My freshmen were complaining the other day about the perils of learning online, having to do homework, and how tough it is being student athletes. I heard them out then looked at them intently for what felt like 30 seconds.
“Life is hard,” I said.
They were silent. They got it.
My grammy said that once and it makes more sense every day. “Life is hard.” Things don’t go as planned. You’ll always be reacting to the plot twists of life, never fully ahead of the curve. You will embark on ventures that don’t go well and lost friends along the way. There will be things you don’t want to do, like school and pay taxes. Sometimes you will feel so worn down by the evil in the world and the stress of your circumstances that you will be overwhelmingly anxious, depressed, and ready to leave town. There are tradeoffs everywhere and injustice is rampant. Then people die.
Life is hard.
By my estimation, there are three realistic responses to this:
The first option is to reject the fact that life is hard and try to make things as comfortable and easy as possible. When challenges or risky opportunities arise, avoid them. Living is better when it’s safe, easy, predictable. Ignorance is bliss, so you ignore the suffering of your life and others’ hoping it will fade away. To numb unwanted negative emotions, perhaps you take up drinking, promiscuous sex, drugs, or fantasy football. Your sole purpose in life is seeking a self-indulgent, pelasurable life, not a contribution.
The second option is to accept that life is hard, then choose what might be worth suffering for. This will require giving up material comfort in the present in order to move towards something meaningful future. Once you choose something, you set your life up so you can honestly pursue it. Along the way you learn to cope with the hard realities of existence by devoting yourself to something bigger than yourself, be it your mission, your family, or your God. You recognize that living to better your circumstances while disregarding others leads to more suffering for everyone, so you avoid that path.
The last option is to give up. This can look like many things, but giving up is always a shirking of responsibilities. Perhaps, after attaining your degree from your parent-funded education, you drop off the grid and live in the woods by yourself with no intent of being generous to those who supported your life to this point. Or maybe you recognize that you’re angry and bitter at the world but do nothing to change your emotional or physical state. Maybe you are so convinced that you’re right and there is nobody that can teach you anything about how to live a better life despite its inherent, abysmal, and devastatingly hard challenges.
Or perhaps you’re so depressed that you’re contemplating giving up in a more drastic way. If this is the case, please read this 2016 article by Tim Ferriss: Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide. You owe it to yourself.
I don’t think there’s any real option besides the second: accept that life is hard, then move from there. In the first you’ll end up like Ivan Illich. In the last you’ll end up depriving the world of your unique and important contribution, the potential of what you could create if you stayed with us, with the hard realities that are so real but so possible to overcome with enough support, be in cognitive or physical or spiritual.
These are the hardest realities to face and the hardest questions to ask. I’m not foolishly saying you should stay where you are and be miserable, but I am suggesting you find something worth suffering for.
Life is hard, but it’s harder if you don’t accept that.