Kieran Setiya’s “Life Is Hard” tackles life’s toughest challenges head-on. This thought-provoking book explores how philosophy can guide us through difficult times, offering practical wisdom for everyday struggles.
Dive into Setiya’s philosophical journey and discover powerful tools to overcome life’s hurdles.
Table of Contents
Genres
Philosophy, Self-Help, Personal Growth, Existentialism, Ethics, Psychology, Mindfulness, Resilience, Life Skills, Wisdom Literature, Happiness, Philosophy, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Politics, Social Sciences, Consciousness and Thought Philosophy, Philosophy of Ethics and Morality
“Life Is Hard” explores the universal human experience of suffering and hardship. Setiya draws on philosophical traditions to address common challenges like loneliness, grief, failure, and injustice. He argues that acknowledging life’s difficulties is crucial for finding meaning and resilience.
The book is divided into chapters focusing on specific hardships. Setiya examines how philosophers throughout history have grappled with these issues, offering their insights as potential solutions. He emphasizes the importance of compassion, both for oneself and others, in navigating life’s trials.
Setiya challenges the notion that a good life is free from suffering. Instead, he proposes that embracing life’s hardships can lead to personal growth and a deeper appreciation for existence. The book encourages readers to find value in their struggles and use them as opportunities for self-reflection and improvement.
Throughout the text, Setiya weaves personal anecdotes with philosophical concepts, making complex ideas accessible to a general audience. He provides practical strategies for coping with adversity, such as cultivating gratitude, practicing mindfulness, and seeking connections with others.
Review
Setiya’s “Life Is Hard” offers a refreshing perspective on dealing with life’s challenges. Its strength lies in its ability to blend academic philosophy with practical advice, making it relevant to readers from all walks of life.
The author’s writing style is engaging and relatable. He avoids heavy jargon, making philosophical concepts digestible for those unfamiliar with the field. Setiya’s personal anecdotes add depth to the theoretical discussions, helping readers connect with the material on an emotional level.
One of the book’s standout features is its realistic approach to happiness and fulfillment. Rather than promising quick fixes or unrealistic outcomes, Setiya acknowledges the inherent difficulties of life and offers tools for navigating them with grace and resilience.
However, some readers might find the book’s pacing slow at times, particularly in sections that delve deeper into philosophical arguments. Additionally, those seeking more concrete, step-by-step advice might find the book’s approach too abstract.
Despite these minor drawbacks, “Life Is Hard” succeeds in providing a thoughtful and compassionate guide to facing life’s challenges. It’s a valuable resource for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of their struggles and looking for philosophical insights to guide them through difficult times.
Introduction: Learn how to live well through the hardships of the human condition.
Life Is Hard (2022) takes a close look at common struggles – like infirmity, loneliness, grief, and failure – through the lens of philosophy, as well as fiction, sports, history, and personal anecdotes. By examining the familiar hardships of the human condition, we can learn how to live well.
Sadness, loss, regret – there are no quick fixes for life’s universal problems. But if you examine them thoroughly and honestly, you can find ways to navigate through them.
That’s what this summary to Kieran Setiya’s Life Is Hard is all about. It looks at human hardships – specifically infirmity, loneliness, grief, and failure – through the lens of philosophers, as well as literature, sports, memoirs, and Setiya’s own personal experiences.
By staring these problems in the face and accepting them as they are, we can learn about living well, even when life is hard.
Lessons from a bathroom floor.
He doesn’t remember the movie, but he remembers the pain.
Kieran Setiya suffers from chronic pain – a condition that first hit him at age 27 when he was at The Oaks, a movie theater in Pittsburgh. The pain stabbed him in the side and sent him running for the restroom. Urinating brought some relief, but the pain returned when Setiya got home. It kept him awake and hallucinating on his bathroom floor all night long.
After multiple tests and trips to various doctors, the only professional remedy Setiya received was this advice: “Try to ignore it.”
For 13 years, that’s exactly what Setiya did. He was uncomfortable at times, and sleeping was a struggle, but the pain did not make his life worthless or unlivable. He advanced his career and landed a job at one of the world’s most prestigious universities, MIT. He supported his wife and mother when they needed him, bought a new home, and engaged in social activism. When the pain got worse 13 years later, it led Setiya to a new doctor with better insights – and the motivation to write his book.
Setiya’s chronic pain may have prevented restful sleep, but it didn’t prevent him from enjoying most of life’s activities. The same can be true for just about anyone with just about any disease or disability. Sure, being a wheelchair user means you can’t run – but it doesn’t mean you can’t play basketball, listen to music, enjoy a sunset, or fall in love. The reality is, we all have some restrictions on life because we simply don’t have enough time or energy to master every skill, play every game, and enjoy everything in the world that’s worth enjoying.
There are, of course, some disabilities or levels of pain that prevent so many activities or cause so much discomfort that they prevent us from living well. This is where circumstances make a major impact: diabetes can be managed by someone with access to affordable insulin and reliable health care, but it can be debilitating and deadly to someone who’s not as privileged.
At times, pain can become overwhelming. But it can also teach compassion. In Setiya’s case, once he’d experienced the trauma of hallucinations on the bathroom floor, he had a lot more empathy for others experiencing their own nightmares. There is solidarity in suffering, which leads us into the hardship of the next section – loneliness.
Curing loneliness at the soup kitchen.
There’s no doubt that loneliness hurts. Functional MRIs show that the area of the brain triggered by social rejection is the same area that’s triggered by physical pain. To understand why loneliness hurts, let’s take a closer look at friendship through the eyes of two heavyweight philosophers.
In one corner we have Aristotle, who wrote that without friends, there’s no reason to live. Two of the ten books in his Nicomachean Ethics are devoted to friendship. The Greek great believed that friendships are based on the virtues of the friend. Those with the most virtues – like being good at your job, or being honest or funny – have the most friends.
That may sound fine at first. But the problem with Aristotle’s theory is that if you lose some virtues, you should also expect to lose some friends. And that’s not how friendships work – at least not the good ones. They last through thick and thin. We value our true friends no matter what.
So as a sharp counterpunch to Aristotle, let’s turn to the renowned Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, who said that all people have value regardless of their virtues. Kant calls this value “dignity.” Its opposite is “price,” or the value we attach to objects that can be replaced.
Since we view our true friends – or romantic partners or family members – with this kind of unconditional love and respect, we can assume they view us the same way. This tells us why loneliness hurts. Being away from our friends deprives us of these life-affirming interactions. Worse, having no friends means our value, or dignity, isn’t being appreciated. We feel like we’re vanishing from the world – like we’re the tree falling in the forest that doesn’t make sound because no one is there to hear it.
The cure for loneliness can be found in other people. This may seem obvious, but there’s a catch. Your connection has to be oriented toward the other person – not in what they can do for you and your loneliness. So say hi to a neighbor, hold the door for someone, or volunteer at the soup kitchen. These acts may not make you a lifelong friend, but they’ll help you feel more connected to the world. And the more of these small steps you take toward connection, the farther away from loneliness you’ll get.
After love comes grief.
Maybe you’ve heard about the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. If you have, forget them. Grief doesn’t appear in predictable steps. Instead, it comes in scattered waves that can change from day to day and person to person.
The chaotic nature of grief is illustrated by The Unfortunates, written by the experimental British novelist B. S. Johnson. It was published in 1969, four years before Johnson died by suicide at the age of 40. The book is narrated by a journalist covering a soccer match in a city that triggers memories of a dead friend. Here’s the experimental part – the novel consists of 27 booklets in a box that can be read in any order, except for “First” and “Last.” Johnson is warning readers that grief doesn’t have a straight story line. It can twist and turn in unexpected directions every time it’s opened.
The rituals of mourning can help us give structure to the chaos of grief, and the need for that can be seen across cultures. There’s the Jewish tradition of sitting shiva for seven days while mourning with friends and family. The West African Dahomey people sing, dance, drink, and tell dirty jokes to celebrate the dead. The Saramaka people in Suriname tell extravagant folk tales. And mourning rituals in Western civilization date back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.
We need these rituals to help us cope with grief because even though we understand death is inevitable, it still hurts – especially when we’re talking about a loved one. French writer and Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux chronicled her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and eventual death in the book I Remain in Darkness. Those were the last words Ernaux’s mother ever wrote. Ernaux watched her mother lose her ability to eat, to control her bowels, to remember loved ones – and she hoped for her death. But when that merciful moment arrived, Ernaux was still “overcome with grief.”
There’s no doubt that grief causes pain, but it’s a suffering that comes from loving and living well. The more friends you have and the more love you share, the more you risk the suffering that will come when you inevitably lose those friends and that love. But it’s a suffering we should hope to endure – not avoid.
Don’t focus on the failures.
Failure creeps into our lives every day – making wrong turns, losing clients, forgetting anniversaries. But failure is most glaring, and memorable, in the world of sports. Baseball errors that cost their teams championships have earned lasting nicknames like “Merkle’s Boner” and the “Snodgrass Muff.” A near century of Red Sox failure begat the “Curse of the Bambino” in Boston. And Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca was branded a failure when he gave up the “Shot Heard ’Round the World” – a home run to Bobby Thomson that sent the New York Giants to the 1951 World Series.
That famous home run and the men associated with it are the subject of Joshua Prager’s The Echoing Green. Prager reminds us there is more to Branca’s life than that one failing moment – just like there’s more to Thomson’s life. He writes about Branca’s large and loving family, and Thomson’s ambivalent father. Prager structures the book so the personal details interrupt the baseball details in odd places and jarring moments. It’s another way of reminding us that lives and people are defined by a jumbled multitude of events, not just one.
When we try to fit the story of our lives into a linear narrative, we set ourselves up for failure. Our lives are not steady tension rising to a perfect climax that will subside into a neat conclusion. They have fits and starts and thousands upon thousands of successes and failures. This infinite, granular view of existence is captured in Nicholas Baker’s novella, The Mezzanine. The entire book takes place on an escalator during lunch hour. Its substance? Digressions on topics like shoelaces, urinals, straws, and childhood memories. Those are examples of all the little things that make life worth living, as opposed to some perfectly arced narrative. There are enough little things in just one lunch hour on one escalator to fill an entire book.
This is not to say that we should forget ambitious goals, or that results don’t matter. We should strive for success. But while we do it, we should focus on the journey and not the destination. That maxim can be traced all the way back to the Bhagavad Gita, which tells us, “Motive should never be in the fruits of actions.” By focusing on the process instead of the result, we can protect ourselves from the hardship of failure.
Summary
Even though suffering is inevitable, it doesn’t have to keep you from living well.
Illness or disability may stop you from enjoying some activities – but they can’t stop you from enjoying all of them. Loneliness might leave you feeling hollow – but you can fill that void by caring for others. Grief hurts, but it’s a pain that only comes after you’ve felt true love – and you know the famous line of poetry from Alfred Lord Tennyson, “It’s better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all.” Finally, while we all fail multiple times a day, we also succeed multiple times – which one you focus on is up to you.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Lonelness
Grief
Failure
Injustice
Absurdity
Hope
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index