I think it’s probably nearly a given that a hard life (define as you see fit) is likely to make you more *interesting *than an easy life. But is that better? Are there any other benefits to a life of obstacles and challenges? How true is “If it doesn’t kill you it makes stronger” (notwithstanding the Joker’s variation on this)?
On a more personal level: with this is mind, would you wish upon yourself an easy life, or a difficult one?
Easy. The purpose of a hard life is to get the things that would make it easy.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
I don’t know, I’m results oriented.
Me too. Sometimes I luck out, others I have to fight for any result.
The result needed is what we all really go for IMHO.
I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I would wager that Mr. “I just spent three weeks in the Riviera” has got better anecdotes and a richer personality than Mr. “I just spent twenty years working twelve daily hours in a coal mine.”
What do you mean by hard life?
Like going hungry, not having a place to live, and physical suffering? Living in a brutal dictatorship, in constant fear of violence?
Or having to work a little to achieve social status and luxury, but still having the bare necessities like food, shelter, and medical care?
Because the latter is not necessarily bad, but the former I wouldn’t wish on anybody.
I guess I would wish a challenging life upon myself as opposed to a boring one, but never a truly hard life.
Here’s more of what I mean. You know when you watch a documentary about someone who’s undergone some horrendous experience? and almost invariably they say something like, “It made me the person I am today, so I wouldn’t do it over.” I’ve heard this said about everything from concentration camp experience to, well, something less horrible than the Holocaust.
We can survive almost anything (cf. Holocaust survivors, for a double-godwinning).
So no, I’m not just talking about *fake *hard, like not being born rich. I’m talking a life of depression, or child abuse, or whatever. I know *artists *who credit their art to the need to express themselves in a difficult situations. (Think how funny Richard Prior would’ve been without his childhood in a whorehouse.) But is this unique to artists?
By American standards, I wouldn’t say that I had an easy life. I say that because I have nothing on those that live in some form of extreme poverty or virtual (or even actual) slavery for the entirety of their short lives.
I wouldn’t trade a minute of it. What you learn from privation carries you in good stead for the remainder of your life (again, if there is opportunity to improve your life, which not everybody has). I have no complaints.
Meh - suffering for your art is overrated. Some of the world’s greatest artists, IMO, never suffered much at all.
Me, I pick easy. I’m Epicurean.
I prefer balance in most things. Too easy a life could end up sucking, and too hard a life surely would. But I guess, ultimately, our only reference point is our own experience, so either one would be what you made of it.
(My life has been a pretty good balance of easy and hard, so the above paragraph proves itself :p.)
I think it depends entirely on the individual. Some people are driven to do things and/or accomplish things and a life of ease would bore them silly. Others like to take it easy and feel like stress and effort detracts from their enjoyment of life.
I think the most important thing is happiness. As long as the way you are living enables you to live a truly happy life, in my opinion that is what’s best.
I agree with the old saying; “It’s better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.”
Well, every experience made you the person you are today, but I suspect that in these cases, more often than not, it’s more of a coping mechanism – by incorporating the horrible experience in your, well, self-definition, it to a certain extent stops being something that’s happened to you, and instead becomes part of you, thus possibly at least alleviating some of the feeling of helplessness and powerlessness.
And I prefer to try to take it easy.
Personally, I think that somewhere in the middle is healthiest. As I see it, suffering wears people down, warps and destroys it’s victims; privilege corrupts and deludes.
You hear that because that’s what people tend to want to hear. You don’t usually hear about, for example, the people who were driven insane in the camps and are institutionalized to this day in Israel. I recall reading about the example of a woman who screamed until her voice was destroyed, and does nothing but stare into space after all these years. For that matter, how many child molestation victims say they don’t regret being molested ? And then there’s all the examples of people who are abused and end up in prison or otherwise warped. Plenty of people do NOT improve under extreme stress; personally, I expect that most people don’t. Ruined people don’t make good arguments for “rugged individualism” and “personal responsibility” and “the virtue of suffering”, which is what most Americans want to hear about.
Try to grab a copy of Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness which is a truly fascinating book about the fallibility of human perception. At one point he lists 3 quotes:
“I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way.” JW from Texas.
“It was a glorious experience.” MB from Louisiana.
“I didn’t appreciate others nearly as much as I do now.” CR from California.
These people were Rep Jim Wright after being forced to resign in disgrace, Moreese Bickham after wrongfully serving 37 years for defending himself against a Klansman who shot him and Christopher Reeve after his paralysis.
He goes on to explain that, while we don’t want to believe that people react this way to misfortune and routinely believe that similar misfortunes would bring us undone, studies show that most people deal well with trauma and a significant portion state that their lives are enhanced by the experience.
He introduces the chapter with a bit of Hamlet, “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
I don’t buy it. People demand painkillers for a reason. People kill themselves for a reason. There are too many people too badly screwed up by trauma for me to buy claims that it’s no big deal.
And as for people saying they’ve “grown” or had their lives “enhanced” by suffering, that’s to be expected. The alternative is to be called a whiner or loser.
I’m reminded of that old bromide, “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle”. People are always saying that, and I’m always, WTF?! Of course he does! Every day people, even religious people, succumb to their realities (disease, abusive spouses, drug addiction, poverty, etc.). Really I think what people mean is, “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle…until he kills you.” Because this is true.
Right! For every person with an inspirational, “overcoming the odds” story, there’s another one laying in bed, crying out for sweet merciful death. And there’s a degree of luck involved in determining which type of “sufferer” an individual will be. Give any individual a strong support network and plenty of money and chances are they’d be able to weather any medical trauma with a smile, at least when the cameras are on them. But put that individual in a urine-soaked bed in a decrepit institution, with no visitors and no one to give them encouragement, and you’ll find an individual who just doesn’t want to live anymore. And who would blame them?
I’m willing to bet that most people with those “overcoming the odds” stories are not in the latter situation. They deserve props for surviving and overcoming, true, but they also have very good reasons to be grateful.
Easy for me. Hard for you. Because I find that entertaining.
ETA: Seriously, I’m kind of glad I had a brief period of homelessness in my life – but that’s because it was brief, and I wasn’t intractibly stuck in poverty.
Not very.
“What doesn’t kill you, brings you one step closer to the inevitable.”
Not warm and fuzzy, but more realistic.
That is exactly the point of the book. People “don’t buy” lots of things but have no idea what they are talking about, they believe that because they have all these “ideas” about the way things are and the way people think, that they have a completely factual grasp of reality. But they are wrong.
The fact that you can choose to use your own anecdotal generalizations as refution of actual research by professionals kind of proves the point.