#18/120 - Struggle is all you need
If you are in struggles, if you are in pain, and also, if you happen to create something, this essay is for you.
Hi, I am Summerbud. If you are in struggles, if you are in pain, and also, if you happen to create something, this essay is for you.
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When I was in junior high school, there were no smartphones. In the middle of class, during the 10-minute break, classmates would play with each other, and when they got bored, bullying happened.
I was already writing short stories for around 5 years back then. I had a small notebook with all the stories I wrote, most of which were about a fantasy world and dragons. I want to live that kind of adventure, just like Bastian in “The Neverending Story”1. With magic, powerful creatures, tremendous castles, the world ending disaster, and I will be the hero whom rescue the people.
I always put my notebook in my drawer, all the time, since it’s like an amulet for me.
And the big guy in the classroom knew it, maybe 3 to 5 times per week, they would pick a day, most of the time in the afternoon, when the class was getting boring, they wanted to go home and play video games. Some evil ideas emerged in their mind. They will take the opportunity when I go to the toilet, steal my notebook, stand in front of all the classmates, and tell my stories out loud the moment I step inside the classroom. “Yet another dragon story, are you out of your mind?”, “I can write this story in half an hour, this is so bad.” Near the whole class will join the laugh, only some of my friends will stay silent, and some of them will even stand up to defend my work, but it is not working.
They will do that until the teacher comes in to stop them, or when they are bored again, they will throw my notebook somewhere else. And I need to pick them back, slash out the dirt, and hold it in front of my chest, I can’t even protect this tiny notebook, how can I save the world.
That is one of my biggest struggles on the journey of my writing, which stops me from sharing work with others, reminding me of all the classmates, the jokes, and hurting words made by those bullies.
This kind of struggle hurt back then, but now they feel like a breath of air, a gesture I made to celebrate that I have fundamentally changed my perspective toward struggles. Now I view them as wealth instead of a burden; they are the root and soil of my writing, and they will eventually help me build concrete trust between my readers.
This took me 10 years to finally figure out, and I will tell you how I thought it through.
The big question: How do readers judge whether the content is worth their time?
Since we are talking about how struggles can help us on the journey of creation, the first question we should ask is not from the perspective of a creator, but from the perspective of a reader. “How do I judge whether the content is worth my time?”
That is a difficult question.
Imagine you are in front of hundreds of essays in the pre-LLM era. All you have is a pan, paper, and your mind. And your duty is to pick the top five essays, you have the full ownership on this task, and thus if you do it wrong the result will hurt your reputation. What is the strategy you will execute?
I will review these points in order: the structure of the essay “Do they have reasonable headlines?” The grammar, “Do they pay enough attention to the minimum requirement?” The content, “Do they have the knowledge to talk about the subject?”, The rhyme, “Do they express the subject well and elegantly?”
In short, I am reviewing these essays by “Computational Cost”. Meaning I am guessing/feeling how much effort each creator put into their work, and I am trying to match their cost with my sweat.
Let’s fast forward to today, now you have AI. You will find out that the merit I use to judge the “Computational Cost” of the creator suddenly lost its function. Every essay seems relatively good and well-written; they all have a clean structure, good grammar, precise. And since the computational cost of using AI to create an article is so low, it’s hard to use this kind of concept to judge whether this essay is worth your time anymore.
Previously, I can at least say, if I devote more computational cost, marking the work to be as good as possible, it will eventually shine bright enough to attract others. But this kind of direction is broken by the wide adoption of AI. Everyone from now on will assume all creators will use some portion of AI in their work, thus it’s not enough to have these merits, the bar is artificially risen and as a creator, we need to accomplish more.
And the social media algorithm also severely affects the relationship between creators and the audience. Now it’s not fully determined by the audience, but determined by the group that the audience is in, and the algorithm serving this group of people.
To this point, it’s important to understand the consequences of the advancement of technology, and we also need to choose wisely about which game to play.
The direction of this essay is trying to serve a group of people who still value their agency, although we are distracted by the trendy things. But we want to hold our judgement. Decide “Whether a work deserves our time” by ourselves.
If you are still with me, I will begin to talk about how I evaluate content as a audience.
The hologram of a creator
I don’t believe we can look at one creation and completely derive all the meaning from it without knowing anything about its creator. For me, that is an ignorant claim.
In one interview, the creative director of the GTA series, Dan Hauser, told Lex Fridman that when he looks back at GTA4, he felt that it’s so dark, and the reason is that he was miserable and lonely living in New York City back then.2 In this case, if we only view the creation alone, we can only understand a fraction of the creation; it’s dark, checked, it’s lonely, checked. But we didn’t fully understand where it came from.
For me, to properly evaluate a work, we need to know the background story of the creation, how they create, what are the circumstances during the creation process, how they feel, whether they were happy, sad, regretful, or optimistic. What’s their creator wall? What is the painful experience they encountered.
I call this concept the “Hologram of a creator”. The mass of an object at the center encapsulates all the material a creator has, including their work and life. And the gravity wave, space and time bent by the mass, transports the influence to other individuals. The strength of the gravity way is decided by the mass, and the mass, in my opinion, is greatly decided by those “Struggles”.
Let’s break it down into two perspectives. Reader and creator.
For the reader, one of the crucial questions we constantly ask is the question I mentioned previously: “How do we judge whether a work deserves our time?” But the unfortunate truth is that we humans are very bad at sensing fakes. Several studies found that it’s hard to identify the AI-generated content.3 4When technology evolves, while humans have more power to evaluate the fake, the liar will also have better technology to lie. It’s an Evolutionary Arms Race, both sides are advancing, and Liar seems to be leading right now.
One of the techniques to better catch who is lying is by increasing the computational cost, for example, not just ask what their life stories are, but also ask them to tell the stories in reverse. And struggle is also a way to increase the computational cost.
It’s true that AI might still perfectly strike the faking of struggles; still, it is a task that can increase the cost of the computation, especially when AI doesn’t have the experience of the struggles themselves. They understand what it looks like, but they can not fully understand how it feels. This will make a huge difference.
So if we put struggles at the center of our radar, and really look into whether one’s life stories can support their work. It can be a good technique to answer the question “How do we judge a work that deserves our time?”
For creators, struggles are like impurities in our work. Think of creation as an equation: you aim for X, but real life adds outliers and struggles that change the result. AI can produce pure equations. Humans can’t. What we experience in reality directly becomes our source of inspiration for creation, and it will inevitably get into our creation, as Dan Hauser mentioned.
Those impurities may not be directly related to the initial goal of one story, but because our creative process is entangled with our daily life, sometimes when we feel happy, the pace becomes faster, when we feel miserable, the atmosphere becomes damper. That is nature in the sense of human but it’s a very strange thing from the perspective of AI; they can’t really comprehend what it even means. Thus their production is pure, without the trace of real life, and that is exactly the reason why their work can’t really resonate. Too pure, to a point which although you can’t tell what is wrong, but you can intuitively feel there is something not right.
Those impurities are what make a creation alive. Let’s take experiencing artwork in the museum for example, on the way of being overwhelmed by the technique of the artist, you also want to know under what circumstance did he finish the work, is it miserable? Is it painful? What situation did he need to overcome? And I would say the reason why we in general have this kind of interest is a need to comprehend the creators, we can’t directly comprehend them from the creation; we need some trace to really understand what is in their head at the moment and thus understand the overall experience better. That is the reason why I called this the hologram of a creator; it’s not just the creation, but also the experience of creating this piece. It’s a trajectory, it’s a continuous.
And “Struggles” is one of the most important factors in the hologram.
My strategy
When I was first in the realm of YouTube and video games, one man who keeps me returning to watch is PewDiePie. He owns a place in my childish heart when he first played Minecraft. When he plays those video games that I also played, it’s the feeling that I can not forget as a kid. But until today, I found myself unable to really remember the content he made, except for one. The title is “I Drew Every Day for 365 Days… it was painful”. Published in 2025.5
This is a documentary of what he practiced for the whole year, drawing, and drawing painfully. You can see all the sketches, those falling attempts, those weird learning paths, those genuine curiosity. They are all in there, one video, the whole year. To me that is the whole essence of the creativity path, it’s about failure, it’s about trying, it’s about attempting the thing you are not good at. And they have all come down with the struggle.
I think that video is a perfect example of how to showcase your struggle, and together with my own experience, I would like to share some strategies I use with you.
Rewire and the Struggle Batteries
Struggles hurt, and it’s painful. No wonder we have the tendency to not recall any of it and even talk publicly about it. I won’t say it’s wasted. In the end, it’s still a very hard experience. I don’t have a plan to romanticize, so if it still hurts, take it easy, my friend. But if you happened to have the will and the power to take a step forward. I would like to introduce a paradigm shift in your mind.
Struggle is a kind of wealth.
It’s not currency like fiat money, but wealth, which can earn you more currency when you are not working. (The currency in this context might be the follower counts, the article counts, the arbitrary proof of influence.)
The reason why I recognize struggles as a kind of wealth is because:
The hologram of a creator we discussed earlier, struggles is the most powerful experience which can not be diluted by the flooded content created by AI. Struggles serve as the impurities in the creation, and this is the proof of living which can not be fully replicated by AI.
You create a trace for your reader to better answer the crucial question, “Is this article worth my time?” I am not saying struggles themselves already have this power; you need to crystallize it (I will talk about this later). This kind of crystalized struggle will serve as the breadcrumb. Your reader can have an easier time understanding how you create this work, and they can better comprehend your situation and resonate with it.
But to really think of it as wealth, we need to use it like wealth. I created a concept called struggle batteries.6 It has these guidelines in the system.
Collect struggles into something concrete, in your daily notebook, in your memo, in your creation. Find a place outside of your brain to record it down. This not only serves in this system, but this effort will also clear your mind. When you record something down, you are training your brain to think about struggles from the perspective of an outsider, so you can better detach from the painful part and focus on the stuff you learned from it.
Don’t shy away from your embarrassment, I know sometimes it’s really hard to put it on paper, not just because they are painful, but also, maybe they are shameful. Those moments, when we pinch our chest, and there is a choke in the throat, we yell in a weird voice, with the regret “I should not have said that.” Record them down; they are part of your struggles.
Be relaxed when you find they are sneaking into your creation.
Imagine when you are going to describe the bravest moment of a character, your real-life experience creeps in, and you can’t really say the brave punchline for your character, there is something hanging there, and thus you write something that is not what you originally thought, you write something that has the impurities of real life.
It’s ok. And actually, it’s beneficial if you do it right. Think about this, they are the scar of yourself, and these characters you create will inevitably have a similar scar too. Being honest is also a kind of freedom, accepting them like the gene of yours and then developing a strategy to use them wisely.
Show the crystallization.
I once tried to share my creation with one of my college Chinese teacher, she is a gentle woman say everything with soft and relax sound, with my small and shy mind, I thought she might be able to provide me some feedback on my creation, which at that time, was filled with pain and struggle, pure and straightforward.
The feedback I received is a few words on a small sticky note. I forgot the exact wording on the note, but I still remember the feeling. It’s a complete neglect. I should not show the teacher my work, and I should not even show it to everyone at all. But in hindsight, I think the teacher was giving the correct suggestion. I should make the content easier for the reader to comprehend, not just dump all my feelings into my creation and hope they can understand. But the other way around.
Write down your struggle, but when you are going to share it with the world, rethink the form that you are going to use, and think about “What is the value you can provide?”
If you have time, I highly recommend watching the video created by PewDiePie. You will understand the value it provides. Encouraging and inspiring.
Closing
You create beautiful work not because you are perfect, but because you are as broken as everyone.”
Recently, I have been reading “Notes on Complexity” by Neil Gershenfeld. Beautiful book, talking about the complex theory across Quantum theory, relativity theory, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. The author thought Gödel’s incompleteness theorems destroy the attempt of purely using mathematics to describe the world, but it also opens up a door, which connects consciousness back to the universe.
We are stardust, drifting but also connecting to the big consciousness of the universe. This is what he is trying to say, let’s first put right or wrong aside. When we are in trouble, in a struggle, I find it’s extremely helpful to think in this way, there are two thought directions. One is thinking that “Since I am so small, my struggle is not relevant in the end, if this is the case, why should I be so serious about it.” Another direction is “Since we are connected together, the suffering is connected, the suffering is being taken care of by all of us.” Both ways can help you dilute the pain of your struggle.
And with secular thinking, when we are suffering, if we make it right, we are accumulating wealth. A kind of wealth that can not be diluted by the flooding of AI. And to me, that is the most beautiful aspect of struggle. It’s inevitably unique.
May your struggles be many, may you have the strength to get it through, and may you have the wisdom to see them as wealth.
Po Chun
One of my favorite stories of all time, I keep returning to the novel to re-read it when I feel lost. It’s an escape, but at the same time, a reminder of our everyday life is already an adventure. It took me over 10 years to finally understand this.
“Oh, here’s the world. We’re doing one based on a version of New York,” so GTA IV. And I was living in New York, and had been living in New York for a few years. I wasn’t sure if I was happy. I was going through a lot of personal dramas as usual. And that was why I was looking at some of GTA IV again recently, and it’s really dark. And I was like, “Ah, that’s why.” You know, I was single and miserable, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in America. - Transcript for Dan Houser: GTA, Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar, Absurd & Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #484
A study published in late 2024 by researchers at Yale University found that readers could only distinguish between human and AI essays about 50% of the time. Essentially, their guesses were no better than random chance. Human heuristics for AI-generated language are flawed
Research in the Journal of Medical Education (2025) showed that even “blinded” experts (medical professionals and humanities scholars) only identified AI texts with roughly 65% to 70% accuracy. While better than a coin flip, it still means 1 in 3 AI essays was completely indistinguishable from a student’s work. Detecting Artificial Intelligence–Generated Versus Human-Written Medical Student Essays: Semirandomized Controlled Study
Like the Appreciation Batteries in the first essay of I wrote in this series of newsletters. - Appreciation is Scarce