Choosing Between Comfort and Excellence: Lessons from Hercules at the Crossroads

"I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of a man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor" - Henry David Thoreau

a simple log cabin among the woods

The Myth of Hercules at the Crossroads

In Greek mythology, Hercules, encounters two women at a crossroads. Kakia, the goddess of vice and Arete, the godess of virtue. Kakia offers Hercules a life of ease, pleasure, and immediate gratification. Arete offers Hercules a more difficult path, promising a life of hard work, discipline, but lasting honor.

Hercules must decide between an easy life of comfort and a challenging but rewarding life of excellence. Hercules chooses the strenuous path of virtue and ultimately is made a god by Zeus.

Modern Comfort vs. The Strenuous Life of Excellence

The Life of Comfort

Today, the choice between comfort and excellence, vice or virtue is even more present. Modern technology, entertainment, and consumer culture offer endless opportunity for sedation. Streaming services on demand, fast food that can be delivered to your door, and a bottomless void of social media posts offer a hedonistic path to nowhere. Increasingly, our culture celebrates this narrative, upholding a life of leisure and excess as a worthy aspiration. One need only look at the cultural icons and celebrities of the 21st century to verify this claim. The end result of this path? Decades of wasted opportunity after passively selling our future and dreams for the path of least resistance and greatest comfort.

Increasingly we are learning that our modern sedentary lives devoid of risk and hardship are making us physically, emotionally and mentally weaker. Our phobia of discomfort has left us feeble, sick and fragile.

The Strenuous Life

The meaningful life cannot be won by avoiding hardship, risk or hard work. The attainment of purpose and life satisfaction demand the opposite. We must build resolve, through conscious endeavor. We must align out actions with our desire for arete, for virtue. A life well lived is earned. Patiently, with discipline and intention.

There is no secret path to success, no short cut to fulfillment. The house must be built brick by brick. The crop is planted in the spring and harvested in the fall.

Put down the potato chips, unplug the TV and go for walk.

The life of meaning, purpose and fulfillment you desire can be yours. If only you are wiling to embrace challenge over comfort, and virtue instead of vice.