There Are No Shortcuts (aka, It’s Supposed to Be Hard)

 

We live in a world increasingly obsessed with speed, efficiency, and ease.    Before you stop reading and decide I’m just a technology Luddite who is out of touch, hear me out.

 

Everywhere you turn, someone is promoting a “life hack”—fitness hacks, nutrition hacks, home-optimization hacks, digital-hygiene hacks, and parenting hacks.   Each is focused on maximizing efficiency through simple low-effort solutions.    A cursory search for life hacks reveals innumerable tips and tricks—all designed to be life-changing.   In fact, there are so many life hacks available to the modern human one might need some organizational hacks to optimize how to implement all the other life hacks.

 

Eventually, this starts to seem like a dystopian world where each of us has become an Ouroboros—snakes eating our own tails.

 

 

 

One of the promises of artificial intelligence is we will be able to offload more tasks to a computer-based neural network which can, theoretically, produce “content” indistinguishable from information, art, or music created by an actual human being.   By doing so, the thinking goes, we will be freed up with more time to relax and enjoy doing other, more rewarding, more enjoyable, more human things.

 

The irony:  We are being asked to offload human activity, so we have more time to be...human.

 

And yet, these are not mere philosophical musings.   We are each faced with a seemingly infinite number of choices every day.   The concurrent siren songs of speed, efficiency, and ease are difficult to resist.

 

 

Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, arguably the most powerful man on the earth during his lifetime, often found himself considering what to do next.   In Meditations, a series of personal writings to himself, he wrote:

 

 

Aurelius was arguing for a life lived without shortcuts, a life focused on the present, most-important thing, a life that slows down to concentrate, ponder, consider, then act.

 

But isn’t Aurelius’ stoicism just another life hack?  No!  His assertion:  By slowing down and avoiding the temptation of speed, efficiency, and ease, he would live out his days with actual purpose and meaning.

 

Bodies cannot build muscle without resistance.   Minds cannot stretch and grow without strain.   Habits cannot form without test.   Music cannot be perfected without practice.   Cars cannot steer, accelerate, or brake without traction-induced friction.

 

Surely, you get the point.   Difficulty produces truly meaningful results.

 

This approach is fundamental to the classical-liberal approach to education embraced at Liberty Common School.   Students learn from their first days walking the halls of the institution that one becomes more human through the daily discipline of laying brick upon brick to grow in knowledge and virtue.   There are no shortcuts to the end goal.   It takes focus, energy, and drive.   The appropriate ends—truth, goodness, beauty, and perfection are not reached by shortcutting the process.

 

It’s supposed to be hard.   And it results in students becoming fully human.