This is a guest post from Stephen Mills from theratracetrap.com

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Read Time: Around 5-6 minutes

Stephen Mills is a personal development blogger who shares his thoughts at his blog

“In this world, things are hard, and conflict and pain are commonplace. Fighting for what you want and against what you don’t want is considered normal. Struggle is celebrated in this world – in this difficult world.” – Julia Rogers Hamrick

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What is The Easy Life?

To me the easy life is a life where you primarily do what you want, when you want to do it. You thrive instead of just survive. You live a life of joy, peace, and one relatively free of pain, conflict, struggle, and resistance. It does not necessarily mean a life free of challenge, effort, or intensity. Nor does it mean a life of lounging around doing nothing.

I know people who play soccer during their lunch hour in the broiling Houston summer heat. If I were to do that, it would be hard. To them it is fun and they enjoy it immensely. They do not have to motivate themselves to get through it. If you love mountain climbing, it might be challenging, exhausting, and difficult, but it does not mean you live a “hard” life. You do it because you love it. To me, any repetitive, boring, simple task is hard. Those tasks used to be an enormous struggle for me to complete. They are easier for me now, but they still not what I would call part of an “easy” life.

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The Two Ways of The Easy Life

In my view, there are two complementary ways to live the easy life. One is changing your behavior and the other is changing your thoughts. I think they both are required but you can achieve an easy life with different degrees of each; there is no one solution for everyone. The ideas below contain both ways. It’s important to note that these are high-level summaries and each one requires a deeper dive to figure out how it can work for you. 10 Ways to The Easy Life This is a partial list. I feel like I could go on forever, but these ideas are the first ten I thought of and I think are a great start to living the easy life.

1. Kill your commitments. The vast majority of people I know are seriously over committed. Over the years, I have come to the conclusion that commitment in general is a bad thing.  I know this may go against common wisdom, but if common wisdom was so wise, most people wouldn’t be common.

Commitments invariable become a burden. It never fails that a commitment will end up conflicting with something else you want or need or feel like doing instead. You might just be tired and not feel like it, but since you committed you feel you must. Then it becomes hard. This doesn’t mean you can’t contribute, volunteer, help, give, or whatever else you feel like doing. Just don’t commit in advance. Do it on an ad hoc basis; when you feel like doing it. Refusing to commit is a basic part of a free and easy life. I’ve written much more on this in Freedom From Commitment.

2. Avoid the golden handcuffs. We get used to living at or above our means and buying all kinds of material things.  We do not need these large homes, expensive cars, electronic toys, clothes, or the myriad of other things we get used to living with. Having all these things comes with a cost; it often means handcuffing yourself to a job or a way of earning money that you don’t enjoy. You are not free to decide to quit your job or do something else, because you are enslaved by your possessions. These material possessions will not make your life easy or happy. Do you want to work until you are old at a job you don’t enjoy so you can pay for homes, cars and other possessions? Or would you rather live modestly and sit on the beach reading a book (or whatever else makes you happy)?

3. Decide to pay the price to get out. Getting to easy will sometimes come with a price. You must commit to paying the pricing to getting out of the traps that are causing you pain, discomfort, boredom, or anything else that you don’t want or like. Paying the price to get out is better than staying trapped. The get out price is may be intense, but at least it will be temporary. The price of staying trapped is a chronic slow burning pain. I say rip off the bandage and get on with your new life. If a person or circumstance in your life is causing you unhappiness, you have to let them go. Alternative you can choose to live your difficult life. Don’t blame anyone else; it is you who are choosing to live that way

4. Stop compromising. I know this is a controversial statement, but I really feel strongly about it. It’s also a much nuanced topic that would take a book to fully explore. I wrote one article specifically on this subject and I encourage you to read it if you are interested: Freedom From Compromise and Control. My view of compromise is that it is typically usually a lose-lose situation.

5. Accept that you are choosing your life. You are choosing your life. You don’t have to do anything. This is a hard concept for most people to accept, but unless you take responsibility for your choices and your circumstances you will never get to an easy life. If you think your life is forced upon you, then stop reading and have a long miserable life.

6. Forget what happened in the past. This is captured in a wonderful quote by Guy Finley:
”Stop thinking you can change what happened yesterday by reliving it today.” I would modify that to stop reliving what happened to you five minutes ago. Every minute of stress, upset, anger, disappointment, depression, or any other negative emotion over what has already happened, is another minute thrown into the wastebasket of your life. You can’t change the past, but you can enjoy the present.

7. Don’t give away your happiness. Do you have a boss that makes you mad?  Is there a toxic person in your life who makes you depressed or causes you to seethe with anger and frustration?  Do you stress out over the idiot drivers on the roads?  You are handing your happiness over to them; just giving it away as if it were nothing. Read more here.

8. Stop caring what other people think. From almost the time you are born you are bombarded by others with telling you what you are expected to do, what you should do, what will make you happy, beautiful, successful, and secure. You should do what makes you happy as long as you respect the rights of others. I say to hell with what others think. If you really think about it, it is highly hypocritical and arrogant of others to expect you to do what they want.

9. Stop caring what others do. The day I stopped caring what others did, a gigantic burden was lifted from my shoulders. There may no more single psychological freeing experience than simply letting go of the behavior of others. This does not mean you have to agree with what others do; your values and beliefs will obviously be different than those of other people. What it does mean is that you refuse to let what they do affect you.

10. Stop trying to control others. This is a special case of caring what others do. So to keep it short and simple: The degree you try to control another person, is the degree to which you make yourself a slave to their behavior.