Your Brain Has Been Tricked Into Hating Real Life

Jun 15, 2026

You don’t have a mission because you’ve never suffered for anything.

Most people who tell me they “can’t find their mission/purpose/passion” are waiting for something to feel exciting before they commit to it.

Everyone wants to feel passionate first, then they think working on it will be easy.

It doesn’t work like that.

The way it usually goes is this: you have some initial interest in something. Maybe it catches your eye, maybe someone introduces you to it, maybe you stumble into it by accident.

Then there’s a phase where it sucks. You’re bad at it, it’s confusing, the progress is invisible, and every part of your brain wants to quit and go do something easier.

If you push through that phase long enough, you start getting competent. And once you’re competent, once you can do the thing at a decent level, that’s when it starts to feel like something you love.

Interest, then suffering, then competence, then passion. In that order.

Now... some people manage to skip the suffering part almost entirely.

Warren Buffett was obsessed with numbers from childhood, so obsessed that the hard parts barely registered as hard. The interest carried him through everything. If that’s you, if you’ve already got something that pulls you so hard the difficult parts don’t even register, what follows is obviously not for you.

This is for everyone else, the people who’ve never had that kind of obsession with anything and are wondering what’s wrong with them.

I’ve been through this many times.

When I started going to the gym, it was miserable. I was weak, I didn’t know what I was doing, I was sore constantly, and I felt stupid next to everyone else. Every session was something I had to drag myself through.

There was nothing enjoyable about it for months. But I kept going, and slowly I figured things out. I could see changes, I felt strong, I wanted to be there. Something that used to be punishment became something I need.

Same pattern happened with meditation, with reading, and ultimately with writing.

Most people who say they don’t have a passion have never made it past the suffering phase with anything. They’ve never felt what it’s like on the other side. They don’t even know what they’re working toward.

Why You Never Learned This

Think about kids who learn instruments.

The kid doesn’t usually wake up one day dying to play guitar. Their parents get them into it, they hype it up, they make it exciting, they congratulate the kid when they learn a new song. The parents are actively building the interest.

And the kid doesn’t have a phone in their pocket offering something better every five minutes, so the activity gets a fair shot. When it gets hard (and it always does), the parents keep them going. Before long, the kid can play. They’re good at something, and that competence becomes its own reward. Years later they’re the one with the guitar at parties, writing music on their own time. It became part of who they are.

The parents did two things: they created the conditions for interest to develop, and they held the line long enough for competence to take over. Once the kid could play, nobody needed to push them anymore.

Most of us didn’t get that.

Some had parents who let them quit the moment something got hard. Guitar lessons for three weeks, fingers hurt, “that’s okay honey, find something you enjoy.” I get why parents do this, it comes from a good place. But “find something you enjoy” really means “follow whatever feels good right now.” And if there’s a screen in the house, what feels good right now is always going to be the screen. So your interest never gets pointed at anything with a real learning curve.

A lot of people I know had it worse than that, though. Their parents never put them into anything to begin with. No instrument, no sport, no craft, just school and free time. And free time, for most of us, meant screen time. Your interest wasn’t missing. It was there the whole time. It just went undirected, which means it got captured by whatever was most stimulating and easiest to access.

School doesn’t work here because school has no mastery arc. You get grades, you pass or fail, you move on. But you never go through the process of being genuinely terrible at something for months and grinding your way into being good at it. School teaches you to complete assignments and follow instructions. That’s a completely different thing from building a real skill.

So a lot of people reach their twenties with zero reference experience of the full cycle. They haven’t just failed to finish it, they’ve never been inside it (don’t know which is worse to be fair). They don’t know what it feels like to push through months of being bad at something and come out the other side competent. That specific reward, the feeling of earned ability, is completely foreign to them.

You can’t want something you’ve never experienced. And your interest wasn’t absent, it just went somewhere else.

Cheap Pleasure and Simulated Mastery

Part of why the kid with the guitar succeeded is that there was nothing better competing for their attention. No phone in their pocket, no tablet on the couch, no algorithm serving them something more fun every thirty seconds. The activity got a fair shot at holding their interest long enough for competence to develop.

By now you’ve probably spent years soaking in activities designed to give you fast, effortless pleasure. Videogames, social media, doomscrolling, porn. The boring beginnings of an activity that you could develop competence for if you pushed is no match against these.

If you’re a guy, you know exactly what I mean. Think about the first MMO you played as a kid. Ten, eleven years old, completely consumed by it. That was probably the most obsessive, all-in experience of your life, and nothing has come close since.

The problem is it set the bar for what engagement is supposed to feel like. Nothing real can match it. Learning a real world skill can’t compete with something specifically engineered for being addictive. So you keep chasing that feeling without even realizing it, and everything real feels flat by comparison.

The damage goes deeper than just making you impatient, though. All of those activities gave you a simulated version of the mastery loop. You leveled up in games. You grew followers. You curated a feed that felt like you were learning things. You got the sensation of progress and competence over and over again without building any real skill. Your brain has felt “I’m getting good at this” dozens of times, but it was never true.

So when you sit down to learn something real, something that takes months of confusion and failure before you see any results, it not only feels slow, it feels totally broken. Your brain already has a reference for what “getting good at something” is supposed to feel like, and the real version doesn’t match. The real version has no progress bar, no level-ups, no likes. It’s just you being bad at something in a quiet room. Of course you quit.

But there’s something deeper and darker going on here.

You’ve experienced a lot of pleasure in your life from all of this overstimulating stuff, but almost no real enjoyment. Those are different.

Pleasure is passive, it’s what you get from scrolling, watching, consuming. It feels good in the moment and leaves nothing behind.

Enjoyment is active, it’s what you get from using a skill you built, from doing something you’re good at, from being fully engaged in something that challenges you. It feels different from pleasure, deeper and more lasting. But you only get it after competence. You have to earn it.

If all you’ve ever known is cheap pleasure, you have no frame of reference for what enjoyment even feels like. You don’t know what’s on the other side of the grind because you’ve never been there. So you keep cycling back to the easy pleasures and wondering why nothing feels meaningful, why nothing sticks.

Your tolerance for the hard phase has been destroyed by years of instant gratification, and you’ve never once experienced what exists beyond it. You’re not lazy. You just don’t know what you’re missing.

If you’re still drowning in easy dopamine all day, scrolling, gaming, consuming, then trying to commit to something hard is like trying to eat more vegetables after stuffing yourself with ice cream.

You have to cut the overstimulation first. Give your brain a chance to recalibrate so that real activities, the slow and boring kind, can actually register as interesting to you. Without that, you’ll quit at week two and feel worse about yourself than before.

Not gonna go deeper on this subject as I already have a ton of stuff written about it (and a full course).

The Right Question

Stop asking “what am I passionate about?” You don’t know what you’re passionate about because you’ve never been good enough at anything for the passion to develop.

Ask “what am I willing to suck at for six months?”

Pick something. Commit to being terrible at it. Your brain is going to scream at you to stop, it’s going to tell you this isn’t the right thing, it’s going to offer you easier pleasures at every turn.

That resistance doesn’t mean you picked wrong. It means you’re in the suffering phase, and the suffering phase is where everyone quits.

The passion comes after, it always has.

Knowing all of this is certainly helpful.

You’ve got one step closer to conquering your mission, towards the life you truly want.

But this is the surface, the what and why. Those will put you at a definitive advantage over people that don’t even know what they don’t know.

But it’s not the HOW. And the How is everything.

The HOW is $10. Less than a drink on a night out.

If by now you’ve seen value, I’ll let you imagine what the real action taking part provides.

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