Problems Are Real
A problem-free life causes stagnation—choosing your challenges restores vitality.
Welcome to Age with Attitude, where I have upgraded that one question to:
What’s possible as we age?
Have you ever noticed that when people get together, the conversation too easily turns around problems?
We start with the weather, move to politics, chat about our latest ailments, and share whatever bad news we’ve picked up along the way.
Walk into almost any coffee shop, golf club, or living room, and you’ll hear the exact same script playing out on loop:
“Just wait until you hit eighty...”
“Can you believe what the politicians are doing now?”
“My body is just giving out on me.”
We naturally turn to dinner tables, coffee chats, or online spaces like Substack seeking genuine connection. We pull up a chair to unpack, dissect, and ruminate on everything that is going wrong.
It’s natural social discourse—we share what’s hard, commiserate over the daily grind, and find comfort in a shared reality.
On the surface, it feels like community. It feels like we are searching for solutions. But watch the room closely, and you’ll feel the weight. You notice people gathering around, endlessly dissecting what’s broken.
We engage in these spaces because we want to connect. But the energy can feel heavy—an atmosphere rooted in chronic frustration, outrage, and complaint.
Low-tone energy has a powerful gravitational pull. After an hour of marinating in heavy complaints—whether around a kitchen table or in a comment section—we feel drained. We find ourselves sucked down to that exact same level of irritation, holding onto problems that aren’t even ours to solve.
If we aren’t careful, these commiseration circles quietly become an energy sinkhole. Without realizing it, we end up spending our best vitality discussing problems that are not ours, we cannot solve or have no intention of solving, leaving us drained instead of inspired.
I’ve also noticed this exact dynamic gathers an serious number of likes and comments on Substack:
“Yes!”
“Me too!”
“I understand you.”
“I have that problem too.”
I call it the Grievance Echo Chamber: the social dynamic of people reinforcing and amplifying each other’s complaints.
I don’t know about you, but I find it exhausting.
This is not an argument for no problems.
Problems are real.
Here is the inconvenient truth: a life without real problems does not produce tranquility—it actually produces stagnation.
Think of physical fitness. When you place zero physical demand on your body, your muscles don’t remain strong, rested, and ready; they atrophy. The machine shrinks to match the lack of demand.
The mind works the exact same way.
When we try to eliminate all problems from our world to keep things comfortable, our mind doesn’t go quietly to sleep. It turns inward.
When it’s denied real, meaningful work to do, it begins inflating trivial inconveniences into major, life-altering crises:
Getting deeply worked up over a 20-minute Wi-Fi outage or a late parcel delivery.
Getting consumed by shopping center crowds, bad traffic, or political commentary on the news.
Fixating on minor body creaks and going down endless online health rabbit holes.
By retreating from constructive friction, our world quietly shrinks to match the tiny scale of what we are willing to face.
Life operates through motion, and motion inherently generates friction. Problems aren’t proof that our life is broken. They are proof that we are actively engaging with life.
The moment we realize this, the central question shifts entirely.
It is no longer “How do I avoid problems?”
It becomes “Why am I spending my precious vitality dealing with tiny, boring, unchosen problems?”
Ask yourself: what actually creates vitality, cheerfulness, and genuine satisfaction?
It is never passive leisure, endless consumption, or an empty schedule. It is the active, purposeful resolution of meaningful challenges.
When we leave behind the corporate pressure cooker for a well-earned retirement, it’s not the exit ramp from life. It’s the time to redeploy accumulated wisdom, skill, and competence toward problems of our own choosing.
When we voluntarily take on a project, learn a difficult skill, or step up to help someone else, we don’t get a quiet life—we get a mountain of fresh problems. We get logistical hurdles, steep learning curves, and unexpected setbacks.
But notice the crucial difference: these aren’t problems happening to us; they are problems we chose to take on.
Vitality is not the absence of problems, but the presence of chosen purpose with its associated problems.
When we act deliberately and plan our own games, problems cease to be threats. They become the exact material we use to build confidence, stay sharp, and continue to expand our world.
We don’t need to pray for an easy life with a blank horizon. We can demand a life filled with bigger, better, and more meaningful problems to solve.
What if we stop dreading the friction, start choosing better challenges and embrace the interesting problems they bring?
Then we have something much more interesting to discuss around the dinner table, in the coffee shop, or online space.
If we want to look forward to the next decade or thirty years with real excitement, we don’t need a guarantee of smooth sailing. We need a goal so compelling that we eagerly welcome every obstacle that comes with it.
We can decide on a future with boldness. We can trade small, inward-looking anxieties of comfortable isolation for the large, invigorating hurdles of deliberate creation.
We aren’t retiring. We’re redeploying.
My game is “Train for Longevity”. I am developing my personal system around aerobic capacity, strength, and mobility, based on a 12-week cycle that prioritises one discipline at a time, so I don’t overdo it and crash my Heart Rate Variability (HRV), as I have in the past. (Some scientists and health experts describe HRV as a direct “measurement of life force”.)
So, what is really possible as I age?
I’m not sure, but I’m keeping score, and I’ll let you know as I go along.
I am also interested in what project or game you are taking on that pushes your boundaries—one with responsibilities that demand your best and a view of problems not as intrusions, but as signals that you are alive, in motion, and building something that matters.
I’d love to hear how this lands for you.
Hit the Like button below, and let’s continue the conversation in the Comments.
My favorite reads this week:
I’m Quitting Drinking For One Year At 81 by Gary Buzzard
At Nearly 63, I Don’t Work Out Every Day by Lorraine C. Ladish