Something from my travels

Rome (2025): Keep a good lookout.

To Struggle is Human

Every year, as I get older, the conviction grows in me that things used to be better.

I am not alone feeling. I legion. And one us.

We complain modern frying people’s brains was said of video games fifty years ago, and television before that, and radio before that.

And before that, people worried that novels would ruin the moral compass (of women in particular).

We lament delinquent youth. But so did Seneca in the first century. So did mediaeval monks. So did Victorian parents, mortified as they were by Jazz Age rebellion.

People are trying to ban books because they worry about ‘woke ideology’. And they did the same thing at the dawn of the printing press, terrified that uncontrolled knowledge would corrupt society.

Our daily ires are older than our countries.

Hesiod wrote in the eighth century BC that he lived in a degraded “Iron Age”, and that the previous eras (Golden, Silver, Bronze) were superior. Socrates complained in 400 BC that youth were disrespectful and didn’t listen to their elders. Every generation believes theirs is the decline.

The pattern is consistent enough to be comical:

Comic books would corrupt children (1950s Senate hearings). Rock and roll would destroy morality (1960s panic). The internet would fragment society (1990s warnings). Social media is rotting brains (2020s anxiety).

Your nostalgia isn’t special. Many of our worries and frustrations seem baked into our psychology.

And this operates on a personal level too...

I struggle constantly with productivity. I wrestle make my, to unblock myself, to get things done. Life admin piles up. Messages from friends and loved ones sit unanswered. I make elaborate plans for discipline and focus, then watch them dissolve.

I assume this is a modern problem. Too many screens. Too much distraction. The dopamine factory has broken my brain.

Then I came across a biography of John Adams, one of America’s Founding Fathers.

On 21 July 1756, twenty years before signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams, then only 21, sat to write in his diary:

“I am resolved to rise with the sun and to study Scriptures on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday mornings, and to study some Latin author the other three mornings. Noons and nights I intend to read English authors.... I will rouse up my mind and fix my attention. I stand myself and think upon what I read and what I see. I will strive with all my soul to be something more than persons who have had less advantages than myself.”

The next morning he slept until seven. The following week, this was the diary entry:

“A very rainy day. Dreamed away the time.”

This is John Adams. Founding Father. President. A man who accomplished extraordinary things. And his diary at twenty-one reads like a modern productivity anxiety post.

It reads like my diary. And perhaps yours, too.

There are two things this reminds me:

First, that historical figures - I cover this at length in Sovereign. The people we admire weren’t superhuman. They often have the same struggles with procrastination, distraction, and self-discipline.

John Adams constantly formed and failed to execute good resolutions. He lamented being absent-minded, lazy, prone to daydreaming his life away. vowed read. He vowed to quit chewing tobacco.

The lives of the wealthy aren’t much different either. What struggles they lack financially are often heaped double in family strife, addiction and corrupting self-image, inter alia.

Second, and more important: if John Adams struggled with productivity and still accomplished great things, then struggle itself.

It is not your birthright to be unproductive simply because you have many apps on your iphone.

Some of my problems ARE caused by phones and screens. The dopamine economy is real. Social media genuinely fragments attention in ways previous media didn’t. These are legitimate concerns requiring real solutions.

But some problems are eternal human struggles that existed long before screens. The difficulty of sustained focus. The tendency to drift. The gap between resolutions and execution. The profound challenge of simply doing what you know you ought to do.

Knowing the difference can change your approach.

If you think, “I can’t focus because of my phone,” you may try to fix the phone problem. Remove apps. Use web blockers. Create friction.

But if you realise “humans have always struggled to focus – even John Adams wrestled with this,” you might approach it differently. Maybe with more self-compassion. Maybe with recognition that the struggle is the work itself, not evidence you’re broken or uniquely disadvantaged by modernity.

You understand that this is your rite of passage. That you share the fate of your forefathers.

People have always found it difficult to rise with the sun, to study Scripture, fix their attention, and be something more. John Adams dreamed away rainy days in 1756. You doom-scrolled in 2026. The medium may change, but the struggle remains.

Persist.