5 Reasons to Wish for More Problems

What if your problems are a source of your power?

Problems. By this, I don’t mean the tidy puzzles you confront, the issues you talk out at staff meetings—or at least, not primarily that stuff. Instead, I mean the big problems: the hands you are dealt in personal or professional life that you never would have chosen, the conditions or developments that shape the weight of your burden, define what you can do, and maybe even limit the joy you feel. What if, far from keeping you from fully being who you are, these problems are actually at the center of who you are? Perhaps it is these very things drawing out the full range and depth of the spirit and capability with which you confront your way forward in the world.

When I was in college, a visiting engineer came to give a lecture, offering advice to students from his perspective at the latter half of his career. I don’t remember anything he said except for one perplexing statement. “In the future,” he said, “you will wish you had more problems in your life. You don’t understand that now. It will make sense to you later.” The statement stuck with me specifically because it did not make sense then (just as he said) and did not make sense for a long time. Problems are bad, after all.

It makes sense now. Maybe it took this long for me to understand, but I get it now, and I agree. Problems are still bad; I avoid them as best I can. Yet at the same time, I know my problems have made me more than the untroubled times ever have. I don’t want problems, but when it comes to the ones that find me and fall to me in a way I cannot avoid, I know that having more of them is ultimately better than having fewer. I am not sure I have courage or even grace in the face of problems, but in clearer moments I do have perspective, and maybe this would be worth something to share.

Are problems disasters? Are they to be lamented? Not always. Not entirely. Our difficulties can be the way into something more.

Here is an attempt to recognize the mixed nature of problems. Here are five reasons why, in the face of problems, it would not be an altogether crazy response to wish for more of them:

1. Problems Clarify Priorities

In any life in which things are going mostly well, it is easy to spend considerable time on things that do not matter. The list includes amusements that bring only slight enjoyment; idle time beyond what is needed for thinking and rest; procrastination; and the concessions we give to others’ expectations and/or to our smallest fears. We all do this stuff, and in the moment, it is difficult to see the way free from doing it.

But a problem, or a set of problems, has a way of sweeping all this aside. Either the problem makes clear what needs to be done, because of the demands of the situation and the difficulty that addressing it will entail, or else the problem is consuming enough that it reduces the time and bandwidth that are available for extraneous concerns.

Either way, the problem focuses attention and streamlines effort, and in this way elevates the value of that effort and attention. We find an antidote for a subtle and counterintuitive danger: the risk that we might lose the worth of our capacity by having too much of it to fill.

2. Problems, Not Pleasure, Connect to the Future

Pleasure gives life its flavor and makes life worth living. Yet pleasure is not enough to make a life. Whether it is a small pleasure like watching TV or eating something good, or a large pleasure like a major vacation trip, the characteristic all pleasures have in common is that they disappear. The sands of time cover them all. Destinations go this way, for example. Trips taken sooner or later come to be long enough ago that the places have changed, we have changed, and little about the experience remains accessible or relevant to the present moment. And I could fittingly say the same about any pleasant experience I’ve known: I am in the present now, but it has gone into the past.

Yet a problem that has been overcome, or a problem that has been successfully carried, does not have this characteristic. A problem overcome offers a sense of victory that lasts. I can recall the time when I had that problem, and feel some sense of how I live in a better time now. And a problem carried offers a kind of defense against smaller afflictions, in the way that rising to carry the burden leaves me less mindful of the weights of smaller things.

To be sure, I am talking about particular types of problems here—serious ones perhaps, but those that can be carried or overcome. Some problems are too big for either. But those we can accept, while life as we know it still goes on, will contribute to the lasting quality of that life in ways that our pursuit or experience of enjoyment cannot.

3. What Is Purchased Through Struggle Is More Valuable Than What Is Purchased With Money

A person who had to trek through a wilderness to make her way home knows that wilderness more richly and more personally than the one visiting that same wilderness as a sightseer. Problems give us the fullness of experiences—and might offer the only way we can have this fullness. Buying an experience sanitizes it, because anyone presenting the same purchase price can have the experience the same way. Yet all of us would prefer the experiences sanitized—no one would choose to endure experiences in the ways that problems bring them to us.

That is why we ought to be grateful for at least some of the difficulties fate has chosen for us to have: the ones providing some of the most personal experiences of our lives, experiences we could never have had so deeply without the troubles.

4. Loss Teaches Appreciation

Within our finite world, none of us gets to keep anything. Everything ends somehow. The fortunate ones among us therefore are those who get to experience endings and loss at just the right rate. That is, at a sufficiently measured pace that we see the loss happening and develop a worthwhile response.

I think I might be something like that lucky. To be sure, the sense of change is apparent: While there are still new experiences and possibilities and beginnings, the rate of goodbyes and transitions is starting to pick up. This need not be sad, however. With any season of life that comes to a close (parenting young children, for example), I can recognize that the seasons in bloom right now are here to be known and experienced.

The antidote to loss is appreciation. And the problems that lead to loss, as many of them do, can help that appreciation to grow and come to the fore.

5. Struggle Expands Sympathy

There is a well-worn principle we are told as children and come to appreciate as adults. It is sometimes expressed this way: “Do not presume to judge another until you have walked a mile in their moccasins.” In addition to all else they give us, our problems provide us with moccasin-miles. We come to know how long the distances of difficulty can be, and what crossing those distances entails. One traveler more accurately perceives another’s travails.

With this last point, I am describing our sympathy and understanding—our grace toward others, an aspect of character. All of us imagine ourselves to be sympathetic and fair-minded, as do I. Yet I am aware as well that comfort makes me callous. I can be blind to how easy I have it relative to someone else.

Problems make the reality of challenge apparent, improving my understanding of difficulties others face. In the choice between comfort and character, I will choose comfort every time. That is why it has been better for me, and I think better still for those who have encountered me, that sometimes a different choice was made for me.

Peter Zelinski writes and speaks about manufacturing. He is co-host of a YouTube series, The Cool Parts Show , and editor-in-chief of Modern Machine Shop (about CNC machining) and Additive Manufacturing (about industrial 3D printing). A writer in his free time as well, he is also the author of several books; more at peterzelinski.com .