If life had a difficulty setting, would you pick Easy?

Every time I start a new game, I spend about three minutes frozen on the difficulty selection screen. Easy, Normal, Hard — sometimes with names the studio invented, like Adventurer, Hero, Legendary. I sit there wondering which version of the experience I want to have. And one ordinary day that question escaped the monitor and lodged itself in my head in an uncomfortable way: if life had that screen, what would you choose?

The screen life doesn't have

In games, difficulty defines how many resources you start with, how clever the enemies are, the margin for error the game allows you. On Easy you survive even when you make plenty of mistakes. On Hard a single mistake can be fatal. The game is the same — story, settings, characters — but the experience changes completely depending on what you ticked before starting.

Life doesn't have that screen. You're born at some point with certain settings already fixed: family, country, health, historical era, plain luck. Nobody passed through the difficulty selection. And that's where the question gets more complicated: if you could adjust those settings now — fewer obstacles, a wider margin for error — would you?

Why we pick the hard mode

There's a curious phenomenon in games: plenty of people choose Normal or Hard even on a first run through a game they know nothing about. The reason is a mix of pride, curiosity about their own limits and, being honest, a bit of social performance — "I played it on hard" sounds better when you're telling someone about it.

But there's something beyond vanity. Games on Easy tend to get boring faster. With no real challenge, engagement drops. You click through on autopilot, never feeling the adrenaline of a fight decided on the edge. Difficulty, paradoxically, is what makes the game worth the time.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent years studying the state he called flow — the total engagement that happens when the challenge is calibrated correctly against your skill. Too easy: boredom. Too hard: paralysing frustration. At the right point: you forget the time and become completely present. The best games exploit exactly that.

Dark Souls and the masochistic pleasure of failing

No franchise made this more obvious than Dark Souls. Released in 2011, the game was designed to be punishing. Enemies kill you repeatedly before you work out the patterns. Dying isn't the exception — it's the loop. And even so it has a fanatical fanbase who swear it's the most satisfying experience they've ever had with a game.

The logic is cruel and simple: killing Dark Souls' first boss after twelve attempts gives you a satisfaction that killing an easy boss first time never could. The achievement has weight because the failure had weight too.

Viktor Frankl, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, argued in his book Man's Search for Meaning that human beings don't seek pleasure in itself — they seek meaning. And meaning is often born from the obstacle overcome, from the difficulty that didn't break you. Suffering without meaning is just suffering. Suffering that takes you somewhere is another matter.

The problem: nobody chose the starting point

There's a knot here that needs untying before going any further, because ignoring it would be dishonest. When we say difficulty enriches, there's a risk of romanticising situations that have nothing romantic about them.

In 2012, the writer John Scalzi published an essay that went viral, using the metaphor of games to talk about unequal starting conditions. The central idea was simple: some people begin with more resources, more margin for error, more of a safety net — not through merit, but through the settings they started with. You can disagree with the political conclusions drawn from the piece, but the mechanics of the metaphor are precise.

Difficulties you chose make for an interesting philosophical conversation. Difficulties dropped on top of you without consultation — chronic illness, structural poverty, violence, circumstances outside your control — have a completely different texture. Treating those two things as equivalent is dishonest.

Difficulty with a purpose is different from arbitrary difficulty

Dark Souls is brutally hard, but it's fair within its own rules. You die because of your mistakes and you learn from them. The difficulty has logic, has patterns, has a possible answer. That's radically different from a game that kills you at random, for no reason, with nothing to learn.

I think that distinction is what actually matters: difficulty with a purpose — a challenge you have a real chance of overcoming — has the potential to generate meaning. Arbitrary difficulty, with no way out, no possible answer, is just cruelty under a different name.

The more honest question isn't "would you rather have an easy life or a hard one?" It's: are the difficulties you face part of a game you have a chance of winning?

So, would you pick Easy?

Back to that imaginary screen from the start: if an option appeared tomorrow to put life on Easy Mode — fewer obstacles, less uncertainty, more margin for error — would you tick it?

My guess is that most people would say no. Not out of masochism, not out of performing as someone who "took it". But because we intuitively know that the easy version of a story isn't a better story — it's an emptier one. No friction, nothing to overcome, nothing to tell afterwards.

What we actually wanted isn't the absence of difficulty. It's difficulty that makes sense. Obstacles that are possible to beat. A game that's fair even when it's hard. And, preferably, a few checkpoints saved for when things get too heavy.

Would you play on Easy if you could? Tell me in the comments. And if this reflection made any sense to you, there's more barstool philosophy here on the blog: on the backlog of things we never finish, and on being the protagonist or an NPC in your own life.