Life is Hard - By Kieran Setiya (Chapter 4) Mercy Adedokun

    

     Kieran Setiya wrote “Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way” to look into moral philosophy as a way of life. He urges us to live by the original meaning of philosophy, a love for wisdom. Setiya himself was born in England and moved to America to become a philosophy professor at MIT. Setiya believes that we should not write off or justify our suffering. Comforts like “everything will work out in the end,” or “everything happens for a reason,” can lead our suffering to stay unacknowledged. He argues that what we need for our suffering is acknowledgement.

    In chapter 4, Setiya focuses on the topic of failure and how it can define us as people. He discusses many famous examples of failure, in sports and in history. He discusses famous baseball players who would fumble a catch and then have their entire careers defined by their failure. Setiya explores historic examples of failure as well. In 1649, after the execution of King Charles, Gerrard Winstanley led a revolution of trenchant Diggers and proclaimed the “Earth the common treasury of all.” He had hoped that they could create a utopia without private property and that landlords would lose their serfs. Instead, the uprising was crushed by landlords, and the houses they built were burned down.

Life As Narrative

    We all tell ourselves a story about ourselves, and that can heavily influence the ways we act and the actions we take. “We become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives,” - Jerome Bruner.

    There are three elements of life as narrative: first, we are bound to “story” ourselves and present our lives as coherent narrative wholes. Secondly, we are told that a good life must form a coherent narrative. Lastly, we think that it must be one whose subject tells that narrative to himself.

    Setiya writes that society pushes us to want to tell our lives as a narrative. a “dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides.” To believe that your life is heading for a climax that it may not reach is to see it as a potential failure. To see life as a narrative means you either win or lose. The downside of squeezing your entire life into one narrative is that you let the outcome define you. We talk as if someone can be a failure, not as if failure is a single act in a lifetime of small successes and failures.

    Failure itself is incredibly luck-based. There are a million factors outside of our control that determine what happens and where. Perhaps the right people weren’t in the same room as you when you needed them. Maybe you ended up in the wrong place, leading to success or failure. There is so much more to your life than the story you tell yourself about it. A life can’t really succeed or fail at all; it can only be lived. - Joe Moran. By not defining our lives by singular moments or decisions, we are less likely to define ourselves as “losers” or “winners.”

    Setiya offers a counter to Life as Narrative, Nicholson Baker’s novella The Mezzanine, written about a single lunch hour, wherein the narrator goes on about the mundane and basically nothing. There is no life-altering change or intense dramatic arc. Yet, there is enough experience and richness in a single lunch hour to fill a book. If a single hour holds so much meaning, how can we define our entire lives into one coherent arc?

    Setiya clarifies that he doesn’t mean to not engage in long-term projects to better your life or give up your ambitions. Instead, he wants us to resist the urge to try and force our lives into one storyline. We are not successes or failures, and one moment of either does not change the course of our lives. Setiya’s logic reminds me of a different book, The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler. In that book, Schafler writes about measuring our lives in terms of goalposts. We tell ourselves that once we reach a certain desire, we will finally be happy or reach fulfillment in life. We believe once we graduate from college, get our dream job, family, or other desire, that we will be complete. However, when we do reach those goals, we won’t be fulfilled. We will find another goalpost to work towards and leave our happiness until after we reach that goal. Schafler suggests that the solution is to get rid of the goalposts and celebrate ourselves while we are still in the process.

Happiness and Telic Living

    Setiya mentions a quote that argues, “Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America, but when he was discovering it. The point is in life, in life alone—in discovering it, constantly and eternally, and not at all in the discovery itself!” Happiness is found in the doing, not the things being done.

    Setiya defines telic and atelic activities. Telic means an action with an endpoint, such as baking a cake, writing an essay, or lifting weights to achieve a certain body type. There is a time when you are baking the cake or writing, and there is a final project, such as the cake or essay. Atelic activities that have no end, and are done the moment you do them. Thinking is an atelic activity; if you are thinking of a dog, you have already thought of one. As well as listening to music, you don’t listen to music to stop listening, you listen because it’s beautiful. We often do telic and atelic activities at the same time. He brings up the example of a parent teaching their child to tie their shoelaces, which has an endpoint (hopefully the kid learns how to tie their shoes), but they are parenting at the same time (an action that has no end). Setiya says it doesn’t matter which one you are doing, but which one you value.

    Framing our happiness in life through telic activities actively ruins the happiness we experience. You aim to succeed and to end your engagement with something you value. He writes that it's “as though you’re trying to destroy a source of meaning in your life. If you value thinking and you are doing that, you have what you value right now. Nothing you have done, or will do, can ruin this.” He urges us to find meaning in the atelic activities we enjoy or find a telic activity that's adjacent to that.

    By valuing the process, we can add some insurance that we will get value out of our lives. There is no way to make yourself immune to failure, and the results of projects (like going to college) do matter. However, we can take back our happiness by making our failures less pivotal and making meaning when things don’t go as planned.

Economic Differences and Failure

    Lastly, Setiya touches on the economic implications of calling someone a “failure.” He discusses the invention of the credit report and how it came to define Americans more than “a bank balance or character reference.” Throughout the 19th century, we increasingly measured our self-worth by prosperity. Economic crashes caused spiritual collapse in people who had failed. “Deaths of despair” were committed overwhelmingly by white men because people saw themselves, not society, as a failure. This myth still prevails today, with people glorifying and idolizing billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

    Nowadays, investment in college and “human capital” seems like the only way through the 99% lose - 1% win economy. Setiya urges us to reform how we gauge human worth by productivity, because as long as we do that, some people will always end up as “failures.” Setiya acknowledges as social animals, we care about whether we are perceived as winners or losers to those around us. Setiya’s solution is not to leave society, but to change it.

All in all, get rid of your goalposts and find happiness in the doing. By valuing the process, you can lessen the impact of failure on your life.