I’ve recently come to the conclusion that life is, by default, taking us toward destruction. A great piece of evidence for this is death. Everyone dies in the end. There are many similar examples around us: plants die, our electronic devices eventually stop working like they once did, food goes bad and starts to smell, we become physically less capable as we age, and so on.
What holds this destruction off is challenge. If we don’t regularly put ourselves in difficult situations, if we avoid discomfort, the process of decay speeds up. We become weaker, duller, more depressed. Challenge is the only thing that keeps us sharp. When you stop working out, your body slowly loses the muscle you’ve built over the weeks. When you stop learning, your mind starts to dull. The only way to delay the inevitable is to keep pushing back through effort and difficulty. That resistance is the closest thing we have to an antidote.
As Andrew Huberman put it during a conversation with David Goggins:
“The anterior midcingulate cortex is smaller in obese people. It gets bigger when they diet. It’s larger in athletes, it’s especially large or grows larger in people that see themselves as challenged and overcome some challenge. And in people that live a very long time, this area keeps its size.”