Life is short and life is hard. Such is the message of two illuminating new books, both offering intellectual tools to fortify us amid the onslaught of life. In Life Is Short Dean Rickles aims to provide a panacea for those facing death anxiety. In Life Is Hard Kieran Setiya offers strategies to combat infirmity, loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, absurdity and hope.
Rickles’s short book begins with Seneca’s essay “On the Shortness of Life” (around AD55). The average life-span in our time is far greater than it was in Seneca’s. But Rickles’s frustration is that “life is still too damn short”. In the first few chapters he explores why some people feel exasperated over the shortness of life and how to alleviate that vexation.
One piece of advice is to stop wasting time on frivolities. Seneca argued that time is supremely precious, even more so than money. You can lose and make money, but time can never be clawed back. Not without a touch of condescension, Rickles agrees with Seneca: “Years of a ‘Millennial’s’ or ‘Zoomer’s’ lifespan are spent idling on [social media] platforms, concerned more with how they appear than how they are, never giving themselves space to properly think – true even of a good deal of my academic colleagues, I might add!” The author has escaped the trap: “I ditched all social media for this reason, and felt better almost immediately”.
In another consolation Rickles attempts to combat the feeling that “Death anxiety is the ultimate FOMO”. In The Makropulos Case by Karel Čapek, the protagonist, Elina, drinks an immortality potion. She lives for 342 years. To extend her life she must drink more potion, but she decides against it. Without the horizon of death her life devolves into meaninglessness. Rickles isn’t convinced: “342 years seems unnecessarily brief to me”. With more time he would read more books, learn new languages and practise unicycling. But unless our memory capacities change drastically with longer lives, an immortal life would look like a series of normal lives: we wouldn’t remember much of the past. Some might find relief in knowing that life “is more or less the length it needs to be to hold together in a meaningful way”.
Still another consolation is that it’s good that the world in which we are participating will outlive us. Rickles likens life to a sandcastle: “We build a grand structure on the beach, lovingly carving moats and so on, and we would like it to continue. We get rather disappointed when it is taken by the sea or, worse, is destroyed by other beachgoers”. Knowing that others will continue to build and preserve the sandcastle of humanity after our death means that being human and doing human things are worthwhile.
The middle chapters of the book analyse what the author calls the “disease of time”. Diseases of time – our biases towards prioritizing our present selves over future selves – prevent us from living well. Rickles argues that our “temporal myopia” lubricates our overindulgence in present pleasures such as eating chocolate on the sofa or watching “a monkey riding backwards on a pig on YouTube”.
“Disconnectedness” from the future self – who will have to deal with the consequences of our current self’s actions or inactions – means that people often become “the architects of their own suffering”. This seems right, but at times the author overgeneralizes. Rickles ventures into problematic territory when he conflates slimness with happiness and wellbeing: “if one actually saw how eating healthily would create a slimmer, happier, more active future you, then you would be far more likely to eat healthily right now. It is the deferment of the outcome that is the problem, the delay in gratification (the slimmer, happier you)”.
He is also right to note that our individual actions have a collective impact. He argues that prioritizing cheap and dirty fuel, or “not being bothered to recycle or use birth control”, creates “climate and population crises”, impoverishing our future health. However, he doesn’t account for governing structures that prevent people from accessing birth control, recycling facilities, clean transport options or fresh and healthy food.
To the author’s credit he acknowledges that it’s also problematic to overvalue one’s future self. In a touchingly human passagehe discusses how, as a child, he would practise piano until his fingers split open. Later, in pursuit of becoming a thinker, “I would put a chair on my mattress and read nonstop for several days without sleep (with a five-day record, at which point I was having hallucinations and waking dreams bordering on schizophrenia), rocking the chair to keep myself awake, in a room peppered with notes telling myself to ‘work more now!’”. Rickles reflects: “he went rather overboard, that guy!”.
The final chapters unpack existential antidotes to the disease of time. Rickles likens life to a tree. To choose is “to prune the branches of one’s future”, cutting off some possibilities so that others can flourish. He calls the venture of conscious pruning “Project Me”. Project Me is about taking responsibility for your life as your own authentic creation: “a kind of malleable sculpture (an opus, or a topiary project if the pruning metaphor works better for you) that you must carve away at right now in the correct way to get the results you desire”.
For the “correct way” to prune, Rickles turns to Carl Jung’s concept of “individuation”. Individuation is the process of becoming whole by realizing that human existence is a question that each of us must answer. Part of this questioning involves dredging our unconscious to expose our rotting branches of fear, trauma and ignorance. This process is important because, “if you are making decisions so powerful as to eliminate entire futures from the universe, then you had better know what forces are guiding this process! You should know if it is really you calling the shots”.
In order to kick-start the process of individuation, Rickles recommends looking at an online “death timer” to see how many days you might have left to “create a real life you can be proud of”. Death, he concludes, “is itself the source of life’s meaning, calling us to really live, to force us to think about what kind of life we want, about who we are, to know ourselves and act in the world accordingly, careful in how we create its future”.
Rickles assumes that most people want much longer lives: “I want more, and so, probably, do you, at least if the many supposedly life-extending supplements are anything to go by”. Yet supplement sales aren’t a reliable indicator. If surveys are anything to go by, a Pew Research study in 2013 found that only 9 per cent of people want to live more than 100 years and men are more interested in dramatically extending their lives than women. It’s unclear why more men than women lust for immortality. Perhaps the world is kinder to men – or at least those with a level of privilege that makes them comfortable enough to see great value in longevity. For a person living with chronic pain, for example, an eternity of suffering might seem like hell. Kieran Setiya’s Life Is Hard appeals to those who suffer in more ways than being aware of their mortality.
Setiya opens with the claim that “Life, friends, is hard – and we must say so. It’s harder for some than it is for others”. He substitutes goadings of positive thinking with “the patient work of consolation”. Imagine you go to a friend with a problem. The friend tells you: “Don’t worry; it will all be fine!”. Why does positivity not console? Setiya’s answer is that such a response disavows your concerns: “Worse than denial, even, is the urge to justify human suffering. ‘Everything happens for a reason’ – except, of course, it doesn’t”.
Mystical justifications for hardships are an appeal to “theodicy”. When something bad happens, we want to believe that something good will come of it. But Setiya argues that theodicy is intellectually and ethically mistaken: “It’s wrong to justify your own or others’ suffering, to mute pity or protest in that way”.
The Book of Job is about theodicy. Job was a God-fearing “man of perfect integrity”. In order to test his faith, God let Satan kill Job’s children, take away his possessions and cover him with sores. People assumed that he must have deserved it. Later God gave Job double his original wealth and children. Setiya argues that such a “theodicy falls flat. It’s a travesty to think replacements could atone for the loss of Job’s first children”. He didn’t deserve that fate. Human suffering is ubiquitous, but, like Job, “we don’t deserve to suffer as we do”.
The first hardship Setiya addresses is infirmity. He shares his own searing struggle with inexplicable chronic pain, his mother-in-law’s ovarian cancer and his wife’s dermoid ovarian cyst, which is “the kind of cyst that can grow teeth and hair”. How can philosophy help us to cope with such malfunctions? The author argues that we should resist Aristotelian illusions of eudaimonia – a flourishing life – and instead settle for a good-enough life.
Setiya navigates a particularly challenging path to argue that “physical disabilities don’t, as a rule, prevent us from living well”. He cites examples such as Harriet McBryde Johnson, a lawyer and disability activist with muscular dystrophy. In 2002she debated Peter Singer, who argued for euthanizing babies with muscular dystrophy. Johnson countered that people with disabilities are not substantially worse off than people without them because, in Setiya’s words, “There is too much diversity, too much contingency, in the prospects for living well”. But social policies that make work, education and socializing accessible are essential to living well with disabilities.
For those struggling with infirmities Setiya offers a few truths: “suffering can be a source of solidarity” because compassion for ourselves can extend to others; focusing on the present takes away some of pain’s power over our future; and life without pain isn’t that great. “You are missing less than you think”, Setiya advises, while realizing that such truths may not comfort all.
How might we best cope with loneliness? While being alone is sometimes essential and joyful, loneliness is “the pain of social disconnection”. Solitary confinement and friendlessness are brutal because we are social beings, mutually dependent. To feel less lonely, Setiya recommends paying attention to others, sharing “sympathy and moral outrage”, and learning to listen. Starting a podcast, in which he asked others questions about themselves and ideas, helped him to feel less lonely.
How might we cope with grief? For Setiya the “goal is to grieve well, not to extinguish grief”. To grieve well it’s important to know that it is rational to grieve over loss. “Grief is not weakness but a token of persisting love.” You grieve because you love, and loving is part of living well.
How do we live with failure? Start with knowing that failure is not an identity. Even the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, whose life is full of fiascos, isn’t defined by failure: “He is defined instead by his refusal to condemn the despised, his unerring modesty and truthfulness, his generosity, his will to believe and expect the best of others”. That’s what makes even a tough life worth living.
How do we live well amid injustice? Given the relentless cacophony of horror, including mass shootings, wars and pandemics, it’s understandable that some people try to ignore what’s going on. They think: “If I cannot save the world, maybe I should save myself”. The problem with pursuing individual happiness at the expense of justice is that “happiness is not the only thing worth wanting”. Living well is worth wanting. And living well means being connected to and caring about other people.
While Rickles proposes that the continuation of humanity after our death is important so that our lives aren’t reduced to sandcastles that wash away with the next tide, Setiya proposes that it would be a travesty if we were to end human history on a sour note: “What would be terrible is for human history to end – a history of prejudice, slavery, misogyny, colonial violence, war, oppression, and inequality, along with fitful progress – with our potential so far from being realized”. We can’t change the past, but we can improve our future. Human life may not have inherent meaning, but Setiya suggests “its meaning could be to limp slowly, painfully, contingently toward a justice that repairs, so far as it can, the atrocities of the past”. The author urges us to start small. Pick one issue. Join one group. Setiya helped to organize a faculty protest against MIT’s fossil-fuel investments. MIT has not (yet) divested, but an action such as protesting “adds its fraction to the odds of change”.
But let’s not only hope that the future will be better. Setiya concludes with a warning: hope is dangerous. To act we need to hope that we will succeed; but if we fail we risk despair. Without action hope flounders as wishful thinking. We must find balance: “To hope well is to be realistic about probabilities, not to succumb to wishful thinking or be cowed by fear; it is to hold possibilities open when you should”. This is the underlying message of the book: don’t hope for an ideal life: actively seek possibilities to live well amid inexorable hardship.
Both authors blend philosophical ideas, stories and personal examples to show how philosophy can guide us through some of life’s toughest challenges. Some readers will bristle at Rickles’s proclivity for moralizing examples such as his rant about Anaïs Nin, who, he suggests, succumbed to the “disease of time” because she “lived parasitically on her husband” and had a “large collection of men”. Other readers might feel overwhelmed by Setiya’s tendency to name-drop philosophers in rapid-fire succession.
Yet since none of us will escape death, illness, loneliness, grief or failure, both books are bound to be ameliorative for any member of the human species. Philosophy isn’t an antidote to suffering, but it can help us to understand our mortal limitations and trials, and bring our attention to sources of solace and compassion. “There’s no cure for the human condition”, Kieran Setiya writes, but philosophy can indeed help us make “the best of a bad lot”.
Skye Cleary’s latest book is How to Be You: Simone de Beauvoir and the art of authentic living, 2022
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