Posted for Patrick Shannon 006

 Life is Hard Chapters 6&7 

As we all know, life can feel absurd at one time or another, it can almost feel like a cosmic joke without the punchline. In chapters 6 & 7 Kieran Setiya doesn't shy away from this feeling. In these two chapters in Life Is Hard he dives into two of what we can consider life's biggest existential challenges. One being the fear that our lives may be meaningless, and the search for something to grasp upon when things are falling apart in our day to day activities. 

In Chapter 6 Setiya is going to begin this with a deep question which one could answer in any way: Does anything really matter? One could answer that unless our actions are life changing that no nothing we do matters. But the counter argument to this is that just because the world may not see the good or the bad that we may do in our everyday life it does matter. The good that we do can positively affect the world in a way that we do not see instantly. 

A basic example of this is holding the door for someone. I like to think of it as, If one is to hold the door for someone then the person receiving this gratuity is more apt to hold the door for someone else later in the day. However, in a world that is so vast it is easy to come up with the answer that nothing we can do really matters in the vast universe we live in today. I'm sure everyone reading this has had a point in their life where they are sick of the daily routine that just never seems to end, the tragedy that one can endure in a lifetime, and the disappointment we have and will endure in our short lives. 

Setiya invites in the works of Albert Camus and Thomas Nagel and other like minded individuals to explore how we can respond to this. Absurdity does not cancel out the meaning of life, it just reveals how one can create absurdity. One does not receive a cosmic purpose handed to us but this does not mean that our values, relationships or our passions are any less real. Because lives are so fragile and finite, this is what makes our lives and every day we get to spend on the earth so important and not fragile.

After being in the military I do not think much of what I call the “civilian world” is absurd at all. I feel as if it is a place where anyone can succeed in life as apart from tragedy there are so many options that one can do to raise the spirits of their day. A fond example of when I thought life was absurd and also the people is when we would do these 10 to 20 kilometer hikes in the summer time out in the desert when my role was specifically to be in an armored truck. I thought to myself “in what world does this make sense, it is 100+ degrees outside and our main avenue of transportation was our trucks”. I would often call the commanding officers' style absurd as to me it made no sense as to why we would put all this physical strain on our bodies when we had trucks in which we got around in. Kieran Setiya defines absurdity differently than I picture it in my head but my young self in the military thought that some of the training we would do is beyond absurd when we are not utilizing the tools we were equipped with.

After confronting his thoughts on absurdity, Setiya will turn to hope. This is one that I often confuse with optimism. However, he looks into a deeper sturdier kind of hope, the kind that can occur even when things are not going in your favor. My struggle between the two and defining one from another come from this example. I was in the Marine Corps, I was in the infantry and oftentimes the conditions we worked, lived and just about did everything in were subpar. I remember being in Australia and Japan doing these major exercises where we would be living in

the jungle or “the bush” as Australians call it and just praying for weather to be good to us and overall things would be smooth sailing. People often asked me why my spirits were higher than the rest of the guys, I would often just respond with “I am just being optimistic”. However I believe that Setiya would call this being hopeful. Setiya argued that being hopeful is not about certainty, it is about refusing to give up on the possibility of change even in overwhelming scenarios. 

He drew from philosophy, history and even his own life and came to the conclusion that being hopeful is not a feeling, it is more so a way of life and that one needs to practice this in order to succeed at being hopeful even in uncertain circumstances. This offers us a way to live meaningfully despite the uncertainty which could be a test to one or like I have experienced it could be a training exercise, it is different for everyone. One may not associate negative feelings towards a test but could see going to the dentist more physically and mentally draining the test. Hope gives us the strength and the ability to live and to care even when life gets hard. 

To summarize these two chapters on hope and absurdity I see ways in which I can practice activities in my day to day life in order to achieve a more fulfilling experience. Setiya talks about how we can face absurdity in our day to day lives and how to conquer that feeling and make the most out of it. He later talks about hope and how one can be hopeful in life, not to focus on the negative aspects of things and compare them to the positive outlooks of a situation, just stay on the positive side. I think that we don't initially think that life is absurd, I think that with things that come up in our lives like with work or school these factors in our lives may lead us to think that some of the things we do in our daily activities tend to make us think they are absurd.