Zack Vayda and the Answer to Life

Recently I rewatched Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I read the book when I was young and loved it, and I'm happy to report the movie holds up to the book, a rarity these days. Not only that, but it also holds up to time. It's not just good because it's a "classic," it's good because it's well written, well directed and well acted. For those of you who haven't read the book or watched the movie, it's about...well, it's hard to explain. I suppose you'll just have to watch it for yourself. 

The movie is centered around a group of characters that travel the galaxy looking for an all-knowing computer that can calculate "the answer to life, the universe and everything."This got me thinking about how I would answer that question, in my very short amount of experience in the topic. We've all heard someone say "life is hard." There's definitely truth to that, but I don't think that's the best answer. Life certainly is hard, but there are moments, hopefully long ones, of relative ease, and "life is hard" doesn't account for those times. So I've come up with my own theory (emphasis on the word "theory").

Life is work.

Part of me hates that I have to say that. I wish I could say life is easy, or life is an opportunity, or life is fair. There were times in my life where my answer would've been more along those lines. While life had hard moments in my childhood or in high school or in college, the majority of it was easy. I often miss college for that reason. My time was spent in constant close proximity to all my friends, I had food prepared for me, I had a roof over my head, I could go to class in sweatpants and I certainly was not working 50+ hour weeks. I could go on, but I'll spare you the reminiscence. 

But those days were a long time ago, and life has been much harder since then. I can no longer eat whatever I want when I want, I have to exercise regularly, I pay the bills and have to worry about taxes, I work 50 hour weeks and don't always have weekends off, I'm paying off a car and paying for gas and paying for insurance, and it's not even a nice car. 

A lot of that I could've expected in college, but what I didn't anticipate was how hard it is just to be happy, mentally and emotionally. I have to constantly be learning new things and reading books and reflecting on my feelings and typing them out just to gain some control over how I feel. I never could've predicted that, and that's largely why adulthood has been a difficult transition for me. And if I'm struggling like this when I know I have it easy compared to so many less fortunate people, I can't grasp how hard every day must be for them.

I'm currently in the part of my life where I'm dealing with these realizations, which is why this blog has been mostly negative so far. But there's a significant positive to life being work. 

Work yields results.

It's been hard to transition into having to work to be happy. But I've had wonderful glimpses that have shown me what work can do for me. Whether it's truly appreciating a hot cup of coffee on a rainy Sunday morning, understanding just how lucky I am to have a passionate and wise family, finding peace in a long day of work or having brief moments where I feel good about myself, who I am and who I'm trying to be, I've learned that working at something makes it infinitely more enjoyable than anything that has just been handed to me. And the best news is that I've only been really working at this for about a year. Imagine how I'll feel when I've been working at it for two, or ten, or twenty, or fifty.

It's easy to see life being work as a negative thing, but would you really want life to be about money, or about where you live, or about who you know? Would you really want your life to be about something that is so often out of your control? If you think about it, the one thing you can control is how much effort you put into your life. And if that is true, then that means your life is 100% in your control. 

Life is work, so if you don't like your life, work harder.