I’m trying to address a distinction implied by the OP that can cause confusion in how people perceive the question. In order to believe that life is unforgiving you would have to draw a distinction between life and the forgiving people that are in it.
Lets say that you steal from a store. The store owner catches you but lets you go. Is this the store owner being forgiving or is this life being forgiving? I’m not arguing for one or the other, I just want the OP to clarify his question.
If life in the OP means everything in life that occurs without people making choices, then life can’t be unforgiving because being unforgiving is an act that requires a choice.
If life in the OP includes the people who make choices then it is both forgiving and unforgiving because there are all kinds of forgiving and unforgiving people in it.
Or the OP could meant that your own life is unforgiving, so then you should be too. To me this version make the most logical sense and the others can be easily dismissed.
Because this isn’t life. This is a fragment of life; a whisper, a shadow of life. It’s an escape from the stresses fo the real world. In the real world I have a wife with bipolar disorder who seems to be growing more unstable by the month, and there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to relieve her suffering. In the real world there’s an economic crisis, starvation, genocide, war, rape, and murder.
It may be true that many Dopers lives aren’t terribly tough, but to extrapolate our fairly privileged positions to the world in general is something less than wise.
I’d begin by questioning the first statement: its looking so obvious at first glance is an artifact of one language’s semantics (namely that in English the properties ‘good at dealing out abuse’ and ‘good at enduring abuse’ happen to be expressible with the same word). What’s a truism only in some language(s) isn’t a truism at all.
I didn’t mean it that way - I meant that we, on the Dope, really don’t have it all that tough in our lives.
I don’t treat the Dope as a stress reliever - in fact, my existence here is generally more stressful than my meatworld one, based on the number of arguments I get into and their effect on me…
That’s harsh, but everyone has similar stories - I take medication just to keep me from curling up in the corner, for instance. Doesn’t make me think life is that tough.
Are these all affecting you? If not, then you can’t really say they count, can you? Who on the dope is starving? A victim of genocide or war? I’ve been raped, it sucks, but it doesn’t make my life any tougher now.
It would be as folly-full to take the worst that could happen, and to extrapolate from that to “life is tough”, don’t you think?