A full fridge and that empty feeling.
I was that 'gifted kid'.
You know the one. The 'Head Boy'. I was told I could achieve anything. But by the end of the final year in school certain teachers had already started saying 'you are wasting your talent' by not choosing accounting, or law.
See, in almost the same breath as being told this, I was also being told 'be sensible'. 'Get a skill. 'Get a job'. 'Save'. 'Don't take a risk'.
So... I didn't risk it. I remember the moments clearly. In college, the one I was told to go to because it was where 'all the posh kids went', I lost all myself, while also being told to focus on what I enjoyed. Ironic.
I failed the academic side miserably, and only scraped into a HND in multimedia technology in university, where I thrived. Anyway....
While all that happened, I didn't explore apprenticeships, or learn creating a business. I didn't explore the wider world but took a gamble on understanding service of others in any way.
I put on the uniform and did what I was told, and the gift got buried somewhere underneath all of that. What replaced it was the 'comforts of mediocrity'.
Have you ever felt that?
Have you ever had the 'full fridge', a full feed, a full weekend planned without distraction, and still ended up feeling empty?
What about picking up your phone at the bus stop so you don't have to sit with your own head for ninety seconds?
What about ever buying something on a bad afternoon, to feel better for an hour and then feel worse?
Guess what?
That feeling has a name.
YOU, have been 'padded'.
Every edge of yourself gets softened. Every gap gets filled. Every silence is covered with noise.
Somebody, somewhere, has decided the kindest thing they could do for you is to make sure nothing is ever too hard.
So, our question today fellow readers, is:
What if the hard thing you are protected from is the very thing that could be showing you who you are?
Seriously... You have been made to be comfortable. So that you have to never worry about being ready for the ride.
Padded, not prepared.
The padding
Want to play and see?
Try picturing with me for a second, an ordinary padded day.
Morning: An alarm goes off, then you're straight to the phone. A feed waits before your feet even hit the floor to start the day.
Afternoon: You choose from a whole playlist for any mood. Tired, Sad, Bored, Anxious. There is a soundtrack ready to cover anything you need to.
Evening: You can get food to your door. While you watch a show that autoplays to the next one. The phone contains a basket of goodies that you don't need, for a feeling you can't quite name,
Night: You scroll, and you scroll, until sleep wins. Then you wake up and the whole thing starts again.
Nothing in that day asked anything of you. Nothing tested you. Nothing showed you what you're made of.
Seriously... go back and read that day again. Where in it did you have to push?
Somebody built that day for you. On purpose.
The treadmill
Now, I don't want you to just take my word for it, so let me bring in a few names.
Back in 1978, three psychologists, Philip Brickman, Dan Coates and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, went and found people who had won the lottery. You'd expect them to be the happiest people in the room, right?
Guess what?
They weren't any happier than people who hadn't won. Worse, they got less pleasure from the ordinary stuff. A chat with a friend. A compliment. A good breakfast.
That's called the 'hedonic treadmill'. The new thing feels brilliant, then it feels normal, then you need the next thing just to feel anything at all. Later research softened it a little, because some life changes do stick. But the pull is real. And you have felt it.
The bigger picture
Then in 2014, a team of four, Helga Dittmar, Rod Bond, Megan Hurst and Tim Kasser, did something big. They pulled together research from hundreds of samples, in what's called a 'meta-analysis', to ask one question. Does getting and owning more stuff make people feel better?
The answer came back the same, over and over. The more a person's life orbits around getting and owning things, the lower their wellbeing tends to be.
Read that again slowly.
The very thing you were told would make you feel better, is linked to feeling worse.
The system behind it
Here's what the marketing system of consumerism says to you:
'Treat yourself. You deserve it. It's self-care.'
And sometimes it is. Rest is good. Being kind to yourself is good.
But see, a life where nothing is ever allowed to be heavy has a cost. Care that never lets you get tested, leaves you untested. A life with no weight in it builds no strength.
The faith foundation
There's an old line in Luke's gospel, said to a crowd who were arguing over an inheritance:
"One's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions." (Luke 12:15)
You don't have to share the faith to sit with that. Two thousand years on, the meta-analysis says the same thing.
The more you pad, the less you feel.
The silence you run from
So if padding is what gets added, silence is what gets avoided.
The study that should wake you up with the slap
In 2014, a psychologist called Timothy Wilson and his team published a study in the journal Science. The title was 'Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind'.
They asked people to sit alone in a plain room for between six and fifteen minutes. No phone. No book. Just their own thoughts.
Most people didn't enjoy it. Anyway.... the researchers went further. They gave people a button that delivered a mild electric shock. One the people had already said they would 'pay money to avoid'.
Then they left them alone.
Two thirds of the men and a quarter of the women pressed it.
Stop. We need to stop and contemplate together here. They chose pain, over just fifteen minutes with themselves.
To be fair to the research, other scientists have questioned how far you can stretch this one. It doesn't mean 'people hate thinking'. But it does show that a lot of people find their own company so uncomfortable, pain feels like relief.
Why it feels so hard
Dr Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist at Stanford, and in her book Dopamine Nation she describes the brain's pleasure and pain like a seesaw. Every quick hit of easy reward tips it one way. The brain pushes back the other way to rebalance. Keep feeding it easy reward and your baseline sinks. Ordinary life starts to feel flat. Silence starts to feel unbearable.
So you fill it...
Name the reflexes
Be honest with yourself here. Which of the beginning examples is yours?
The bus stop reach: Phone out the second you stop moving.
The shower soundtrack: Earbuds in, or a speaker on, so there is never a gap.
The background hum: Something always playing in the room, even when you're not watching it.
The bedtime scroll: You don't go to sleep. You get taken by it.
None of this makes you a bad person. It makes you a trained one. You were taught to reach for noise every time life went quiet.
The turn
See, the silence holds the thing you've been avoiding.
And more often than not, the thing you've been avoiding is you. The idea you had and never chased. The thing you used to be good at. The question about your life that feels too big to look at.
The second system
Here's what 'they' say:
'Boredom is a waste of time. Stay busy. Stay productive. Keep up.'
The field wants you full, every minute of every day.
So here's the answer. Boredom is a doorway. Everything you've never named is waiting on the other side of it.
Exercise: The Ten Quiet Minutes
Try this with me this week.
Set a timer for ten minutes.
Remove every input. No phone, no music, no screen. Put the phone in another room.
Hold a pen and a page. Nothing else.
Write whatever surfaces. A memory. A want. Something you were good at once. Something that's bothering you. Don't judge it, just get it down.
Do it three times this week.
It will feel strange. You'll feel the itch to reach for something. That itch is the padding pulling at you. Sit through it.
What you numb, you never name.
The doublespeak
Now have a look at the messages that surround you. Really look.
Two messages at once
On one side of the screen: You are enough. Love yourself. Be you.
Right underneath it: Here's what you need to buy to get there.
The trainers. The skincare. The 'aesthetic'. The setup. The course that promises the life. The supplement for the body. The app for the mind.
That's doublespeak. You're told to love yourself, while being sold a thousand conditions for doing it. You're told you are enough, then sold all the parts you're supposedly missing.
A note before we carry on.
I'm a full believer in capitalism as the greatest system to ever have existed. The free market and all that. This is not some hidden “anti-capitalist document”
A self-assembled from a basket
When who you are comes from what you purchase, it never settles. There's always a new release, a new trend, a new version of the person you're meant to be. You buy in, and within weeks you need to buy again.
Worth you buy has to be bought again. Rented worth always runs out.
The screen in your hand
Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist at NYU, and in his book The Anxious Generation (2024) he argues that the move from a play-based childhood to a phone-based one, through the early 2010s, changed young people's mental health for the worse. It's a serious argument with a lot of data behind it. It's also contested. Other researchers say the link is weaker than he claims.
Guess what? You don't need to settle that fight to notice one thing. A childhood lived through a screen of comparison makes the conditional self feel normal. You learn early that you're always being measured, so you learn to measure yourself first.
'Just be yourself. Here's how. It's £49.99.'
The answer
You can't buy what was already given to you.
You can only stop agreeing that it's missing.
Underneath everything I teach is a belief I hold honestly, and offer to you rather than push. Your worth was given, you didn't earn it. It came before the performance, and it doesn't depend on it.
Whether you share the faith or not, try the idea on for size. What would change in your week if your worth was already settled, and nothing you bought or did could add to it or take it away?
A self you buy is a self you rent.
Struggle builds the self
Right. This is the heart of it.
The study that changes the conversation
In 2010, Mark Seery, Alison Holman and Roxane Cohen Silver published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The title borrows that old line, 'Whatever does not kill us'.
They followed a big national sample of American adults over several years. They measured how much adversity each person had lived through. Illness, loss, hardship, upheaval. Then they tracked how their mental health and wellbeing were doing.
You'd expect the people with NO adversity to be doing best. Wouldn't you?
They weren't.
The people who'd faced some adversity did better than the people who'd faced none, and better than the people who'd faced a great deal. A life with zero struggle didn't protect anyone. It left them less able to cope when trouble finally came.
Hold this carefully
I need to be clear here. This is about moderate, survivable struggle. It doesn't mean trauma is good for you, and it doesn't mean anyone should go looking for harm. If you've been through something that broke you, that was never a lesson you needed, and nothing here is asking you to be grateful for it.
The point is narrower, and more useful. A life with every hard edge removed doesn't make you strong. It makes you untested.
The body already knows this
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a word for it in his 2012 book Antifragile. Some things break under stress. Some things survive it. And some things get STRONGER because of it.
Muscle: Load it and it tears a little, then grows back thicker.
Bone: Stress it and it lays down more density.
People: Work the same way, given the right dose.
Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt took that idea into their book The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). Their argument is that when we protect young people from every discomfort, we don't make them safer. We make them more fragile, and they break on the first hard thing life throws at them.
Growth after hardship is measurable
Back in the 1990s, two psychologists, Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun, built a way to measure something they called 'posttraumatic growth'. After real hardship, lots of people report changes they'd never have chosen, but wouldn't give back. A stronger sense of what they're capable of. Closer relationships. Clearer priorities.
Struggle can show you what was already in you. And it can build what wasn't there yet.
'Protect your peace. If it's hard, it's not meant for you.'
The answer
Some hard things are exactly meant for you.
They're how you find out what you carry.
The ancient authority
Marcus Aurelius ran an empire, and still sat down at night to write notes to himself. One of them, from his Meditations (5.20), reads:
"The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way."
The obstacle is the training.
Paul, writing to the church in Rome, put it in a sequence:
"Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope." (Romans 5:3 to 4)
Notice the order. Suffering sits at the start of that line, and hope sits at the end. You can't skip to the end.
And C.S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain (1940), said it like this:
"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
Exercise: The Struggle Map
Write down three hard things you've already come through. Exams, a move, a loss, a job, a falling-out, a failure.
Next to each, write what it built. A skill, a strength, a belief, a habit, a friendship.
Circle the one you're proudest of surviving.
You'll notice something. The hard things are where most of your real self came from.
The weight you avoid is the strength you lose.
The wrong struggle
So... struggle builds you. But be careful, because 'they' sell struggle too. And they sell two versions that go nowhere.
Dead end one: the performed struggle
The 5am routine, filmed. The cold plunge, filmed. The gym session, filmed and captioned. Suffering turned into content.
It looks like hardship. It looks like discipline. But every rep is pointed at the camera, and the whole thing is still about you. Who sees it. Who likes it. Who thinks you're impressive.
That builds an image. It doesn't build a self.
Dead end two: the opt-out
The other voice is darker. It's all rigged. Nothing matters. Burn it down. Check out. Why bother?
It feels like freedom. It feels like seeing through everything. But it ends up in the same place as dead-end one. You, alone, with nothing built.
One lie, two costumes
Put them side by side.
The performed struggle: 'Grind for the camera.' Suffering as proof. All about me being seen.
The opt-out: 'Nothing's worth grinding for.' Suffering as pointless. All about me being free.
Different clothes. Same centre. Both are aimed at yourself, and pain aimed at yourself has nowhere to go.
'No pain, no gain. Post the proof.'
And from the other side:
'It's all rigged. Why even try?'
The answer
The question was never WHETHER you struggle.
The question is who the struggle is for.
Pain for the mirror stays in the mirror.
Coach yourself
Be honest. Which dead end do you lean towards?
Do you find yourself doing hard things mostly when someone's watching?
Or do you find yourself deciding hard things aren't worth it before you've even started?
There's no shame in either answer. Most of us have lived in both. Naming it is the first move out.
Pain aimed at yourself goes nowhere.
The right struggle aims outward
So, our question for this part, fellow readers, is:
If struggle for yourself goes nowhere, where does the good kind point?
The research answers it clearly.
Happiness and meaning are different things
In 2013, Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker and Emily Garbinsky published a study in the Journal of Positive Psychology. The title says it all, 'Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life'.
They surveyed hundreds of adults and found that happiness and meaning overlap, but they pull apart in some telling ways:
Happiness was linked to getting what you want, to the present moment, and to TAKING.
Meaning was linked to GIVING, to joining up your past and your future, and, this is the big one, to stress, worry and struggle.
People who called themselves 'a giver' reported more meaning in their lives.
Meaning costs something. And it usually costs you on someone else's behalf.
Five dollars
In 2008, Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Aknin and Michael Norton ran a short study, published in Science. They handed students an envelope in the morning with either $5 or $20 inside. Half were told to spend it on themselves by the end of the day. Half were told to spend it on someone else, or give it away.
By the evening, the ones who'd spent it on other people were happier. The amount made no difference. The direction did.
A why worth carrying
Viktor Frankl survived the Nazi camps and went on to write Man's Search for Meaning (1946). He said meaning comes through a task to do, a person to love, and the attitude you take towards suffering you can't avoid. He leaned on a line from Nietzsche to sum it up:
"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how."
Your 'why' is almost never you. It's almost always someone.
Join the dots
Here's where it all comes together.
Your easiest gifts are the things you do so naturally, you assume anyone could.
Somebody else's real need is out there right now, waiting for exactly that.
Using one on the other will cost you something. Time, effort, nerve.
That cost is the right struggle. It builds you while it serves them.
Remember the 'gifted kid'? The gift got buried partly because it was only ever pointed at proving himself. Pass the exam. Win the role. Look the part. Point that same gift outward, at someone who needs it, and it starts doing what it was made for.
What the world says
'Look after number one. Nobody else is going to.'
The answer
Look after number one by serving number two.
That's where the research says the meaning lives.
There's a line in Mark's gospel that the whole pattern rests on:
"For even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve." (Mark 10:45)
Whatever you believe, you can see the shape of it. The greatest life in the story was aimed outward.
Exercise: The Thanked-For List
Write down three things someone has thanked you for this year. Small counts. 'Thanks for listening.' 'Thanks for sorting that.' 'Thanks for making me laugh.'
Next to each, write the need it met for them. Were they lonely, stuck, confused, overwhelmed?
Look for the pattern. What do you keep giving without trying?
That pattern is the shape of what you carry. You've been giving it away for years and calling it nothing.
Serve first, and the self follows.
Practise struggle on purpose
So if nobody taught you how to struggle... you can teach yourself.
Small doses. On purpose. For someone else.
The oldest training plan
Two thousand years ago, a man called Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius with some odd advice. In Letter 18, he told him:
"Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: 'Is this the condition that I feared?'"
Now Seneca was rich. He didn't need to go without. He chose to, so the thing he feared would lose its grip on him.
Psychologists today call it 'voluntary discomfort'. You take on small, survivable hardships on purpose, so the big ones find you ready.
The three weekly reps
Build them into your week, like training sessions.
The Quiet Rep. Ten minutes, no input, pen and page. Three times a week. You're training yourself to sit with your own head.
The Fast Rep. One day off one comfort. The feed. The basket. The background noise. The takeaway. Pick one and go without for a day. Then ask Seneca's question: 'is this what I feared?'
The Service Rep. One hard thing, done for one person, using your gift. Help someone with the thing you're naturally good at, even when it's inconvenient. Especially when it's inconvenient.
Track it
After each rep, write three lines:
What I felt: The itch, the resistance, the relief.
What I noticed: About myself, my habits, my head.
What I found: Something I carry that I'd forgotten about.
Over a month, those lines will tell you more about who you are than any quiz or personality test.
Oh no, another 'world quote'
'That sounds miserable.' Why would anyone choose that?'
The answer
Because the person who chooses small struggles is ready when the big ones arrive.
And because every rep proves a lie wrong. The lie that you're too soft, too young, too ordinary to carry anything of weight.
This week
Do all three reps once. Just once each.
Then write one sentence: What surprised me was...
That sentence is yours. Keep it.
Small reps, strong roots.
The close
Go back to where we started. The 'full fridge', the full feed, the empty feeling.
Now picture the same person a month from now.
They can sit for ten minutes without reaching for anything.
They've gone a day without the comfort they thought they needed, and found out it wasn't what they feared.
They've done one hard thing a week for someone else.
They have a list, in their own handwriting, of what people thank them for.
Nothing in their bank account changed. Nothing in their basket changed. What changed is that they found out what they're made of.
Here's the whole thing in one line:
Comfort was sold to you as care. Struggle aimed outward gives you back yourself.
You weren't broken. You were padded. And padding comes off.
So say it out loud, in your own voice. Say it because it's true:
"I am not padded. I am prepared. I carry something worth the weight."
Next time: what happens when you finally know what you carry, and you have to say it out loud to someone who could pay you for it.
Sources
Brickman, P., Coates, D. and Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917 to 927.
Dittmar, H., Bond, R., Hurst, M. and Kasser, T. (2014). The relationship between materialism and personal well-being: A meta-analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(5), 879 to 924.
Wilson, T. D. et al. (2014). Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind. Science, 345, 75 to 77.
Lembke, A. (2021). Dopamine Nation. Dutton.
Haidt, J. (2024). The Anxious Generation. Penguin Press.
Seery, M. D., Holman, E. A. and Silver, R. C. (2010). Whatever does not kill us: Cumulative lifetime adversity, vulnerability, and resilience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(6), 1025 to 1041.
Tedeschi, R. G. and Calhoun, L. G. (1996). The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 9(3), 455 to 471.
Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile. Random House.
Lukianoff, G. and Haidt, J. (2018). The Coddling of the American Mind. Penguin Press.
Baumeister, R. F., Vohs, K. D., Aaker, J. L. and Garbinsky, E. N. (2013). Some key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life. Journal of Positive Psychology, 8(6), 505 to 516.
Dunn, E. W., Aknin, L. B. and Norton, M. I. (2008). Spending money on others promotes happiness. Science, 319, 1687 to 1688.
Frankl, V. (1946). Man's Search for Meaning.
Seneca. Letters to Lucilius, Letter 18 (Gummere translation).
Marcus Aurelius. Meditations, 5.20 (Hays translation).
Lewis, C. S. (1940). The Problem of Pain.
Scripture quotations from the ESV: Luke 12:15, Romans 5:3 to 4, Mark 10:45.