The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made.
It requires troublesome work to undertake the alteration of old beliefs.
—John Dewey
One of the byproducts of the relentless exhortation to be happy seems to be the conflation of easy and good (or right). Years ago, someone I’d just met told me she knew that moving to Albuquerque was right for her because everything—job, place to live, friends—fell right into place. Her assessment of her experience (easy = good) may also have been based on the belief that there are things we’re meant to do, people we’re meant to encounter, and places we’re meant to be. If something feels right and doing it is easy that can be enough to convince us that it’s meant to be and, therefore, it’s right.
Assessing something based on how easy it is or how right it feels is fine if nothing much is on the line because nobody wants small or mundane things to be hard. We develop hot keys and hacks for that stuff. But as a general practice, always aiming for what’s easy or for what feels right leaves a lot to be desired.
Go Against the Grain
There are many things we do that feel natural. Things that feel natural tend to be easy and to feel right, too. If you conflate easy and good, you’re more likely to move toward what seems easy and natural and away from what seems difficult and unnatural. The saying going against the grain means doing the opposite of what feels normal or natural or easy. Going against the grain rarely feels right.
The path of normal, natural, and easy is the path of least resistance and your brain, my brain, and every other person’s brain is hell-bent on taking that path. It doesn’t want to deviate. It doesn’t want to go for what’s difficult or for what doesn’t come naturally. So we are automatically suspicious of anything that feels contrived.
But following the path of least resistance is what maintains the status quo. If you want to change the status quo, you have to deviate from that path. You have to do what doesn’t feel (and isn’t) normal, natural, or easy. You have to do things that feel contrived.
Invent with Ingenuity
These days, the word contrived has a bad rap. It’s the opposite of easy or natural; therefore, it’s almost automatic to see anything contrived as not good. But originally contrive simply meant to invent. At one point it even meant to invent with ingenuity, although that later changed to invent falsely. The latter interpretation seems to be the one that has stuck around, which may be why there are so many negative synonyms for contrived, such as: stilted, artificial, hokey, affected, forced, labored, strained, elaborate, unnatural, and overdone.
Yes, contrived can mean any or all of those things. Something contrived can certainly feel stilted, artificial, and unnatural. It can be forced and labored. It can definitely feel overdone. That’s because doing something that feels—or is—contrived is the opposite of taking the path of least resistance: the path of maintaining the status quo. Doing the contrived thing requires using your brain (System 2), which is never as easy as going with the flow.
In the realm of behavior change, doing what feels normal and natural may be easy and feel right, but it won’t get you the results you seek. It will get you more of what you already have. This isn’t a matter of personal preferences or of semantics. Being willing to embrace what feels contrived is an essential element of living a truly satisfying and meaningful life.
At the next MONTHLY MEETING OF THE MIND (& BRAIN), we’ll take a look at how our bias against what feels contrived gets in the way of getting the results we want—and discover what we might be able to do about it.