What is the point of the struggle, I wonder, (genuinely, not dispiritedly) as a I slog out to my office, with a 750 word column to conjure out of the air, and no real story burning in me to share.

As a joke, my husband had prompted Chat GPT. Here one comes, he said, and before I’d even made it to my desk, machine learning had generated something that could pass muster. Instead of labouring for four or five hours, performing some mysterious process I’ve never fully understood, that may or may not result in the communication of something helpful, concise, or entertaining, I could just go lie down and stare at the ceiling instead.

Every other morning at the gym, I embrace struggle, and I can feel the struggle slowly embracing me back, altering my body, muscle returning to encase my torso, my back, my shoulders. I creak less going up stairs, my tweaky knee has stopped tweaking. I can feel a strength accruing that I want more of, want to be able to rely on, and so I keep showing up, and stumbling and struggling through workouts, and collapsing on the floor at the end of class in a puddle of my own sweat. 

Struggle is not something I actively seek in any life domains apart from gym (which is expressly in service of more fun and ease in the rest.) Otherwise, I favour flow, efficiency, and speed, associating struggle with a planning screw-up, preparation failure, budgeting shortfall or sign that I’m not where I’m supposed to be. So when a free workaround to writing original stuff from scratch in the lonely dark becomes widely available to all and sundry, it’s genuinely perplexing to ask: why would I insist on doing this the hard way? It’s suddenly easier than ever for anyone to produce intelligent content and harder than ever to find the time to consume it. Reading or writing long blocks of text require a full nervous system and physiological recalibration, a complete slowing down of the system, in order for focus, absorption, and concentration to arise.

Because my arms are still hot and heavy from this morning’s session, I keep coming back to the workout as my metaphor. I have never really thought of thinking as physical work, or of ideating and writing and engaging mentally with the world as a physical process, but it is only happening because we have bodies and brains and nervous systems, and are not, in fact, just atoms or energy free-floating through the cosmos. Thinking a thought, and pulling it out of your mind and into some kind of shareable shape, is embodied work, as much as doing a sumo squat is. And it yields us physical results, even if we don’t see them straight away.

Machine learning or AI is a precursor, possibly, for robot servants who’ll be able to lift things and do manual labour, and maybe make working out seem pointless too. But we still know it’s worth building strength and eating our protein. As athletes, as perimenopausal women, as seniors, whatever our stage in life, all signs point towards maintaining muscle and strength for bone density, longevity, brain health and mental balance. Not to mention that lovely opioid reward of post-workout endorphins. 

There is a neurochemical equivalent to endorphins involved in the creative process. When you struggle at the blank page, your brain generates a cocktail of feel-good neurotransmitters. Avoid the struggle, and task AI with the turning your uncertainty into a neatly structured response, and, as a 2025 study showed, you will pay a cognitive tax. Writing with AI tools leads to “a quiet erosion of the mind” or “cognitive debt.” There is no growth in neural activity. Your brain grows less capable of doing heavy-lifting. And, there is no post-creative rush. No aha moment. No encounter with yourself: woah, so that’s where I’m really at.

This morning we did a stamina test. Coach reminded us that stamina is the ability of your muscles to persist. Endurance is the ability of your heart and lungs. Is there a third wing to this, the ability of your mind or soul to stick with the uncertainty and the mess and the awkwardness of birthing something, anything, other than, in addition to, you? Be that, a fitter version of yourself,  a garden, a relationship,  a collage, an outfit, an essay on why you’re bothering at all. Maybe that would technically be called tenacity. Or hope. Or delusion? But that, at least, is why I keep showing up, warming up, locking in and embracing the struggle.  Although I rarely have proof that it matters, that it’s worth the effort, that I’m making any gains, my brain is splooging out a feel-good chemical soup, that nourishes this entire body of mine, and thus, this entire embodied experience, and that in itself is worth the effort. 

https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/local-news/opinion-struggle-is-a-keystone-habit-11780285