When I ride my bike uphill, it’s hard and I have to push myself and it takes forever, but then I get a downhill coast as a reward.

my interest in reducing my amount of effort has actually been popular in the workplace. since i preferred to spend as little time working as possible, i came up with ways to avoid doing the repetitive things i didn’t want to do. for example, there were some things at work that required the same/similar information to be typed over and over and everybody else did it by hand. i made a notepad file and hotkeys so i could just hit a couple keys and paste the information, then change it slightly and be done with it. my laziness translates into efficiency, so when i need to i can do the same work as everybody else in much less time.

in general as i age i’ve gotten less interested in pushing myself to do things that don’t seem to be working out, whether it be a relationship or a job or anything else. i don’t necessarily believe that ‘everything happens for a reason’, but i’ve found that oftentimes i was pushing myself to do things for other people rather than for myself. i believed that my lover would be happier or my parents would be happier or my friends would be happier if i did x. not necessarily consciously, of course… it was often very subconscious and i didn’t realize it ’til years later. more specifically, it’s recently been an issue with me for monogamy… even though i was interested in other relationship arrangements and believed i’d be happier with an alternative, nobody i was with was willing/interested in experimenting so i pushed myself to do what i thought would make them happy.

don’t get me wrong… there are definitely things that are worth working for. but a lot of times when i’ve felt like i was banging my head against a brick wall and feeling miserable it was because i believed there was only one way to accomplish whatever my goal was when in fact there were lots of others that i wasn’t seriously considering.

i would seem to me that the biggest factor here for me would be how much you enjoyed that working hard, or if it was a valuable experience. if it was just a terrible slog, you might just be glad it’s over and whatever is produced doesn’t mean much just because you had to kill yourself over it. but in some other more personal cases, maybe the fight for it makes it all more valuable in the end.