Kieran Setiya

Pain, Loneliness, Grief, Injustice ... Hope? Life is hard - as the past few years have made painfully clear. From personal trauma to the injustice and absurdity of the world, sometimes simply going on can feel too much. But could there be solace - and even hope - in acknowledging the hardships of the human condition? Might doing so free us from the tyranny of striving for our "best lives" and help us find warmth, humanity, and humour in the lives we actually have? Could it inspire in us the desire for a better world? In this profound and personal book, Kieran Setiya shows how philosophy can help us find our way. He shares his own experience with chronic pain and the consolation that comes from making sense of it. He asks what we can learn from loneliness and loss about the value of human life. And he explores how we can fail with grace, confront injustice, and search for meaning in the face of despair. Drawing on ancient and modern philosophy, as well as fiction, comedy, social science and personal essay, Life is Hard is a book for this moment - a work of solace and compassion. It draws us towards justice, for ourselves and others, by acknowledging what it means to be alive.

How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

Life Is Hard

This attitude may strike you as perverse or pessimistic. But we need not live our "best lives" in order to be more resilient; and we have to face the facts. Here's an experience you may have had: You tell a friend about a problem you are coping with, maybe a blowup at work or in a close relationship, a health scare that has you rattled. They are quick to reassure you "Don't worry; it will all be fine!-or to offer you advice. But their response is not consoling. Instead, it feels like disavowal: a refusal to acknowledge what you're going through. What we learn in moments like these is that assurance and advice can operate as denial.

As the novelist-philosopher Iris Murdoch wrote: "I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of 'see' [that turns on] moral imagination and moral effort." It's description more than argument that orients us to life, that tells us how to feel and what to do. It takes work to describe what's really there. Here philosophy is continuous with literature, history, memoir, film.

If the best we could do was to minimise injustice and human suffering, so that life was not positively bad, there would be no point in living life at all. If human life is not a mistake, there must be things that matter not because they solve a problem or address a need that we would rather do without but because they make life positively good. They would have what I've called 'existential value'. Art, pure science, theoretical philosophy: they have value of this kind. But so do mundane activities like telling funny stories, amateur painting, swimming or sailing, carpentry or cooking, playing games with family and friends - what the philosopher Zena Hitz has called 'the little human things'. It's not just that we need them in order to recharge so we can get back to work, but that they are the point of being alive.

Lindy

Like being gay in a homophobic culture, being disabled may be to one's detriment, but that's a social failing, not a natural inevitability. Physical disability is not, in itself, an obstacle to living well.

There is not just one activity to love - contemplation or statesmanship - but a vast array of things worth doing, ranging from music, literature, TV, and film to sports, games, and conversation with friends and family from the essential labour of doctors, nurses, teachers, farmers, and sanitary workers to commercial innovation, science pure and applied ... even philosophy.

Like many, I have a sense of being left out, excluded from some wider, smoother fabric of social connection, accessible to others. I don't trust that feeling; but I live with it. Human beings struggle with social needs.

Pick a friendship that matters in your life: it matters, in the end, because your friend matters and so do you. True friends cherish each other, not just the friendship that connects them.

While grief brings pain, the pain is part of living well: it's inextricable from love.

Don't let the lure of the dramatic arc distract you from the digressive amplitude of being alive. 

So long as self-esteem is tied to the production of market value, some will be 'failures', at best indebted for their living - through social insurance or a universal basic income - to the economic victories of others.

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