8 Blunt Reasons Why Life Is So Complicated And Difficult

Life is undeniably complicated – here’s why.

A woman with long brown hair is lying on the wooden floor with her eyes closed. She is wearing a patterned top with circular designs and has her hands gently placed on the sides of her head. The background is also wooden.

Have you ever just sat and stared off into space, wondering when and how everything got so complicated?

After all, it didn’t seem to be this messy when we were younger. We had school and we had play – everything else just sort of fell into place.

Maybe it was the naivete of youth that made us so oblivious to the world’s complexities, or maybe it was something else entirely.

Either way, life seems to get a lot more complicated as we grow older, doesn’t it?

There are several reasons why this happens, and those mentioned below are some of the most common ones that everyone will deal with.

1. We only have so many hours in the day to get things done.

A man in a blue button-up shirt is standing outside a modern building with large windows, holding a notebook in one hand and checking his watch on the other wrist. He appears to be focused on the time as he stands on a grassy area.

The average person has at least three more things that they *should* do on any given day than they actually have time to get done.

Sure, the modern western work day is based on the idea that we have 8 hours to work, 8 hours for sleep, and 8 hours to ourselves. But do we really have those last 8 hours?

Let’s say we have to commute an hour to work each way. That drops those magical 8 hours down to 6.

And how much of that time is spent taking care of other people, or household responsibilities?

Are there children and animals that need to be fed, cleaned, walked, and generally taken care of? What about dependent family members like elderly parents/grandparents or sick spouses? How much time is needed for food preparation? Laundry?

So maybe after everyone else is taken care of, you might have an hour and a half or so to squeeze in your own interests and self-care. Do you exercise most days? Have you got time for a shower or bath? Will you get a whole 20 minutes at some point to work on a hobby or read a few pages of a book?

One of the reasons why many of us are stretched so thinly is because most people in the west don’t live in multi-generational households. A family that consists of two parents and a child (or children) doesn’t have grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins to help shoulder the load of breadwinning, childcare, cooking, and cleaning.

Instead of all these duties being spread around in a “many hands make light work” situation, the parents work themselves to exhaustion trying to keep everything going on their own.

As you can imagine (or know from experience), this gets even more harrying in single-parent families. There’s just too much to do alone.

2. Our energy is limited.

A man with a frustrated expression sits at a desk, staring at a laptop screen. He rests his head in his hands, with elbows on the desk. In the background, there's a board with sticky notes attached. A pen holder and some papers are on the desk in front of him.

This goes along with the reason mentioned above. People who deal with chronic health concerns – whether physical or mental – often refer to themselves as “spoonies.” This is in reference to the idea that people only have X numbers of spoonfuls of energy that they can use on a given day.

Think about the many tasks you have to do on a given day. You may have to do some things that are physically and mentally exhausting, like chopping wood, managing issues at work, running after toddlers, and so on. How much energy do you have left when it comes round to dinnertime?

Do you have the strength and energy to then cook a three course meal from scratch? Or do you just forget it and order pizza because you can barely walk around the house without collapsing?

3. Our abilities don’t always match our desires (or responsibilities).

A woman with long dark hair wearing glasses and a pink shirt stands in front of a turquoise fence. Her facial expression shows confusion or bewilderment, and she has her left hand raised with the palm up as if gesturing or questioning.

Many of us take our health and able-bodiedness for granted. I know I have in the past, but some injuries that needed months to heal gave me a significantly different perspective from how I perceived life prior to that.

If you struggle with physical or mental health issues, then everyday life is likely going to be more complicated for you than it is for others.

Someone with ADHD may have difficulty concentrating on work-related tasks, and might let vital home-related responsibilities fall by the wayside simply because their brains work differently.

Similarly, a person who has hypermobile joints or arthritis may take longer to do physical tasks and require regular rest breaks than their peers or family members.

We all have our personal strengths as well as things that we struggle with. Nobody is “perfect” all around, so we all do the best we can with the abilities and energy we have at our disposal.

4. Interactions with others require us to wear different masks.

A woman with straight, reddish-brown hair and a neutral facial expression holds a smiling mask of her own face in her left hand. She wears a black earring and has one side of her head shaved. The background is grey.

It can be both complicated and exhausting to adjust the mask you wear to suit different situations. While we may try to be as authentic as possible in our dealings with others, we do have to shift direction and behave differently depending on who it is we’re with at the time.

The way we interact with colleagues will be different from how we act towards clients or customers, for instance. Similarly, we generally don’t speak to our parents or partners the same way we speak to our children – not unless we’re trying to spark arguments, that is.

If you’re dealing with many different people over the course of any given day, you’re switching gears in all directions constantly. We have to change vocabulary and tone at the drop of a hat so we’re meeting people at their level, and that requires quite a bit of cognitive awareness and focus.

Try to switch gears half a dozen times while working from home, and you’ll likely end up feeling drained and scattered by the time dinner comes along.

5. People aren’t telepathic.

A woman with dark hair tied back is holding a cup and listening attentively to another person in the foreground who is also holding a cup. They appear to be having a conversation outdoors with green foliage and trees in the background.

Although we may seem to have psychic links and bonds with those closest to us, people really aren’t as telepathic as we’d like them to be. This requires us to make all those interesting clicks and buzzes from our larynxes in an attempt to make ourselves understood.

That doesn’t mean we’re going to be. How many arguments have you experienced solely because of misunderstandings? You’re saying one thing, the other person is saying another, when technically you’re both trying to say the same thing. But for some reason, the message just isn’t getting through clearly.

Since we all interpret language and word choices differently, and have different ways of explaining ourselves, there will inevitably be complications and conflict.

Let’s say one person asks another how far away X location is from where they are now. Most Europeans will give an answer in kilometers or miles, whereas many North Americans will describe the distance by the amount of time it takes to get there.

So you have one person saying “it’s an hour’s drive north,” and the other is asking “yes, but how far away is it?” The one being asked believes they’re giving the right answer, while the one asking is getting more frustrated by the second.

Conflicts like these take time to unravel and decipher, not to mention having to deal with the heightened emotions (and raised voices) that will happen while trying to figure out where the communication glitch is occurring.

At this point, all the other things that we have to take care of get backed up and bottlenecked, thus complicating our lives further.

6. There are many moving parts to juggle.

A woman sits at a desk, talking on the phone with a concerned expression, while holding a child in her lap. The desk has a laptop, notebook, glasses, and various plants. The room is brightly lit with a table lamp and decorated with plants and colorful items.

As we go through life and change our circumstances in various directions, we have a lot more responsibilities and tasks that we need to take care of.

For example, being a homeowner requires a ton more work and maintenance than renting an apartment. When you’re renting, the landlord is responsible for making sure that all the house’s working parts are taken care of. It’s their property, so aspects like the plumbing, electrics, foundational support, and roofing are all their responsibility.

You might already have a full plate with your job, child or elder care, and doing enough housework so you’re not living in squalor, only to find out that wasps are nesting in the exterior siding, there are squirrels in the attic, the roof is leaking, or you have a termite infestation.

There’s always going to be something major to handle, and that requires time, effort, money, and having to deal with the professionals who can sort these issues out for you. Or you could try to fix them yourself, which will require more of your time to research techniques, plus the effort put into fixing everything.

Do you have any time to spare? What do you have to sacrifice in order to make sure these issues are sorted? All of us seem to be spinning many plates in the air all at once. They’re very carefully timed and will all clatter to the ground if we aren’t making an effort to keep them all balanced. Throw a drinking glass or a spatula into the mix and the result can be both dizzying and exhausting.

7. The unexpected is inevitable, and will wreak havoc on the best-laid plans.

A person with a closely shaved hairstyle, wearing hoop earrings and a sleeveless white top, looks directly at the camera with a surprised or shocked expression. The background is plain and gray.

Woody Allen once said, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” This is a long way of saying an old Yiddish proverb: “We plan, God laughs.”

What each phrase means is that no matter how well you schedule your life in an attempt to smooth the path ahead, something unexpected will inevitably drop into your lap that you need to deal with.

For example, you may have planned a trip abroad in great detail, only for the airline to send your luggage to Papua New Guinea by mistake. Or you’ve managed your time in a calendar so all of your responsibilities are scheduled to the minute. But then you’re hit with an unexpected illness and get bedridden for days.

There will always be a Happening that interferes with our plans. When this happens, most of us get frustrated and angry about being thrown off course. Naturally, this interferes with the rest of the scheduled time, because having to calm down from an inner tantrum will draw valuable time away from other tasks that need to be taken care of.

Similarly, we might be in a really great place physically, emotionally, and mentally, but a major life event happens that pulls the rug out from under us. If you were to suddenly lose your spouse to illness or injury, for example, you might find yourself the sole breadwinner and caregiver for several young children.

That complicates life on countless levels, and is also emotionally devastating: all expectations and dreams for the future have suddenly come crashing down.

8. Past hurts and “what ifs” about the future add extra layers and complications.

A woman with light hair sits pensively on a couch, resting her chin on her hand. She is wearing a light brown sweater and looking slightly to the side. The background is softly blurred, showing a cozy indoor setting with natural light coming through the windows.

Just about all of us have issues from the past that we’re still working through. Some might be more intense than others, and they’ll have various healing times accordingly

Ghosts of difficult circumstances we’ve navigated in the past can jump up and haunt us when we least expect them, and it’s not uncommon to lie awake at night mulling over long-past scenarios that still cause twinges of pain or anger.

Similarly, anxieties about the future’s uncertainty can muck us about as well. We live in interesting times, and many people feel that there’s a lot to worry about out there. Additionally, those who like to feel that they’re in control most of the time tend to struggle more with anxiety than those who flow with things as they unfold.

Depression and anxiety can make even the simplest daily tasks seem monumental. And then they’ll pile up, thus causing more depression and anxiety.