My wife once sent me a picture of a home decor sign that said:

“Being an adult is telling yourself, ‘Next week won’t be so busy’ over and over again until you die.”

This would be hilarious if it weren’t so true, or maybe that’s precisely why it is. Over the last decade, the “adulting” meme rose to prominence. Adulting is when a person has to learn how to do common skills or activities, such as changing the oil in a car or doing taxes. In previous generations, these were just considered part of being an adult, and no one ever really received adulation for doing something so quotidian. Now, some people feel like they need recognition for accomplishing such “difficult” tasks. It’s the grown up equivalent to a child’s participation trophy. “Congratulations, you made a good effort and didn’t completely fail. Here’s a pat on the head and recognition for doing the absolute minimum required.”

As much fun as it is to cast shade on other people in my generation, there is a germ of truth in the adulting meme. Being an adult is hard. You have to make somehow make ends meet in a time when many expenses, especially housing, are much higher than they’ve been historically. If you are fortunate enough to own your home, you have maintenance and upkeep as well as property taxes. If you have children, you are engaged in an ongoing struggle with tiny humans who require constant guidance and training. These children seem to have the perfect skills to cause frustration and disaster in your home, and so you must fight daily against your selfish impulses to be the selfless providers and counselors you should. Their souls will be dramatically impacted by how you train them and interact with them each moment of the day—no pressure.

Laundry and dirty dishes pile to the sky, and now your dishwasher is broken, requiring you to wash dishes by hand, taking up even more of your precious time and leaving other tasks undone. Then the one car needs a checkup while the other one quits alongside the road. Now you need to call a tow truck or have a friend help you swap out the alternator. This is all happening while your evenings are filled with church, working on other projects at home, gardening in the summer, cutting and splitting wood in the winter, and cramming a few seconds of rest and refreshment in the cracks between everything else.

I think Adam and Eve likely dealt with the same struggles that we do. I can imagine Eve checking her sundial at around 6 o’clock, wondering when Adam was going to make it in from the field or whether he was going to be late again—the meal she had slaved over for the last several hours getting cold in the pot on the supper table. She balances Cain on her hip while trying to tidy up the mess he just made of the tent. She might be thinking, “Pain in childbirth might almost have been easier than the everyday slog of trying to maintain a household while dealing with petulant and spill-prone children.”

Adam and Eve were promised a hard life, and that is exactly what they got. Backbreaking labor, frustration, broken relationships, and unending toil to push back the broken world that kept creeping into their home. We have inherited the same world. Today we may have electric ranges, vacuums, minivans, and toasters, but the struggle is no different. It’s easy to envision a time when the house is clean, there is nothing to fix, there are no spills to mop up, and the task list has everything checked off. When we carry this vision of perfection before us, it is easy to become frustrated or discouraged when we can never quite reach the shining city of “Perfect Home.”

When I was in my early teens, a pipe running from our well into the house sprang a leak. My dad tasked me with helping him dig up a section of the yard to find the leaking junction. We worked on it for a while, but as night fell, it got darker and started to rain. I put on a jacket, but I was soon soaked, cold, and muddy. Dad had to go elsewhere to take care of something, so before long it was just me in the bottom of a muddy hole with the rain showing no signs of abating. After too many minutes of self-pity, I finally gave myself over to the mud, rain, and cold, realizing that the best thing I could do was to “embrace the suck” and just get on with the task at hand. I threw myself into the work and found myself actually enjoying slopping around in the mud and braving the cold and rain. I finished up the job, then went into the house and rewarded myself with a steaming hot shower.

Counter-intuitively, it is when we face reality and realize that we will never quite arrive at our idealistic vision of perfection and ease that it becomes easier to deal with the difficulties of a hard life. There is work to be done, and whatever is in front of us today, whether it is a diaper that needs to be changed, a disobedient child, or a leaking roof, is what we have been given to do. By throwing ourselves into our work, we join those before us in making this life a place where others can thrive, even if the vision of perfection in our heads is never reached. Those who embrace the difficulties of life are those who can improve what is around them and maybe even occasionally enjoy the struggle. The sooner we disabuse ourselves of the fantasy that our lives will somehow become easier some day in the future, the quicker we can roll up our sleeves to improve things as much as we can right here, right now.

Of course life is hard, why would it be any other way?