Can you believe it?" my friend Faith confided. "Gerald takes eight different pills a day, and I think all that medication mix is affecting him. The doctors are working on figuring out what to do." Her confidences concerned her overweight husband.

She continued in a resigned manner, "Of course, he has high blood pressure, too. If he only made an effort to lose a little bit of weight, that alone might help. Then maybe he would not have to take all that medication."

But the weight loss option was not attractive to Faith's husband, and he had told her that it was easier to just take medication. Taking the medication was the easy way out.

I see Faith's point, but I also see Gerald's point.

Today, each and every one of us is bombarded daily with a barrage of messages from pharmaceutical companies, each touting the names of medications that will solve all sorts of problems. They make it all appear so easy, and easy is the operative word.

These days, easy seems to be so valuable that it is sought by people everywhere. It's easy to get fast food—fast in our culture is the twin of easy—and it's the fast food that contributes to the American population's obesity, especially among children.

Once people gain all that excess weight, they go in search of easy solutions to their problem. These days, the suggestions for quick and easy solutions to difficult problems abound. A few days ago, for example, I heard a radio commercial from a major supermarket chain. The cheerful voice of the female announcer exhorted listeners not to worry and to cease all the hard work of exercise. The supermarket chain, she said, was offering an easy solution for those pounds: all the overweight customer needed to do was to talk to the wellness consultant the supermarket had retained.

It's all so easy, after all.

During the same radio program, I heard a prominent actor complain about homework being assigned to children. He wasn't complaining about the type of homework that was being assigned, but the very concept of homework itself. He was outraged about what he saw as redundant nonsense. Can you imagine, he fumed, that children have to exert and apply themselves after having spent an entire day at school! The situation wasn't easy for children or their parents. His comments reminded me of my own students, who often use the wordfun when they speak about education- related matters. I came to understand their use of the word as a synonym for easy, namely something that does not require any effort.

Don't get me wrong: I am all for fun in education, at least in the sense of being able to engage students and to make their process of internalizing new concepts as desirable and as enjoyable as possible. But this is not necessarily the same as being easy.

The search for easy fixes also impacts how people communicate in corporate settings. I have come across many executives who manage multi-million-dollar budgets and are charged with all the associated decision-making powers, yet are literally unable to read with full concentration even two pages of text if it is typeset in solid paragraphs. At best, their attention span is limited to digesting information arranged in bulleted lists.

I am not dead-set against easy solutions in all cases. If anything, I firmly believe in searching for simple solutions to complex problems, I am always determined to find the most efficient way to carrying out any task or project, and I absolutely do not believe in duplicating effort or reinventing the wheel. But as I practice all these approaches, I am thoroughly aware that some efforts will take time, that not everything will be fun, and that I will have to accept some results that come only with delayed gratification.

We live in a world that conducts life at a frenetic pace. We are all overwhelmed with information that is broadcast to us via the many gadgets to which we have become inseparably tethered, and each of us could use every ounce of help that we can muster.

One of the major attractions of community association living, in fact, is the ease of the lifestyle, which is so prominently featured in condominium marketing literature. After all, someone else will deal with landscaping, snow and trash removal, and even conflict resolution. But this ease of living can be sustained only as long as the governance of the association is excellent, the physical plant shows no sign of aging, the management team is cohesive and competent, and ultimately, the community is caring and actively involved. Caring in concept is easy, but hands-on active involvement is sometimes very trying because it requires engagement, which often translates to duties and responsibilities, neither of which is easy. Gravitation toward easy in this situation can lead to a vicious cycle.

To avoid falling into the easy trap, the easiest—yes, I said it—thing to do is to monitor the decision-making processes of the community association and actively question problem-solving approaches and solutions. Active engagement includes inquiring about whether we are reaching for the easy solution, which may not prove easy or useful in the long term. We should all keep Faith's husband in mind, and when faced with making a decision, ask if the path we want to pursue is the equivalent of downing eight different pills in one gulp or the alternative, namely changing lifestyle, diet, and exercise routines. Will the route that isn't as easy prove more useful in the long term? It's definitely not very easy, and it requires not only considerable exertion but also acceptance of delayed gratification.