Diving Into the Challenges Life Presents Us All

Life Is Hard

How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

By Kieran Setiya

I have always been taken by Philosophy and the thoughts it provokes. Why it has taken me this long to pick up my first book on the subject I wish I knew. It was probably one of the hardest reads I have done. It wasn’t because of the writing but because of the reflection that happened throughout. This post is going to be a bit different from the others. I am going to touch on each chapter and leave my favorite(s) thought provoking lines from each.

Starting with the introduction. “Happiness is a mood or feeling, a subjective state; you could be happy while living a lie.”. This made me question does happiness really make life easier? According to that line no, and it makes sense. Just because we are “happy” that does not mean we are living our best lives. Later-on he writes, “Ill argue that while the unjust may be happy, they do not live well.”. So, what’s more important being happy or living well? If happiness is a subjective state, shouldn’t we all be trying to live well instead?

The first chapter discusses infirmity. Whether physical or mental these plagues us all at some point in our lives. “Pain isn’t just bad in itself; it impedes one’s access to anything good.” It’s about how deal and approach pain versus the actual pain itself. The mental state is a powerful thing, if we allow it to be.

Loneliness. There are multiple studies that are referenced in this chapter that show that we are currently living in one of the loneliest times. Even with all the social media, we are losing true connection with others, and this can have long term effects on our beings. “Functional MRIs show that the region of the brain activated by social rejection is the same as that involved in physical pain.”. The “friendships” that we have established online are they really “friendships” or are they there to seek validation, to try to feel connected. When we are always connected and have the rejection of those who we are seeking validation from right at our fingertips, what is that doing to our overall mental states?

He then goes on to talk about relationships of all kinds. This line hits home though, “Being loved for your character, he argues, is being loved for what makes you you; and since love and desire are always for what is good, only those whose character is virtuous can truly be loved for themselves.”. This was based off a paradigm of friendship from Aristotle. Are we always presenting as true selves online? In turn are those friendships real or are we losing the real-world connections that give us that connection that we wired to as humans to have with one another? This made a lot of sense, and the timing was perfect for me. I had just decided for my New Years resolution to give up all my personal social media. It was time for me to focus on the tangible world in front of me before it is too late, there is so much more beyond the life of a screen. I can say that over the last month I have found myself appreciating and nurturing the relationships in my life that are beyond the screen, and even if it is subjective, my happiness from day to day is increasing.

“Greif is not a weakness but a token of persisting love.”. We have all experienced grief in one way or another. That line put it in a whole new perspective for me. I have a tendency to over love and care for people, so grief is something that I have grown to know well. For a long time, I viewed it as a weakness, but it really doesn’t have to be that way. “Unhappiness is part of living well, of facing the truth and responding as we should. If we did not grieve, we would not love.”. This can be from small things to the loss of a loved one. No one can tell you how and what to grieve. We all have our own battles so grow and continue to love. “It is that love, like grief, is an emotional process, not a state.”

Then there is failure. “But we have come to speak as if a person can be a failure – as though failure were an identity, not an event.”. “The more you appreciate the sheer abundance of incident, the more you’ll see any life as an assortment of small successes and small failures…”. It really is about mindset, just because you may fail at a part of a task, it doesn’t mean you as a whole are a failure, it is only a minute portion of the much bigger picture.

At some point in all of our lives we have felt the injustice of the world. “In thinking about the hardships of human life, I have been thinking about myself, but I can’t help thinking of others, the profusion of humanity whose adversities I don’t face.”. “Love is, we found, a moral emotion: you do not really love someone unless you see value in them that would survive the loss of love.”. I don’t have a perspective on this besides the words that are in front of us. They need to be taken individually and digested on a person-by-person basis. “You have a right to your suffering, too.”.

This next passage goes back to loneliness in my opinion but falls under injustice as well. When the author is discussing Adorno in Minima Moralia and the trivia of contemporary life and how we have forgotten how to give presents. Adorno wrote “Real giving had its joy in imagining the joy of the receiver. It means choosing, expending time, going out of one’s way, thinking of the other as a subject: the opposite of distraction. Just this hardly anyone is now able to do. At best they give what they would have liked themselves, only a few degrees worse.”. I have always been a gift giver. We have all given gifts that were just that a gift with little to no thought behind them. However, I have been told that I am a good gift giver. Most of the time it is not something extravagant but thoughtful, the thought turns into meaning, which turns into love. Which is in our nature to crave. It’s relative because it links to industrial capitalism. “The living dead, we have no prospect of flourishing.”. Harsh but true. This has been a regular discussion between me and a close friend.

The next two chapters prompted more reflection than I could have imagined. Absurdity to start. “Exploring absurdity leads us back to love and loss, to narrative and the non-ideal, to acknowledgment and attention.”. “It is for us to interrupt the storm, taking hold of the present to give meaning to the past.”. “Should we be lifted by hope or flattened by despair?”. Nothing else is needed here.

This was the chapter that I had flipped open to when I first picked this book up off the shelf in the store. This has grown to be one of my favorite words, HOPE. “The idea that hope is empowering, noble, even audacious, has become conventional wisdom. But it was not always so.”. “And the more we hope, the more we risk despair.”. I will always keep hope because without it there is no light. And as much as I enjoy the darkness and everything it teaches and holds, that is not a place to live, so keep hope and keep light.

“Hope has elements of both desire and belief.”. “Hope is a concession to what you cannot control.”. “Like hot iron, hope is dangerous: it can hurt us. And by itself, hope does nothing at all.”. So, hope requires more than just that, it requires action, no matter how big or small, personal or public, steps in the direction of what you’re hoping for!

182 pages of thought-provoking ideas and reflection. You may agree or disagree with what is written, but that’s one of the joys. Respect the ideas and the person. Learn and grow, offer up your own thoughts. This is only my perspective/reflection from the reading. I am hoping that some of you share yours as well. Snag up this book and appreciate what is presented within its pages.