Calculated Sabotage

The way to stay whole is to choose the hard thing when nothing's forcing us

We are the first humans in history who have to choose difficulty.

Every generation before us had it imposed. Scarcity, distance, friction built into the fabric of our daily life. You couldn’t avoid the struggle because the struggle was the default condition. Survival required effort. Mastery demanded years. There was no shortcut because there was no short.

In Nov. 2025 that world is gone.

Your phone dies and you realize you don’t know a single phone number. Not your mom’s, not your best friend’s. Numbers you used to carry in your head. You’re standing somewhere unfamiliar and you have no idea which direction is north. You used to feel it. Now you wait for Google Maps and the familiar blue dot.

You can’t sit at a red light without reaching for your phone. Ninety seconds of nothing is unbearable.

These feel like small losses. They’re not. They’re symptoms of atrophying. And you can’t often feel it happening. You only notice when you reach for a capacity that used to be there and find empty space.

More broadly this danger is about forgetting how to be the kind of person who can do hard things when it matters.

I’ve watched my friends kids who’ve never been bored. Truly bored. Like with nothing to do, no screen to fill the gap, forced to sit in emptiness until imagination kicks in.

When I was young, boredom was terrible. But boredom was a furnace. It’s where I learned to make something out of nothing. That furnace is gone now. The gap gets filled instantly. And I wonder about a generation and what’s not getting built.

But even still… I do keep reaching for shortcuts I don’t need.

A calculation I could do in my head. I grab my phone. A problem I could solve in ten or twenty minutes. I ask Claude and get an answer in seconds.

Each time, I save a little time. Each time I feel myself choose a thing that makes me weaker. But I keep doing it anyway.

Many obstacles used to be built into life. You struggled because there was no alternative, and the struggling built you whether you wanted it to or not.

Now difficulty for most things (especially knowledge work) is optional. Struggle is a preference. The path of least resistance leads everywhere. In the products we buy, in the places we go, in the dreams we have.

When you solve a problem yourself, you leave with more than the answer. You leave with the shape of the problem, how it resisted you, how you broke through. That stays. That transfers.

When something is solved for you, you get the answer and nothing else. The outcome looks the same. What it leaves behind is completely different.

It’s normal to feel pain in your hands and feet, if you’re using your feet as feet and your hands as hands. And for a human being to feel stress is normal—if he’s living a normal human life. And if it’s normal, how can it be bad? — VI. 33

I’ve started making things harder on purpose as a form of calculated sabotage.

Not everything. Just the struggles that build something. The ones where the difficulty is the point.

I think about five years from now. The tools get better every month. The shortcuts multiply.

And when something breaks when the situation demands something that can’t be outsourced, who am I?

What’s actually mine?

The test isn’t whether we can endure hardship when it’s forced on us. Every generation faced that.

The test is whether we can choose it when nothing’s forcing us. When the easy path works fine. When no one would know the difference.