Jerry Seinfeld in an interview a week or two ago described the process of finding an adult life as a process of finding a torture that you're comfortable with. You find a level of health that keeps the pains down to a tolerable level, and you suffer through the amount of exercise and refuse to eat things that you want to eat enough times that you need to keep you at that level of chronic pain. You make these calculations with all opposing tortures in your life.

Eventually you're living in a finely tuned pain minimizing environment, and if you have any energy left, you can get things done.