Why is life so damn hard?

I have a theory: we rise to the level of our own incompetence

Art for The Intrinsic Perspective is by Alexander Naughton

Scratch the surface of anyone's life, and you’ll find more chaos and hardship inside than you’d expect from the outside.

Certainly, this has been my experience. Every person who looks as if they “have it together” has some surprisingly messy internal battle they're fighting. Beautiful actresses struggle with drug addiction, famous intellectuals are on their third divorce, and the wealthy watch their children grow stagnant under expectations of inheritance.

The phrase “more than you’d expect” is doing a lot of work here, admittedly. Because saying there is relatively “more than you’d expect” hardship and chaos to a life is certainly not the same as saying all lives are equally full of real objective hardship, or real objective chaos, and there’s no difference between, say, the super-poor vs. the super-rich. I doubt almost anyone truly believes that.

No, this is merely the observation that most lives have a great deal of mess internally, relative to their external appearances. There is always a thing. And once that thing is settled, there is another thing, waiting its turn in a long line of grinning hobgoblins. If you drive through even the most pleasant neighborhood, you can see their hunchback forms patiently skulking in the shadows of hedgerows (but their blurry shapes are only visible when squinting, and only from the corner of your eye, so be careful attempting this while driving).

Why would it not be possible for a competent person, with enough resources, to enter into some steady state of life where nothing is going wrong and there's no burning problem that needs to be addressed? An existence without a hobgoblin in sight? An existence wherein, if a stranger were suddenly privy to it from the inside, it would actually be as relatively well-put-together as it appears from the outside?