"Endurance is not always strength when it kills the soul" - ChatGPT
There are things that you don't like to do because they are difficult, and there are things that you don't like to do because they crush your soul.
One of those things for me is marketing. Outreaching hundreds of people, engaging when i don't want to, preaching, pitching, connecting when I don't want to. It makes me want to end everything. Asking an entrepreneur from Twitter, they'll say that it's part of the job. Nobody gets ahead without selling. And I've been telling the same to myself from a long time now. But what they do not tell is the difference between "part of the job" and things that make you want to kill yourself. They don't teach how to answer "Is it truly not in my nature or am I being lazy?"
What do I mean by soul crushing is — when doing something leaves you worse off, both physically and mentally, than before you did it. A good way to recognise whether something is soul crushing or not is to ask yourself, "if i didn't have this desperate situation, what else could make me do this?" — and if the answer is "nothing" — then you already know.
For most people, studying is hard, coding is hard, working out is hard but then after you get them done — you get a sense of accomplishment. You are better off than you were before. They aren't soul crushing, atleast for me.
Sometimes you can delegate the things to someone who does it better, but you don't always have the privilege not to do what's soul crushing. Sometimes it indeed IS part of the job. But if all you do is soul crushing things, you might as well be dead — because such a life is just as painful as death if not more.
I think the unhappiness in your life is directly proportional to how much soul-crushing things you do on a daily basis.
It's one thing to discourage weakness and cowardice, and it is another thing conflating the difference between that and what's actually draining you. And the present hustle culture doesn't teach you how to spot the difference.