Everything gets harder

When I was in High School, I couldn’t wait until college. But I was warned by a friend, “Enjoy High School, while you can. Everything gets harder in college.” A similar experience happened to me when I was in college and looking forward to graduation. “You think life is hard now? It’ll only get harder when you get out of college.” It seemed like there was a trend. The older you get the more difficult your life gets, as you march up a never-ending mountain of misfortune and woe.

I’ve since learned not to listen to the advice of others on the relative difficult-ness of the various stages of my life.

First of all. It doesn’t matter. “Life” being “difficult” is a circumstance that we have more control over than people like to believe.

Second. They’re wrong. I can’t speak for them, but if I try to think objectively about it, I feel like my life is much easier now than it was in college, as a missionary, or in High School. In retrospect, I should have noticed that the person telling me my life would get harder were thinking about their lives… comparing their experience in the present to their selective memory of the past. They failed to mention that as they got older they also got more freedom, more opportunity, more competence, more skills, more friends, more family, more support, and more money. See how selective memory can be?

We’re always surrounded by the challenges of the present, but that shouldn’t overshadow the joys. Everything doesn’t always get harder. It gets better too.