Is life hard

I am unsure about this cliche anymore. The idea that life is hard is spouted everywhere. But in a way it seems that as long as you have a good paying job and avoid most/all major traumas that life isn’t going to be very hard.

So what do you think? I think life is traumatic, but not necessarily hard as long as you plan ahead a little. Of course that view will probably change over the years.

The difficulty of life is relative to one’s experience and exposure to people who truly have a hard life or to people who have an extremely easy life. For some people, the absence of Diet Coke in the local grocery is a tragedy, worthy of flaming in The Pit.

I happen to think life is pretty damn good and would like to stay in it for another few decades.

Being able to plan ahead in the sense that we know it is a luxury in many parts of the country and of the planet. Many people can only plan for the next hour.

Is life hard in the U.S.? Not for me, not for you, but as a friend is always telling me, “Ain’t none of us more than a few paychecks away from being on the street.”

As with most cliches, it’s painting with a broad brush. I think in reality, it’s a matter of self analysis.

Life is mostly just life…

Imagine you were born 60,000 years ago. You’re a hunter-gatherer, spend most of your time hungry, flea-bitten, and confused. Bad times come, and your clan is nearly wiped out. Good times come, and you eat till you puke.

To us, that’s one hell of a hard life. To the cave-man, it was just life.

As Frederik Pohl put it in his cute short story “Day Million,” how will people of the far future regard us? My personal bet is that they’d be half pitying, half admiring: “Those poor bastards didn’t even have manarveling, let alone the everyday arrovenet. And how could they even walk without blisters, since no one had invented the wouldershue!”

(Ask me about flying houses, talking stones, and a certain blind hunter)

Trinopus

It is unless you are flexible.

LOve

That’s a pretty big if there Calc. According to a study released this week by Rutgers University:

That good paying job your are depending on to soften life’s hardships can disappear in a heartbeat. If you think you are immune, you are fooling yourself. If you need proof, just check out the Mass Layoff Statistics at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The days of putting in 20-30 years with the same company are gone.

Let’s see how well your plans work out without that job, Calc. Life is what happens while you are making other plans.

As long as you have something to live for, I think life is great. Sure, it can be hard, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. If we’re talking about generally happy people who lead good lives, their hardships can be as bad or worse than the rest of us.

I think a pretty good indicator to the potential happiness that you can have is the fact that you can question that happiness. That we are asking if life is hard-that we recognize levels of difficulties of life-indicates that we have a relatively low level of hardship, I think.

Well duh. That’s like saying that as long as nothing goes wrong, the quintuple bypass brain transplant you’re scheduled for isn’t anything to worry about.

A lot of people can’t find a good paying job, even when the economy isn’t in the tank. Sometimes it’s prejudice, sometimes it’s being in the wrong field, sometimes it’s just plain old fashioned being born stupid. It’s not like all those poor people want to be poor. And these days, it’s not like us graduate degree having years of top notch education professionals wanted to pack up and move back in with mom and dad either.

And I’d like to add, you don’t avoid major life traumas. You just fail to get hit by one. You have no control over getting a brain tumor at 25, or being born with your organs on the outside, or being set on fire by some random street lunatic. You have no control over when Germany collectively loses it or when some Russian silo commander decides its been a slow news week for too long. There are plenty of major life traumas to go around; disease, famine, war, marital infedility, reality TV. Eventually, one is going to sneak up and bite you on the ass.

Now, what to have for dinner. Pizza? Mexican? 45 cal hollowpoint?