There’s a peculiar grace that comes with hard work, one that has nothing to do with achievement or productivity or any of the usual metrics we use to justify our efforts. It’s simpler than that, more primal. When you’re truly working hard, when your mind is fully engaged in the task before you, you don’t have time to think about how miserable you are.
This isn’t about toxic hustle culture or glorifying overwork. It’s about something more fundamental: the human mind can only hold so much at once. When you’re deep in concentration, trying to solve a problem or create something or simply get through a mountain of necessary tasks, there’s no room left for the anxious spiral of self-examination that so often accompanies difficult periods in life.
Think about the last time you were genuinely absorbed in something demanding. Maybe you were learning a new skill that required all your attention, or pushing through a deadline that left no mental space for anything else. During those hours, the usual chorus of worries receded. The relationship problems, the financial stress, the existential questions about whether you’re living your life correctly—all of it faded into background noise, drowned out by the immediate demands of the work.
This is why people throw themselves into projects during breakups or family crises. It’s not denial, exactly, though it can shade into that. It’s more like a temporary reprieve. The work becomes a kind of sanctuary, a place where the rules are clearer and the metrics more obvious. Either the code runs or it doesn’t. Either the words flow or they don’t. Either the task gets done or it remains undone. There’s a clarity to that which is absent from most of life’s larger questions.
The ancient philosophers knew this. They spoke about how contemplation could be either blessed or cursed depending on what you were contemplating. Too much time alone with your thoughts, especially during hard times, and you risk becoming lost in rumination. The mind, left to its own devices, often gravitates toward whatever hurts most. It worries and picks at wounds and rehearses conversations that will never happen. But give that same mind a genuine challenge, something that requires its full capacity, and it becomes a different instrument entirely.
This explains why retirement can be so devastating for some people. It’s not just the loss of identity or purpose, though those matter. It’s the sudden abundance of time to think. After decades of work providing structure and mental occupation, the silence can be deafening. All those thoughts you never had time for come rushing in, and not all of them are welcome.
Of course, this mechanism has its dangers. Work can become an avoidance strategy, a way to never deal with the underlying issues that make us miserable. You can lose years this way, always busy, always productive, never actually addressing the question of why you need such constant distraction. The workaholic isn’t usually someone who loves their job; they’re often someone who can’t bear to stop long enough to feel what they’re feeling.
But in moments of acute pain or difficulty, when processing emotions feels impossible or when the weight of circumstances threatens to overwhelm, there’s real value in this form of escape. Sometimes you need the respite. Sometimes the kindest thing you can do for yourself is to engage so fully with a task that everything else falls away for a while.
The trick is knowing the difference between a healthy temporary refuge and a permanent retreat. Hard work can give you the breathing room to survive difficult times, but it can’t solve the problems that made those times difficult in the first place. Eventually, you have to stop and look at what you’ve been avoiding. But not necessarily today. Not necessarily right now.There’s wisdom in recognizing when you need the medicine of absorption, when the best thing for your mental health is to stop thinking about your mental health and just work. To build something, fix something, create something, accomplish something. To let the hours pass in focused effort rather than anxious contemplation.
This is the paradox: sometimes the way through suffering isn’t to examine it or process it or even acknowledge it. Sometimes the way through is to simply not think about it for a while. To let work be work, let effort be effort, and let the relief of concentration carry you to the other side of the day.
