Pick Life

I work in an industry where it is common for those who don’t have to do the real work, or those who don’t know how, to use phrases like “cherry pick” or “low hanging fruit” to imply that there must be an easy way of doing things that is obvious to them (or us), but that nobody else has tried - or else that those they are advising intentionally choose difficult solutions. It doesn’t take much thought to realise that such people don’t put much thought into what they’re saying.

Nobody intentionally takes the difficult path - unless through some masochistic streak or in training for something unavoidable & even more difficult. It is not the case that everybody else is so stupid as to miss the easy opportunities. What people who use such phrases are saying is that they are jealous of a perception that someone else is having an easier time than them, & that they want a slice of it. They want a piece of that easy action, because they’re tired of working hard to achieve things. It’s unfair that others don’t have to work as hard. Note what I said at the beginning - these are the people who expect others to do the cherry picking.
In itself, the cherry metaphor is supposed to relate to how easy it is to pick cherries, on the basis that they have these nice long stems to grasp, well away from the fruit, & the fruit itself is firm enough to not crush easily. Then, of course, there’s the reward of getting to eat the cherries - & the fun of spitting out the stones. Going off cherry picking for a weekend on a friend’s farm sounds like an idyllic get-away. You just wouldn’t want to be a cherry picker for a living.

Similarly, the low-hanging fruit is in easy grasp of everyone who passes - they’ve all fondled it, the animals have nibbled at it, & everyone has rejected it, which is why it is still hanging. I’m not even sure if such fruit is necessarily ripe, if it hasn’t fallen from the tree. Perhaps that’s the intention of the metaphor - eat the unripe fruit, just because you are clever enough to look up, not down, where the ripe fruit is underfoot.
Life, unfortunately, is not like cherry-picking. Life, as George Bernard Shaw put it, wasn’t meant to be easy, but I leave it up to the diligent reader to find the rest of the line, which suggests that easiness should not be the goal in & of itself.

Life, however, is interesting, some might even say delightful, because of the challenges that come from realising that there are no low hanging fruit worth taking, & that cherry picking is a nice past-time for a change, but isn’t a lifestyle choice.

I don’t want to pick cherries. I pick life.