Epiphany on motivation and hard work.

I think I had an epiphany recently. I was reading a reddit post and it essentially was a person complaining about life fuckin them over, I can relate. Anyway she was also in a similar predicament to the one I'm in. I realized something just then while writing my response. Boots in bootcamp don't go to the military because they want to go to bootcamp. No one goes to college because they necessarily want to study. Most people do things to pursue some sort of end goal and have to bear with their suffering in the present for profit in the future. If it was just suffering it would be one thing but usually it's more indifference, and that can be changed. Most people learn to kinda love their struggle and align with it, get used to it, and after a while look back and think it really wasn't so bad even though in the moment they might hate it.

This was never clear to me, I'm kinda dumb and learn things a bit later than most usually but I know of it now. Let's hope the lesson sticks.

Quick breakdown of where I was confused philosophically:

  1. I thought that if you were gonna do shit that sucked it would be bad because you have to make the most of the one life you're given because you can die essentially at random. Usually you won't but you could so you gotta cherish every moment.
  2. I thought from that then, that the present was the most important and while this is kinda true it's lacking in perspective.
  3. I realized later in life that you have to pursue things that give you meaning and usually those things are long term. Long term projects and pursuits require at minimum the suffering of having to wait for an outcome, aka for the end goal of the pursuit/project to be achieved. Therefore how does this point and point 1 work together? I was confused on this for many years and couldn't find a way to reconcile this conflict.
  4. Seeing as you need to pursue both long term and short term things to be happy, how can we use logic to make sense of this? Well I came to the conclusion that you can do long term things that suck in the short term, but still fulfill the criteria of "cherishing and making the most of every moment."
  5. Adding nuance to this, you can say the conclusion is you need to pursue short term happiness to keep joy in your world, and long term happiness to keep meaning in your world. It will be hard to balance these to but it is possible. In regards to long term happiness, it's okay to do things that are hard, you are strong and will get better and learn to enjoy it over time. This does not mean you will lose your joy however, this simply means that you will grow to nurture both your inner child and outer adult. And please remember that you need to keep joy and rest regularly.

Alright I'm tired of writing about this lol.
TL;DR:
In big philosophical terms, work hard, party hard, follow your dreams.
Goodnight everyone :)