Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way

My own luck has been good. I was raised in Hull, an industrial city in the northeast of England that had been through better times. My childhood had its share of troubles, but I fell in love with philosophy, made my way to Cambridge as an undergraduate, moved to the U.S. for graduate school, and stayed. I’m a professor of philosophy at MIT, protected by the wealth and stability of an illustrious if eccentric institution. I have a house, a happy marriage, and a child who is wiser and braver than I ever was. I have never gone hungry or been homeless; I am not a victim of brutality or war. But no one is shielded, in the end, from sickness, loneliness, failure, grief.

Since the age of twenty-seven, I have experienced chronic pain: persistent, fluctuating, strange, a constant drone of sensory distraction. It can be difficult to concentrate and, at times, impossible to sleep. Because it is invisible, my condition is isolating: almost no one knows. (I’ll tell you all about it in Chapter 1.) At thirty-five, I had a premature midlife crisis. Life seemed repetitive, empty, just more of the same: a sequence of accomplishments and failures stretching through the future to decline and death. Eight years ago, my mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Her memory faltered for some time, and then abruptly crashed. I am grieving for someone who is still alive.

As I look around me, I see suffering on a massive scale. When I wrote these words, millions were living in enforced isolation, lonely and desperate due to Covid-19. Many had lost their jobs or could not pay their bills. Loved ones were sick or dying; there was an epidemic of grief. Inequality was rampant and democracy fragile. Another storm is coming, as we fail to heed the fire alarm of global warming.

So what are we to do?

There is no cure for the human condition. But after twenty years teaching and studying moral philosophy, I believe that it can help. This book explains how.

Despite its name, “moral philosophy” is about much more than moral obligation. As Plato wrote in the Republic, circa 375 BCE, “The argument concerns no ordinary topic but the way we ought to live.” The subject of moral philosophy is expansive, addressed to everything that matters in life. Philosophers ask what is good for us, what ambitions we should nurse, what virtues we should cultivate or admire. They give guidance and they give arguments; they formulate theories by which to live. There’s an academic side to this: philosophers study abstract questions and dispute each other’s views; they trade in thought experiments that make the familiar strange. But moral philosophy has a practical purpose. Through much of history, there was no clear distinction between philosophical ethics and “self-help.” It was assumed that philosophical reflection on how to live should make our own lives better.

I accept every part of that. But the aspiration to live well has frequently embraced a more quixotic goal: the best or ideal life. In Plato’s Republic, justice is imagined through a utopian city-state, not as a fight against injustice here and now. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Plato’s student Aristotle aims for the highest good, eudaimonia—a life that is not merely good enough but one you should choose if you could choose any life at all. Aristotle thought that we should imitate the gods: “We must not follow those who advise us, being men, to think of human things, and, being mortal, of mortal things, but must, so far as we can, make ourselves immortal, and strain every nerve to live in accordance with the best thing in us.” His answer to the question how to live is a vision of life without deficiency or human need: if you like, it’s his version of heaven.

With rare exceptions, even those who set their sights a little lower tend to theorize the good life, not the bad. They focus on pleasure, not pain; love, not loss; achievement, not failure. Not long ago, the philosopher Shelly Kagan coined the term “ill-being” for “the elements that directly constitute a life’s going badly.” In “typical discussions of well-being,” he observed, “ill-being is largely neglected.” There’s an affinity here with the “power of positive thinking” that implores us not to dwell on trials and tribulations but to dream of the life we want. Even the ancient Stoics—philosophers explicitly concerned with how to weather life’s adversities—were surprisingly upbeat. They believed that we can flourish whatever our circumstance; well-being is entirely up to us. In each of these conceptions, hardship is repressed as we pursue the good.

A premise of this book is that this whole approach is wrong. We should not turn away from hardship; and the best is often out of reach. Striving for it only brings dismay.

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.

Worse than denial, even, is the urge to justify human suffering. “Everything happens for a reason”—except, of course, it doesn’t. Philosophers have a word, “theodicy,” for an argument that vindicates the ways of God to man. Theodicies address the problem of evil: if God is omnipotent and benevolent, what accounts for the manifold evils of the world? But theodicy has a life of its own, outside of narrowly theistic or doctrinal contexts. Religious or not, we conjure the problem of evil whenever we protest that something should not be; and we engage in something like theodicy when we say it’s for the best.

The problem with theodicy is not just intellectual—none of the arguments work—but ethical, too. It’s wrong to justify your own or others’ suffering, to mute pity or protest in that way. That is the moral of the most famous theodicy of them all. In the Book of Job, the Accusing Angel urges God to test a “man of perfect integrity,” killing his sons and daughters, destroying his property, covering his skin with boils “from his scalp to the soles of his feet,” so that he is left scratching himself with a shard of pottery in the dust. Job’s friends insist that he must deserve his fate, a punishment for some cryptic sin. God condemns them “because [they] have not spoken the truth about me.” Meanwhile, Job protests his innocence. Though the book concludes with what might seem to be redemption—God returns Job’s possessions twice over, “fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys,” along with seven brand-new sons and three new daughters—the theodicy falls flat. It’s a travesty to think replacements could atone for the loss of Job’s first children.

What we should take from the Book of Job is not that virtue is rewarded in the end but that Job’s friends were wrong to make excuses for his misery and that it was Job who spoke the truth: we don’t deserve to suffer as we do. I’m not saying there is no God, though I don’t believe in one myself. I am saying that if God’s existence can be squared with the persistence and pervasiveness of hardship in human life, the reconciliation should not temper or negate the fury of compassion, for ourselves and others.

So this is where we are: heirs to a tradition that urges us to focus on the best in life but painfully aware of the ways in which life is hard. To open our eyes is to come face-to-face with suffering—with infirmity, loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, absurdity. We should not blink; instead, we should look closer. What we need in our affliction is acknowledgment.

That’s the impulse behind this book. It’s a map with which to navigate rough terrain, a handbook of hardships from personal trauma to the injustice and absurdity of the world. Its chapters make arguments, sometimes finding fault with past philosophers. But the reflection they involve is as much about attending to adversity as it is about arguing around it. 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. I’ll draw on everything I’ve got.

I said before that moral philosophy and self-help had long been intertwined. This book owes something to that history. Reflecting on the flaws of the human condition can mitigate its harms, helping us to live more meaningful lives. But this is not a self-help book if that suggests “five tips for overcoming grief” or “how to succeed without even trying.” It’s not the application of an abstract theory, or of the doctrines of some dead philosopher, to the difficulties of life. No magical thinking, no quick fix; instead, the patient work of consolation. To quote the poet Robert Frost, when it comes to human suffering, there’s “no way out but through.”

Two insights light the way. The first is that being happy is not the same as living well. If you want to be happy, dwelling on adversity may or may not be of use. But mere happiness should not be your goal. Happiness is a mood or feeling, a subjective state; you could be happy while living a lie. Consider Maya, unknowingly submerged in sustaining fluid, electrodes plugged into her brain, being fed each day a stream of consciousness that simulates an ideal life. Maya is happy, but her life does not go well. She doesn’t do most of what she thinks she is doing, doesn’t know most of what she thinks she knows, and doesn’t interact with anyone or anything but the machine. You wouldn’t wish it on someone you love: to be imprisoned in a vat, alone forever, duped.

The truth is that we should not aim to be happy but to live as well as we can. As the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche quipped: “Humanity does not strive for happiness, only the English do”—a swipe at thinkers like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who value nothing but pleasure over pain. I don’t mean we should strive to be unhappy, or be indifferent to happiness, but there is more to life than how it feels. Our task is to face adversity as we should—and here truth is the only means. We have to live in the world as it is, not the world as we wish it would be.

The second guiding light is that, in living well, we cannot extricate justice from self-interest or divide ourselves from others. It will emerge as the book goes on that even the most insular concerns—with one’s own suffering, one’s loneliness, one’s frustrations—are implicitly moral. They are entangled with compassion, with the value of human life, with ideologies of failure and success that obfuscate injustice. Reflecting honestly on affliction in our own lives leads toward concern for others, not into narcissistic self-regard.

Let’s not overstate the point. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes a just man stripped of his reputation, falsely accused and prosecuted, “whipped, stretched on a rack, chained [and] blinded with fire” but doing the right thing all along. For Plato, this man’s life goes well. Aristotle sensibly disagrees. It’s one thing to act as you should, doing the right thing—Aristotle calls this eupraxia—another to live the sort of life you should want to live. Plato’s victim achieves the first but not the second. He does what is right; yet we shouldn’t want to live like him, in conditions where doing what is right brings terrible costs.

The flaw in Aristotle’s view is not that he draws this distinction, which makes perfect sense, but that he concentrates on the life you should want to live, if you could live any life at all—not on the realistic range of good-enough lives. To live well in the sense that animates this book is to cope with the ways in which life is hard while finding enough in one’s life worth wanting. Philosophy cannot promise happiness or an ideal life, but it can help to lift the weight of human suffering. We’ll begin with the frailties of the body, make our way through love and loss to the structure of society, and end with “the whole residual cosmos.” Spoiler alert: if you want to know the meaning of life, the answer’s in Chapter 6.

The first chapter speaks to something less exalted: the impact of physical disability and pain. I’ll explain how the ill effects of disability—and the incremental disabilities of aging—are commonly misconceived. As activists have argued, but for prejudice and poor accommodations, physical disability needn’t make life worse. Their insight is obscured by fantasies of Aristotle’s ideal life—a life that is lacking in nothing. But this ideal is incoherent and the activists are right. When we turn from disability to pain, philosophy has limits: it’s not an anesthetic. But it can help us understand why pain is bad, a question much more complex than it seems. There is solace for those in pain—and a foothold for compassion—in expressing and acknowledging its harms.

Beside physical pain, there’s the psychic pain of isolation, loss, and failure. Confronting loneliness in Chapter 2, we’ll trace the need for society from the problem of solipsism—the view that only the self exists—to the idea that human beings are social animals. We’ll find that the harm of loneliness turns on the value of friendship, which turns on the value of other people. In registering this value, love is kindred with compassion and respect. That’s why there’s relief from loneliness in tending to the needs of others.

The darker side of friendship, and of love, is vulnerability to grief. In Chapter 3, we’ll explore the dimensions of loss, from the end of a relationship—I’ll write about an ugly breakup—to the end of human life. We’ll see how love justifies grief, so that unhappiness is part of living well. The chapter ends with a puzzle that is as much emotional as philosophical. If the fact that a loved one is dead is a reason to grieve, that fact is permanent. It never goes away. Should we then grieve forever? I’ll chart the limits of reason in dealing with grief and show how practices of mourning can achieve what reason can’t.

Chapter 4 turns to personal failure. Here we’ll spend time with furious Buddhists, Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, and baseball’s Ralph Branca. I’ll argue that the lure of narrative unity is what makes us “winners” and “losers.” We should resist its charms, refusing to narrate our lives in simple, linear ways, or to value project over process. But again, there are limits to reasoning. The shifts in orientation I propose are not ones we can make just by deciding to. We have to work on ourselves, and to fight the ideology that measures human life by what it’s able to achieve—a scale that condones grotesque inequities of wealth and social standing.

There is thus a bridge from failure in our own lives to the questions of injustice that preoccupy the last third of the book. In Chapter 5, we’ll weigh the critic John Berger’s maxim that “on this earth there is no happiness without a longing for justice.” Drawing on Plato’s Republic, and on the philosophers Theodor Adorno and Simone Weil, I’ll argue that while the unjust may be happy, they do not live well. This isn’t the conclusion of some esoteric proof but something we learn by “reading” the world around us, attending to affliction in our own lives and in others’. The first part of this book thus serves a moral purpose, helping us to work through human suffering on an intimate scale so that we grasp what it means writ large. The chapter ends with our responsibility for justice and the good of taking even one small step toward it.

The final chapters look to the universe as a whole and to the future of humankind. I’ll explain how justice could give meaning to human life and how that meaning depends on us. Here existential questions of absurdity collide with climate change: with the urgency of action and the burden of anxiety. We’ll end with hope, asking how it earned a place among the ills of life imprisoned in Pandora’s box. Confronting my own ambivalence, I’ll find a use for hope.

Ultimately, this book is about making the best of a bad lot: the human condition. I offer guidance in adversity, from coping with pain to making new friends, from grieving the lost to failing with grace, from the duties of injustice to the search for meaning in life. There is no simple formula for how to live. What I have instead are stories, images, ideas—some borrowed, some of them my own—and the aspiration to attend, as frankly and humanely as I can, to the problems we face, learning from what I find. Philosophy is not idle speculation or a machine built by argument alone. If you scan the pages to come, you’ll find stretches of argument and a lot besides, all of it words that aim to depict the human condition in ways that direct desire. This is not to disparage abstract reasoning, but philosophers have feelings, too.

In the introduction to his book Morality, the British philosopher Bernard Williams issued a warning I often recall. “Writing about moral philosophy should be a hazardous business,” he advised, “not just for the reasons attendant on writing about any difficult subject, or writing about anything, but for two special reasons. The first is that one is likely to reveal the limitations and inadequacies of one’s own perceptions more directly than in, at least, other parts of philosophy. The second is that one could run the risk, if one were taken seriously, of misleading people about matters of importance.” He’s right, I think, but the alternatives are worse: impersonality and trivia. Philosophers who address the human condition are bound to disclose themselves in describing the world. I’m afraid that’s true of me in writing this book—though when I say that I’m afraid, I mean: I hope.