build More Buffers Into Life
My impatience flares the most when I’m on a tight schedule, and most of the time, my tight schedule is self-imposed. When there’s no margin in your life, every little annoyance will threaten the whole plan. If you don’t leave a buffer, that’s the same as expecting everything to go perfectly every time. Obviously, that’s not realistic and will leave you fighting against reality more often than not.3. Focus on Progress Over Pace
I have a natural desire to go fast, so one temptation of mine is to measure the quality of a day by how fast I move through my task list or from one activity to another. The problem with life measured by a stopwatch is that it may lump normal human activities into the obstacle pile. For example, when my kids want to tell me about something they made or my wife wants to linger over lunch, it could throw a wrench in my schedule. Priorities are really out of line when these things throw you off instead of adding joy to life. Instead of measuring productivity by how far you go, measure days in a row on which you’ve made progress.4. Embrace Hassle as Character Building
We might think we want an easy life, but if we had that, we might grow bored. Part of life’s texture and adventure is that doing important things is hard. Hassle adds meaning to life and can make us more virtuous if we rise to the challenge bravely. When hassle presents itself, we can take the opportunity to reframe life’s challenges as opportunities.5. Enjoy the Journey
At the end of the day, life is what it is. The reality of doing things in the world with other people means dealing with a certain amount of hassle. You can either spend your life resenting this fact or just accept it. You’re never going to defeat hassle altogether, and spending your best energy trying to remove it is a distraction from just focusing on your goals and all that really matters in life. Acknowledge the hassle, and then get on with the work of living and enjoying this one-time journey through life.
Every person who has ever lived has come up against the friction of life. We all face this same challenger and have to choose our attitudes towards it. You can live with hassle without letting it dominate your thoughts.
