Life Is a Series of Problems (and That's Good News)

Most of us carry around a quiet assumption: once I get through this, things will calm down. Once the project ships, once the baby sleeps through the night, once the car is fixed and the move is done, then life can finally start running smoothly.

Then the project ships, and the next one starts. The baby sleeps, and the toddler stops napping. The car is fixed, and the roof leaks. It can feel like you're doing something wrong, like everyone else reached the calm part and you keep missing the exit.

You're not doing anything wrong. There is no calm part, at least not one that lasts. Life isn't a stretch of smooth road that problems keep interrupting. Life is the problems, one after another, and that turns out to be much better news than it sounds.

The goal isn't a life without problems. It's getting good at solving them, and choosing better ones.

Nobody gets a problem-free life

Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck opened his bestseller The Road Less Traveled with three words: "Life is difficult." His point was that once you truly accept that, it stops being quite so difficult, because you quit being outraged every time it is. The philosopher Karl Popper put it even more plainly in the title of one of his last books: All Life Is Problem Solving.

Think about the people you know who seem to have it figured out. They don't have fewer problems. A bigger job brings bigger decisions. A house brings maintenance. Kids bring, well, everything. Even good news arrives with a to-do list attached: the promotion means hiring a team, the new puppy means 6 a.m. walks in the rain.

Golfers have a phrase for this: play it as it lies. You don't get to pick up your ball and move it out of the bunker because the bunker is unfair. You figure out the best shot from where you actually are. Nobody plays a round without landing somewhere awkward. The good players aren't the ones who never miss the fairway; they're the ones who don't panic when they do.

Why this is good news

If problems were a sign that something had gone wrong, then every problem would be a small failure. But if problems are just what life is made of, they stop being an accusation and become the actual game. That shift takes a surprising amount of weight off.

It also means the skill that matters most isn't luck or talent. It's problem solving, and that's a skill you can practice. Every problem you work through leaves you a little more capable and a little calmer about the next one. The second flat tire is far less dramatic than the first, mostly because you know where the jack is now.

And a lot of the good stuff lives inside the problems. Ask people about the most meaningful stretches of their lives and they'll rarely describe a beach vacation. They'll describe getting a business off the ground, nursing a parent through an illness, or learning to live in a new country. Hard, and full of problems. Also the parts they're proudest of.

Turn the knot into a question

Most problems don't arrive looking like problems. They arrive as a feeling: dread on Sunday night, a tight chest when the bank app opens, irritation every time you walk into the kitchen. A feeling is hard to solve. A question is not.

So the first move is to name it. Write the thing that's bugging you as a question that starts with "How could I…?" "Work is awful" becomes "How could I get Mondays to feel less dreadful?" "The house is a mess" becomes "How could I keep the kitchen counter clear for a week?" The question version is smaller, more specific, and, crucially, it has answers.

If the first question you write still feels overwhelming, it's too big. Shrink it until you can picture yourself doing something about it this week.

Check whether it's really a problem

Some things that feel like problems aren't, because there's nothing to be done about them. Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, who teach the popular Designing Your Life course at Stanford, call these gravity problems. You can be upset that gravity makes biking uphill hard, but you can't fix gravity. If it's not actionable, it's not a problem. It's a circumstance.

Your height, the economy, the fact that your commute crosses a river with one bridge: these are circumstances. You can't solve them, but you can absolutely solve problems around them. "The bridge is always jammed" is gravity. "How could I make the jammed bridge less miserable?" (audiobooks, a different hour, a carpool) is a real problem with real answers.

This check saves an enormous amount of energy. A lot of what wears us down isn't hard problems; it's arguing with gravity.

Find the next shot, not the whole round

Big problems stall because we try to solve them all at once, in our heads, usually at 2 a.m. Golf helps here too. Nobody plans eighteen holes from the first tee. You figure out the next shot, take it, then walk up and see where you landed.

For any problem, ask: what's the very next physical thing I could do? Not "fix my finances," but "open the last three statements." Not "get healthier," but "put my walking shoes by the door." The next step should be small enough that you could do it today, and concrete enough that you'd know when it's done.

Then do it, and look again. Problems change once you start moving on them. You learn things you couldn't have known from the tee box. That's not a flaw in your plan; it's how the game works.

Choose better problems

Here's the part that changes how a life feels over the long run. Since you'll always have problems, the real question isn't how to get rid of them. It's which problems do I want to have?

"How do I train for a 10K?" is a better problem than "How do I stop getting winded on the stairs?" "How do I handle a team that's growing too fast?" is a better problem than "How do I survive a job I hate?" "Where do we fit all these people at Thanksgiving?" is a better problem than "Why do I feel so alone?" Every one of them takes effort. Only some of them are worth the effort.

You often can't choose your problems directly, but you choose them indirectly every time you pick a goal, a commitment or a person. Saying yes to something is quietly saying yes to its problems too. When you're deciding whether to take something on, it's worth asking not just "do I want this?" but "do I want the problems that come with this?" If the answer is yes, those problems won't feel like a burden. They'll feel like the point.

If you're not sure which problems are worth having, start with what matters most to you. How to Tell What's Really Important to You has a ten-minute exercise for exactly that.

A few things this isn't

Accepting that life is a series of problems doesn't mean you have to be cheerful about all of them. Some problems are genuinely heavy: illness, loss, a relationship ending. Those deserve time, grief and help from other people, not a clever reframe. You don't have to solve everything alone, and asking for help is one of the best problem-solving moves there is.

It also doesn't mean treating every moment as a problem to optimize. Plenty of life is meant to be simply enjoyed. The point is that when problems do show up, as they will, you can meet them with a little curiosity instead of a sense of betrayal.