I’m a sucker for those Internet advertisements that promise a free iPod, laptop, or camera. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’ve clicked on them enough times to know by now that what they promise and what they deliver are two different things. Usually you have to sign up for a few credit cards, maybe register for Netflix, and then spend $1500 or so on airplane tickets or home furnishings. So you do get a free iPod, but only if you spend $1500 first. What a bargain.

It’s a lesson that I must learn again and again: There is nothing in this life that comes for free. Everything must be earned, everything must be worked for and all must be built. There are no shortcuts, not in dieting, in exercising, in education, in relationships, or in anything else in this world. Yet it is human nature to search for an easier way.

This month’s issue of InTheFray features stories that explore the value of hard work. Sarah Hart takes a look at first-year architecture students preparing their final projects in Charrette. In The delicate art of Facebook snooping, Preethi Dumpala looks at how Facebook has made keeping up with former classmates, old friends, and ex-partners easier — and what this means. In my piece Tourism vs. Backpacking, I tell how my trip through Kashmir has taught me the difference between the two modes of traveling.

In Ashish Mehta’s short story Aliens, we are shown how the difficult moments of our childhood become the defining moments of who we are. Niclas Rantala presents photography that makes a powerful use of light in his slideshow Into the light. Finally, poet Lynn Strongin shares four poems in her series Lean over: there is something I must tell you.

In some senses, it is humanity’s desire for an easy way out that is behind thousands of years of technological development. Early farmers wanted an easier way to break the soil and invented the plow. The desire to move across the country quicker than by horseback drove the development of modern transportation. And the need for increasingly accurate counting and calculating machines resulted in the development of the modern computer. Yet each of these innovations was itself the result of hard work. There is no way around it: progress must be earned.

Aaron Richner I am a writer/editor turned web developer. I've served as both Editor-in-chief and Technical Developer of In The Fray Magazine over the past 5 years. I am gainfully employed, writing, editing and developing on the web for a small private college in Duluth, MN. I enjoy both silence and heavy metal, John Milton and Stephen King, sunrise and sunset. Like all of us, I contain multitudes.