The work you do in the dark
On depth, discipline, and why we're becoming less interesting
The worst advice we give young people is, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” It’s a beautiful, seductive lie. It suggests that the right path is a frictionless glide, and that if you feel resistance, you must be on the wrong one.
This is perhaps the most damaging myth of modern work. It’s the source of the anxiety that plagues people in their twenties, the feeling that they are perpetually off-track because their job, even one they chose, sometimes feels like… well, work. The myth suggests that passion is a magical substance you either find or you don’t, and when you find it, it provides a perpetual-motion machine of motivation.
The reality, as anyone who has ever built anything of value knows, is that everything worth having lives on the other side of effort. A good relationship isn't a discovery; it’s a construction. It requires tending. Artistry isn't a gift; it’s the result of a thousand frustrating practice sessions. Even deep friendships demand maintenance and the occasional uncomfortable conversation.
We’ve mistaken motivation for discipline. Motivation is weather: changeable, unpredictable, often absent when you need it most. You can’t build a life on it. Discipline is climate: the steady, reliable conditions you create for yourself regardless of how you feel on any given day. The most prolific writers don’t write when they’re inspired; they write until they’re inspired. The most successful engineers don’t solve problems when they feel brilliant; they sit with the problem, patiently, methodically, until a solution reveals itself. They show up.
This isn't to say work should be a joyless slog. That’s the other side of the same bad coin. The goal isn’t to find work that is effortless, but to find a struggle you can fall in love with. The right kind of work isn't suffering; it's building. It’s the kind of difficulty that, when you push against it, pushes back and makes you stronger.
Lately, a new piece of advice has joined the pantheon of well-meaning but dangerous ideas: “Protect your peace.” On its surface, it’s sensible. But in practice, it has made a generation allergic to necessary friction. True peace isn’t the absence of problems; it’s the presence of a purpose that makes problems worth solving. The happiest, most engaged people aren’t those who have eliminated all difficulty from their lives. They are the ones who have found difficulty worth enduring.
In the 1980s, scientists built a self-contained ecosystem called Biosphere 2. Inside, they grew trees. But they noticed something strange: the trees grew quickly, but they would collapse under their own weight before reaching maturity. They had forgotten to include wind. Without the stress of wind, the trees never developed the "stress wood" that gives them strength and resilience. They were weak because they had never been challenged. We are becoming Biosphere 2 trees.
So if the goal isn't to find an effortless passion, what is it? It's to find enjoyment. And enjoyment is not the same as pleasure.
Pleasure is the feeling you get from a good meal, a warm bath, or watching a movie. It's restorative. It brings the self back to a state of equilibrium. But it doesn't create growth. Enjoyment, on the other hand, is what happens when you push yourself beyond your limits. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi described it, enjoyment is characterized by "forward movement: by a sense of novelty, of accomplishment." It’s the feeling of stretching your capabilities, of achieving something unexpected.
This is the state Csikszentmihalyi called "flow." You’ve almost certainly felt it. It’s that state of total absorption where you are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. Your sense of self dissolves. Time warps, hours feeling like minutes. The experience is so enjoyable that you do it for its own sake, not for some external reward.
Flow has specific preconditions. It happens at the boundary of your abilities, where a high challenge meets an adequate skill level. There have to be clear goals and immediate feedback, so you can adjust your performance in real time. A surgeon performing a complex operation experiences flow. A rock climber navigating a difficult face experiences flow. But so does a welder finding the perfect seam, or a farmer learning the rhythms of her land and animals.
The examples don’t have to be glamorous. Csikszentmihalyi studied an assembly-line worker named Joe who transformed his monotonous job into a complex mental game of trying to beat his own records. He found flow. He studied Serafina, an elderly peasant in the Italian Alps who found flow in tending to her cows and making cheese, a craft that required a deep, almost mystical understanding of her environment.
The strange paradox is that people report experiencing flow far more often at work than during leisure. At work, goals are usually clear and challenges are abundant. In our free time, we often resort to passive, low-skill, low-challenge activities like scrolling social media or watching TV. We are more likely to be in a state of apathetic boredom on the couch on a Sunday afternoon than at our desks on a Tuesday morning. Yet, we culturally frame work as the burden and leisure as the prize. We wish we were on the couch. This reveals a profound disconnect between what we think makes us happy and what actually does.
The real reward of flow isn't just the feeling itself. It's what happens after. Following a flow experience, Csikszentmihalyi writes, "the organization of the self is more complex than it had been before." You grow. You become more capable, more differentiated. You integrate new skills and ideas into your identity. This is how you build an "autotelic personality"—the ability to create enjoyment and find intrinsic rewards regardless of the external conditions. It’s the psychological equivalent of stress wood.
This kind of deep, immersive engagement used to be the default mode for serious work and learning. It required focus, patience, and the ability to tolerate the initial discomfort of not knowing. It required a quiet mind.
That is a state that is becoming increasingly alien to us.
The philosopher Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message." The content of what we consume matters, but the medium through which we consume it matters more, because it fundamentally shapes how we think. And the medium of our age, the internet, is actively reshaping our brains.
Nicholas Carr, in his book The Shallows, described an uncomfortable feeling that many of us recognize: "someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory." He found, as many of us have, that deep reading—the kind of sustained, linear concentration a book demands—had become a struggle. His brain wanted to jump around, to click, to skim. He had gone from being a "scuba diver in the sea of words" to a "Jet Skier along the surface."
This isn't just a feeling; it’s a cognitive reality. Our working memory, the scratchpad of consciousness, is notoriously small. It can only hold two to four pieces of new information at a time. To move that information into long-term memory and build the rich, interconnected schemas that constitute true knowledge, we need to focus. We need to rehearse the information, turn it over, connect it to what we already know.
The internet, by design, overwhelms this process. It presents a "swiftly moving stream of particles," a relentless barrage of notifications, hyperlinks, and competing stimuli. This creates an enormous "cognitive load." We become so busy managing the firehose of information that we have no mental resources left for the deep processing required for retention and comprehension. We become mindless consumers of data, not thoughtful synthesizers of knowledge.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman explains this through the lens of our two modes of thinking: System 1, which is fast, automatic, and intuitive; and System 2, which is slow, deliberate, and effortful. System 2 is powerful, but it’s also lazy. It will gladly let the impulsive System 1 run the show to conserve energy. The internet is a playground for System 1. It thrives on cognitive ease, rewarding quick, superficial judgments and punishing sustained, difficult thought.
This leads to a dangerous cognitive bias Kahneman calls "What You See Is All There Is" (WYSIATI). Our minds construct the most coherent story possible from the limited information available, without stopping to consider what information might be missing. We see a headline, a 280-character hot take, a 30-second video, and our System 1 confidently forms a complete narrative. We develop an illusion of understanding based on a dangerously incomplete picture. This doesn't just make us more prone to error; it makes us less interesting. An interesting person has depth. They have a mind populated with rich, nuanced, and interconnected models of the world. WYSIATI creates minds that are wide but shallow, full of disconnected facts and unexamined opinions.
We compound this problem by actively outsourcing our memory. The argument goes that by offloading data to the cloud, we free our minds for more creative tasks. But memory isn't just a filing cabinet for facts. It is the very fabric of our intelligence. The knowledge stored in our own long-term memory is what allows for inductive analysis, critical thinking, and imagination. You can’t have a new idea if your mind is empty. When we rely on Google as an external hard drive, we aren't just storing information; we're preventing our brains from building the very structures of thought. We risk, as Carr puts it, "emptying our minds of their riches."
The brain’s neuroplasticity is a double-edged sword. The same adaptability that allows us to learn new skills also means that our brains are being physically rewired to favor the shallow mode. We are becoming better at skimming and multitasking, and worse at concentrating and contemplating. The playwright Richard Foreman described the unsettling result: we are turning into "pancake people—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information."
These two forces—the cultural fantasy of effortless work and the technological reality of shallow thinking—are locked in a vicious feedback loop.
A mind conditioned for the constant, low-grade dopamine hits of the digital stream becomes less tolerant of the patient, often frustrating work required for flow. If we can get a facsimile of accomplishment by clearing our inbox or scrolling through a feed, why would we endure the hours of struggle it takes to truly master a skill or understand a complex problem? The culture of shallow consumption reinforces the myth of effortless passion.
Conversely, a belief that work should feel easy makes us prime targets for the internet’s distractions. The moment we hit a difficult patch in our work—a bug in the code, a tricky paragraph to write—our brain, trained by the passion myth, interprets this friction as a sign we’re on the wrong path. It seeks an escape. And the escape is always one click away, offering the cognitive ease and superficial stimulation our rewired brains now crave.
The result is a hollowing out. We become less competent because we avoid the deep practice that builds real skill. And we become less interesting because our inner world, built on a foundation of disconnected snippets and outsourced memories, lacks complexity and depth. This may even affect our capacity for emotion. The subtlest and most distinctively human forms of empathy and compassion require sustained attention and deep reflection—the very mental habits we are losing.
So what is the truth we should tell young people? What is the antidote to this cycle?
It begins with redefining our relationship with work and effort.
The solution is not to smash our devices and retreat to the woods. The solution is intentionality. The final frontier of personal freedom is the command over your own attention. We have to consciously choose to do hard things. We have to carve out and fiercely protect blocks of time for deep, uninterrupted focus. We have to choose the book over the browser, the complex problem over the easy distraction.
This means embracing the initial phase of discomfort. It means recognizing that the feeling of struggle isn't a sign to stop; it's the sign that you are on the verge of growth. It is the wind shaking the tree.
The reward for this deliberate effort isn't just better work. The reward is a better self. It's the quiet satisfaction of mastery, the joy of a mind that can make its own connections, and the richness of a life lived with purpose. It's the difference between being a passive consumer of the world and an active builder within it. True fulfillment doesn't come from avoiding the struggle, but from choosing a struggle that serves something larger than yourself. That is the work that makes you not just more competent, but more human. And in the end, that is far more interesting.