[Essay] The day I think about the meaning of effort and want to throw it all away.

You find a dream or a goal and work toward it with all your might. Yet, there are moments when you suddenly ask yourself, 'Is there any meaning in this?' Even if you wouldn't call it a waste, you start to doubt the efforts you've accumulated without seeing results, and you wonder if you're truly on the right path.

Studying, working, hobbies. Effort is necessary to reach the top or to improve in anything.

Humans are lazy, so if possible, we wish to improve just by continuing without having to think about it. Yet, because people are also clever, we start looking for the shortest path and thinking about better ways to exert effort.

The experience of putting in effort and not seeing results slowly makes a person bitter. It happens because you start to lose faith in the very meaning of working hard.

When I was a student, I wanted to beat the top student in my grade at studying. To that end, I spent so much time on it that I could say I had no time for anything else. For some reason, I felt like that test would determine my life, and I was strangely nervous.

But I couldn't win. At that time, my young self thought, 'Ah, there are people I can't beat no matter how hard I try. So, what am I working hard for?' and I wanted to throw it all away.

Even now that I am an adult, every time I meet someone at work I cannot beat, I feel that way to some extent.

Now, I live my life working hard while somewhat accepting that 'there are people I can't beat,' but every time I experience losing, I think about the meaning of my efforts. I don't really want to experience that feeling of a hole opening up in my heart, as if everything was a waste.

I know that the experience of losing makes me stronger, but the weak part of me wants to throw everything away every time I lose. I think it might not be so bad to choose a life where I don't try at anything and never know the feeling of losing. Even when I think that, in the end, I find myself working hard toward something again. Perhaps I am not doing it to win, but simply because I don't want to lose the version of myself that is working hard.

In the end, it seems I am hopelessly in love with the version of myself that is working hard at something.