When something’s too easy, I don’t even want to bother. I need excitement. I need a challenge. But my life is super comfortable. So even trying to make things more challenging is a challenge in itself. I’ll analyze a situation, look at how easy it is, get disgusted by the lack of challenge, try to think of ways to make it more challenging, and finally realize that this is going to be pretty hard, just coming up with ideas. Then I’ll actually think of something, finally, maybe, a little trick or a variant to make whatever menial task I’m about to do more challenging. But just as I’m about to get to work, I realize that I’ve already satisfied my craving for more challenge, just by thinking of how to make a boring chore more of a challenge. By this point, actually going about setting up my challenge, execution, well it all seems a little too much. And so I’ll just go about my day only ever thinking about how interesting things could have been if I hadn’t wasted all of my energy dreaming up elaborate and creative challenges.

Because I get tired. The creative process. Very tiring. And another thing I don’t like is being too challenged. I don’t like it when something is so hard, like one of those Sudoku puzzles, not the easy ones, obviously, I’m talking about the back-of-the-book, Sunday Sudokus. And I’ll be honest here, even the easy ones are a little too challenging. Which is hard for me to wrap my head around, because, as I mentioned above, I go through life seeking ways to turn the mundane into the marvelous, or the magnificent, like this sentence right here, you see what I did with these three words that start with the letter M? Totally unnecessary, but just the right amount of challenge.

I’ve reconciled my difficulty with Sudoku to be actually something of an inverse problem, where whoever invented Sudoku, I’m guessing a real nerd, he or she did the exact opposite of what I’m looking for in life, where they took something fun, puzzles, and they made them feel as boring as adding up a bunch of numbers for no reason, all while keeping, if not enhancing the challenge aspect of the game. It’s pure challenge for challenge’s sake. And I’m normally a fan of challenge, like I was talking about earlier, trying to challenge myself into creating all of those challenging situations.

I’m talking challenging like let’s see if I can eat lunch with only a fork instead of both a fork and a knife. Yeah, that might seem silly, and yeah, I just thought of it, just as an example, like what’s a common thing that we do every day? Eating lunch. How to make it challenging? Quick. See? It’s not that easy, and so if I’m left to just come up with something right away, I’ll find myself playing that little game, no not Sudoku, but trying to get all of that food onto my fork without using a knife for support. You ever try eating a sandwich with just a fork? It’s impossible. Because by the time you start hacking away at it with the fork, it falls apart, you find yourself eating just the bread, then just the inside, and it’s not even a sandwich anymore, it’s just a bunch of random stuff on a plate and so not only has the challenge been accepted, but the challenge has also been left unconquered.

So it’s even harder, trying to find that sweet spot, making things just challenging enough to where I can maintain a certain level of engagement with whatever I’m doing, while also making sure that I’ve set myself up for a challenge that I’ll definitely be able to not only commit to, but also to accomplish.

And so a lot of the time I’m just totally unfulfilled, I look around at the world and it’s like a roulette table, almost half the stuff in the world is too easy, almost another half is too hard, and there are those two greens spots, the 0 and the 00, and that’s the percentage of stuff in the world that satisfies my craving for challenge while also satisfying my equally strong craving to finish or do something that’s just challenging enough without being too challenging. Right? And I don’t know about you guys but, I mean, I’ve only been to a casino a few times, and I’ve never gotten that green. There have to be like magnets underneath the green spots, so that way the ball never lands on green.