Beginning With Hard Things

Thesis

Today I am beginning something new.

For most of my life I pursued what came easily. If something aligned with my natural ability, I leaned into it and avoided what resisted me. The result was not growth but repetition. My life accumulated activity without direction.

This essay begins with a simple organizing principle: hard things build a life. Easy things decorate it. I am choosing the former.

Purpose vs. Passion

One of the most important distinctions I have encountered is the difference between passion and purpose. Passion often follows ability. When we are naturally good at something, it feels effortless, and that effortlessness can be mistaken for meaning.

Purpose works differently. Purpose is often attached to difficulty. It requires sustained effort and frequently resists us at the beginning. Where passion makes things feel light, purpose adds weight.

The mistake I made for years was confusing the two. I followed what felt good and called it direction. In reality it was avoidance.

The Value of Hard Things

Hard things change the structure of time. They stretch a day. They force attention into the present moment. They remove the illusion that progress happens automatically.

Easy pursuits do the opposite. They produce stimulation without formation. The ego grows while the person remains largely unchanged.

Eventually the pattern became impossible to ignore: ease feeds ego, while difficulty forms character.

The Anesthetic of Easy Pursuits

Looking back honestly, my fascination with ease functioned like an anesthetic. Instead of confronting deeper questions about direction or responsibility, I recycled familiar territory and convinced myself I was moving.

In reality I was circling. The motion was real, but the transformation was not.

A Deeper Connection

The first disruption to this pattern came through an unexpected pairing: faith and mathematics. When I became a believer in God through Jesus Christ, it was not a quiet conversion. It felt closer to wrestling.

Faith forced me to examine my life honestly. What I saw looked fractured. Responsibilities were ignored. Relationships were taken for granted. My habits were destructive.

Technology, Surveillance, and Curiosity

My long-standing interest in technology eventually intersected with an unstable period in my life. While exploring historical intelligence documents released during the Snowden disclosures, I encountered references to NSA programs designed to map large portions of the internet’s infrastructure.

That raised a legitimate question for me: how much of the internet’s infrastructure can be mapped and analyzed at scale? Curiosity turned into investigation. At times that investigation was thoughtful. At other times it was conducted while I was dealing with untreated illness and stimulant use.

With time and clarity, I can now see that some conclusions from that period were speculative and require more disciplined evaluation. The core question remains worthwhile. The method needs to be better.

The Question of Data Infrastructure

Modern artificial intelligence systems rely on extremely large datasets. Governments and corporations have also spent decades constructing infrastructure designed to collect and analyze data at scale.

That intersection invites a natural question: to what extent are modern machine-learning systems built upon data ecosystems originally created for large-scale monitoring and analysis?

This essay does not claim certainty. It simply recognizes that the overlap deserves careful examination using documentation, research papers, and verifiable sources rather than intuition alone.

A Life of Contradictions

I grew up in Utah, in an environment widely perceived as structured and culturally conservative. Yet my interests developed across very different influences: political history, counterculture movements, computer systems, and philosophy.

That pattern—deep curiosity combined with unconventional behavior—followed me into adulthood. Sometimes it produced insight. Sometimes it produced chaos.

Turning Points

Several experiences forced me to confront the consequences of my choices: fallouts with friends and family during periods of untreated manic depression, recognition of substance abuse and mental illness, and an eventual commitment to forward progress in my mental health and wellbeing generally, no matter the cost of choosing to move forward.

These were not abstract lessons. They were practical collisions with reality. They showed me that a life organized around ease eventually collapses under its own contradictions.

Mental Health, Medication, and Perspective

I live with Bipolar I disorder. During unstable periods, the mind can feel powerful and urgent while judgment is compromised. Ideas move rapidly. Connections appear everywhere. Energy surges, but structure disappears.

My last hospitalization was self-admitted. Within three days of new medication, I felt normal in a way I had not felt for years—closer to the person I knew myself to be before symptoms began to shape my life. The medication could be delivered as an injection taken once a month, and that simplicity mattered.

Since being on that medication, I can remember my past more clearly, think through long-term action with more stability, and control my impulses with relative ease. It has also given me more empathy and self-compassion. The clarity made me realize how hard the struggle must have been when I lacked that clarity for so long.

The months since October have felt like a slow descent into normalcy. Every day I thank God for the way back home.

My Mother’s Cancer

The most important topic I had not fully faced was my mother’s cancer diagnosis. She received that diagnosis twice. During much of her treatment, I avoided going home, and I know that absence still cuts into me.

What I was really avoiding was not only fear for her life. I was also avoiding being seen while I was unstable, exhausted, impulsive, and difficult to trust. I feared that my presence would become another burden when she needed support.

I recently admitted to my therapist that I had stopped blaming myself only after finally naming the fear under the surface: disappointing my mother, failing in a moment when a son should be able to help, and facing the reality that weakness and mortality had moved closer than I wanted to admit.

What matters now is not rehearsing guilt forever. It is telling the truth, refusing self-deception, and choosing responsibility over shame. My mother is an angel. Her fight itself feels miraculous. I probably do not remember the whole story perfectly, and I was likely not as absent as I sometimes believe. That matters too.

I gain nothing by turning regret into self-punishment. It does not make me good to feel bad. Toward the end of my unstable years, I sometimes used bad feelings as an excuse to justify bad behavior. That pattern ends here.

A New Job

This part of the story will be followed by a letter to my mother about my mental health, my substance abuse, my regrets, and the commitments I am making to change. She deserves that honesty.

She cannot be the same person she was before cancer. I can be more for her if I dig deep. That is my new job: to be the bridge between who she was once able to be and who she can be now.

Any deficiencies, any parts in disrepair, are now proving grounds. My job is to carry that load for her and never again be a reason her load gets heavier.

Choosing Hard Things

This essay is ultimately not about technology or personal history. It is about orientation. For years I chased what felt natural. Now I intend to pursue what demands growth.

Hard things reveal weaknesses. They force discipline. They remove illusions. In that sense, they are teachers.

So today marks the beginning of a different approach: a life organized not around ease but around deliberate effort, curiosity guided by discipline rather than impulse, and honesty sturdy enough to hold the weight of reality.