Choosing Your Hard When There's No Easy Answer
- Jul 10
- 5 min read
Most people aren’t lazy. They’re hoping, somewhere in the back of their mind, that if they keep looking, they’ll find a way to get what they need or want without having to face too many barriers.
That’s not unreasonable. People don’t typically intentionally choose the difficult path in most circumstances, and there's nothing wrong with wanting things to be easier. But if you've lived enough of your life, you've probably started to notice that the easy option often doesn’t exist and that things tend to turn out to be harder than you predicted.
The Heaviness of Hard Things
Let’s be honest; some of what people carry is genuinely really heavy emotionally. Grief is hard. So is illness, or watching something you put your heart into start to fall apart, and the slow accumulation of everyday difficulty still takes a toll. Staying in a situation that's wearing you down or getting out of one that's familiar even when it's not good for you, can have a major impact on a person.
Most meaningful things have some level of inherent difficulty, and so do many of the things people eventually need to leave behind. Hard just tends to be part of the deal. The big life changes you’ve been thinking about, the conversation you keep putting off, the commitment you're reconsidering. None of them come without some cost attached.
That doesn't make any given hard thing easier to face, but it can shift the question a little. If difficulty is usually on the table regardless of which direction you go, then the choice stops being about finding the path without it, because you’re not going to find it.
What Happens When You Don't Choose
One thing that tends to happen when every option feels hard is that people stop choosing altogether. The decision sits there, and rather than making it, you wait. You look for more information, see how things develop, tell yourself you'll know when you're ready.
Sometimes that's wisdom. Some decisions do benefit from time, and there are moments when slowing down is the right call. But there's a real difference between patience and avoidance, and it can be easy to confuse the two.
A strong tell of when you’re experiencing avoidance is “when the decision doesn’t go away, it just starts making itself.” The relationship that wasn't working ends because you ran out of ways to try to hold it together or the decision you needed to make gets decided for you by someone else and you don’t like the outcome. The conversation you kept putting off happens in the worst possible circumstances because waiting finally made it unavoidable.
Not choosing is still a choice but it gets made on a different timeline and without any input from you on what’s best.
Not All Hard Is the Same
It’d be nice if we could have one clear definition of “hard,” but we don’t. It’s subjective and can change in one person’s life over time. There’s the hard of doing something that has a big cost, but connects you to something real and meaningful, like taking a risk for something that matters, having an overdue conversation, or finally making a change you’ve been thinking about for months. There’s also the hard that comes with staying somewhere you’ve outgrown, the weight of trying to keep making something work that hasn’t been working for a long time or just being exhausted from doing things that you feel like you don’t have ownership of anymore.
With a quick glance from the inside, they can feel really similar because they both ask something of you and both produce the same unpleasant feeling of dread when you think on them too long. But they’re different when you look at them in retrospect even when the difference is unclear in the moment.
The difference has less to do with how difficult they are and more about whether the difficulty can be connected to anything important. Some hard things, even when you’re in the middle of them, feel “right.” Yes, they’re uncomfortable and you’d absolutely prefer not to be feeling that way, but they are in service of something meaningful. Other things just seem to have a cost when they don’t end up leading you anywhere you care about.
Your Relationship with Hard Things
Ask yourself honestly how you tend to relate to difficulty. When something gets hard, what's your first move? Do you push through without stopping to ask whether that's actually the right call? Do you stop too early, before things have had a chance to clarify themselves? Do you find yourself staying in hard situations long past the point where it makes sense out of commitment or guilt or fear of the impact of leaving?
A lot of people fall into one of those patterns, and it typically makes sense why they do when you understand what they’ve experienced in their life. They may have learned early that they were just supposed to suck it up and endure hard things so that’s what they still do, push through. Maybe they learned that the first sign of difficulty was their signal to leave so they run before there’s been enough time to get any clarification. Having even a small awareness of your own pattern can be helpful when you’re standing in front of a decision that isn’t going to have a clear, easy answer.
Which Hard Is Yours
If most of the choices we face have some version of hard, then we need to start thinking about which difficulty we are willing to carry and why, instead of what we can do to avoid it being hard in the first place.
That's not a call to be impulsive, or to treat every hard path as automatically having deeper meaning just because it costs something. Some things are hard and also just wrong for you. But when you're looking at two difficult options and trying to figure out which way to go, it helps to ask which difficulty has more of you in it. Which one, when you're on the other side of it, you'd rather have chosen. Which one connects to something you actually care about.
The Sticky Question
Nobody gets to live a life without hard things in it. Not trying to be pessimistic, it's just honesty about what most people’s lives actually look like, and it can be easier to accept when you stop treating difficulty as something that shouldn't be there or fight against it.
The most important question is whether the hard you’re choosing is the one that belongs to you. The one that actually aligns with who you are and what you’re about.
There isn’t always a clear answer right away. Sometimes you choose, live with it, and find out later whether it was the right choice. But in the end, asking the question of which hard is the right one for you is more important than being sure you have the “right” answer, and sitting with it tends to be more meaningful than just waiting for an option that probably isn’t coming.
Other suggested blog posts: Vulnerability in Leadership, Overcoming Decision Fatigue
Written by Hunter Cook, MSML, LPC/MHSP (S)
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