outdoor gear experts
When I look around at the natural world—animals, insects, even plants—I notice something they all share: toil. Everything exists in a state of struggle and exertion. Ultimately, the work is for survival. Survival of the self, offspring, friends, community, and species.Take a bird, for example. It spends countless hours—its entire life—building nests, finding food, seeking safety, rearing young, and defending them. Without this effort, the bird dies. It lives or dies by its own strength.
So why does it feel wrong to put perfectly healthy animals into zoos? What exactly is the problem? A penguin in a zoo is surrounded by others of its kind and fed fish every day without effort. It never has to worry about its offspring being eaten. It doesn’t migrate. It doesn’t face danger. It is safe. Fed. Worry-free. And yet, we’ve taken away everything it means to be a penguin—its toil, its effort, its purpose, its pride.
We are no different. We, too, are part of the animal kingdom. Humans need to toil. We need to work throughout our lives. Does that mean everyone has to clock in for a 9-to-5 job to find meaning? No. Childrearing, volunteering, service, learning—work means different things to different people, in different places, at different stages of life. But no one in history has ever been exempt from the need for meaningful effort.
We need real purpose to accomplish real things. And that purpose must come through toil and effort to be meaningful.The problem with modern society is that we are standing on the shoulders of past success. We live in a state of idleness that’s unprecedented in history. The challenges our ancestors faced for thousands of years are now easily solved through innovation and convenience. But this has created a crisis of purpose. We fear difficult things. We become zoo penguins—dazed, idle, soft. We raise our children to be the same.
It’s a slow kind of torture, one that corrodes the mind. We grow anxious. Depressed. We fear the world instead of being an active force in it. We take away the purpose that gave meaning to those who came before us. But we are not exempt from the rules that govern nature. We must toil. We must work—for our entire lives.
There will be periods of feast and famine. What “work” means will change as we age. But remember: the happiest people are not those without problems, but those who toil in the effort to solve them.