Name: Life Is Hard
Rating: 4 (357 reviews)
Author: Kieran Setiya

What’s in it for me? Learn how to live well through the hardships of the human condition.

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 Blink 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.

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.

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.

Key ideas in Life Is Hard