Are we developing a distaste for effort?

Agatha Christie wrote the intricately plotted novel And Then There Were None because, she later explained, she wanted to attempt something really hard: “I had written this book because it was so difficult to do that the idea had fascinated me.”

This human tendency – to push ourselves to do things we know will be difficult – might well help to explain our success as a species. So, at least, argued the mathematician and philosopher Jacob Bronowski in a wonderful 1973 documentary series called The Ascent Of Man, in which he said man’s unique gift was “his immense pleasure in exercising and pushing forward his own skill”.