Life Is Hard

Have you ever felt that life’s inevitable struggles—pain, loneliness, loss, failure—are too heavy to make sense of? In Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, Kieran Setiya asks whether thinking deeply about hardship can make living through it more bearable. Drawing from personal experience and philosophical classics, he argues that philosophy isn’t just abstract theorizing—it’s a tool for compassion, clarity, and resilience. Setiya invites you to drop the self-help promise of living your “best life” and instead embrace the messiness of living a good-enough life, one that dignifies suffering rather than denying it.

Across seven chapters—covering infirmity, loneliness, grief, failure, injustice, absurdity, and hope—Setiya builds an honest map of the human condition. His message is simple but profound: life will be hard, but that hardness is not a mistake to be corrected—it’s the very texture of existence we must learn to face. Pain, fear, and grief are essential to loving truly and living ethically. Philosophy, in his hands, becomes a form of consolation, not a cure. It helps you attend carefully to life’s difficulties so they can be integrated, not erased.

Facing Life Without Illusions

Setiya begins by rejecting the philosophical and cultural obsession with the “ideal” life—perfect health, endless success, cheerful optimism. He exposes how thinkers from Aristotle to the Stoics focused on well-being without acknowledging “ill-being,” what philosopher Shelly Kagan calls the elements that make life go badly. Instead of striving for utopia or mastery over fate, Setiya advocates moral clarity and acknowledgment. The goal is not to rationalize suffering but to face it truthfully. Even Job’s anguish, he reminds us, was fully justified; the moral failure lay with those who explained it away.

Philosophy as Consolation, Not Escape

Setiya distinguishes philosophy’s speculative side from its therapeutic power. When he studied metaphysics as a young scholar, it served as an escape into abstraction; now, he sees philosophy as the artisanry of reasoning through moral difficulty. It doesn’t promise happiness—Nietzsche mocked such promises—but it does promise wisdom and compassion. Philosophy can teach you to “see” the moral world, in Iris Murdoch’s sense: to recognize others’ suffering as real. Rather than fixing life, it helps you stay inside its contradictions. “There’s no way out but through,” Setiya quotes Robert Frost.

Why Hardship Is a Moral Education

Setiya’s claim is radical: adversity isn’t just unavoidable—it’s educational. Acknowledging affliction deepens moral imagination. When we confront pain, grief, or injustice, we’re drawn out of denial toward empathy. We recognize the world as it truly is, riddled with imperfection yet still worth wanting. Living well means learning how to suffer wisely: not denying pain but choosing responses of truth, justice, and care.

This overview sets the stage for what follows. You’ll examine the philosophy of physical pain and disability, then the solitude of loneliness; you’ll trace the moral dimensions of grief and failure, and face existential questions of injustice and meaning. Finally, you’ll ask whether hope—Pandora’s last curse—can be trusted at all. Along the way, Setiya blends personal narrative (his chronic pain and his mother’s Alzheimer’s) with rigorous reasoning. Life Is Hard is not a manual for happiness—it’s a moral invitation to inhabit suffering as part of living well.

Setiya opens the book with the most fundamental hardship: the frailty of our bodies. At twenty-seven, he began suffering chronic pelvic pain—persistent, invisible, and isolating. Doctors failed to diagnose it; treatments didn’t help. His experience becomes a window into a universal vulnerability: the body’s tendency to malfunction. He contrasts his pain with the degenerative illnesses that struck his family—his mother’s Alzheimer’s, his wife’s BRCA2 gene risk, his mother-in-law’s ovarian cancer—to illustrate that sickness and disability are not personal aberrations but shared aspects of being human.

The Misconception of Disability

Drawing on modern disability theory (from Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and Elizabeth Barnes), Setiya dismantles the notion that physical disability automatically makes life worse. Disability, he writes, is often socially constructed: what harms people isn’t the malfunction itself but societal prejudice and poor accommodations. Abstractions about Aristotle’s “perfect life” perpetuate this misconception. When prejudice and barriers are removed, disabled lives can be equally fulfilling. Harriet McBryde Johnson—a wheelchair-bound lawyer who debated philosopher Peter Singer—embodied this truth, arguing that “there are too many variables” to claim the disabled are worse off. Her life, full of activism and joy, proves philosophy must listen to lived testimony.

Pain and the Meaning of Suffering

Setiya separates disability from pain. Pain, unlike lost capacity, resists adaptation—it seizes consciousness. Drawing on Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry, he challenges the idea that pain is beyond description. Pain represents the body in distress; its reality pulls you back into embodiment. To suffer is to remember that you are flesh, not a mind inhabiting a shell. Philosophers from Descartes to Merleau-Ponty felt this paradox: pain demolishes the fantasy of mind-body separation. Reflection cannot anesthetize pain, Setiya admits, but it can clarify its effects and create companionship. Acknowledgment becomes its own small consolation.

Solidarity in Suffering

Living with pain taught Setiya compassion. The separateness of persons—a staple of moral theory—dissolves when you understand that pain binds people through shared vulnerability. He compares the self-concern of chronic sufferers to empathy for others: both require imagination across separateness and time. Pain traps you in the present, as Drew Leder notes; its lessons are temporal humility and solidarity. This insight turns physical suffering into ethical knowledge. When you recognize that every passerby may be fighting unseen battles, you gain moral vision. Infirmity becomes not just hardship but apprenticeship in empathy.

Loneliness, for Setiya, is not simply being alone—it’s the pain of disconnection. He distinguishes solitude, which can be creative (as Anthony Storr celebrated), from loneliness, which corrodes. Revisiting his own childhood isolation and pandemic reflections, he situates loneliness in both personal and historical context—from the Romantic poets’ celebration of solitude to the modern epidemic measured by “Bowling Alone.” Yet he warns against simplistic narratives: social isolation has long existed, and its harms arise not from modernity alone but from humanity’s nature as social animals.

The Philosophy Behind Loneliness

Modern philosophy, he observes, is in part a quest to escape solipsism—the belief that only the self exists. Descartes began with the lone “I think, therefore I am”; later thinkers like Hegel and Wittgenstein insisted that the self depends on others. Our consciousness is social at its core. Yet this metaphysical dependence doesn’t erase emotional loneliness. True harm lies in being cut off from the reciprocity that confirms your dignity. Solitary confinement, for example, shows how deprivation of human contact can feel like torture. The self needs others to be real.

Why Friendship Matters

To understand loneliness, Setiya turns to Aristotle—history’s greatest theorist of friendship—and revises him. Aristotle claimed friendship is based on virtue; only the good can be loved for themselves. Setiya counters that love need not be meritocratic. Genuine friendship is unconditional: we cherish people not for their traits but for their sheer humanity. Drawing on Kant’s idea of dignity, he explains that friendship reveres the intrinsic worth of persons. Loneliness wounds because it deprives you of this recognition, leaving your value unrealized. Being friendless is not trivial absence; it’s a moral void.

Escaping Loneliness Through Attention

How do you escape chronic loneliness? Not through self-focus but through moral imagination. Studies by psychologists like John Cacioppo show that loneliness distorts perception, making others seem threatening. The way out is small acts of attention—greeting a stranger, volunteering, truly listening. Setiya shares how interviewing philosophers on his podcast became his cure: by asking sincerely about their fears and stories, he learned intimacy through listening. Friendship begins not with shared interests but with acknowledging another’s reality. Compassion and respect, he writes, are melodies sung in the same key.

Where loneliness craves presence, grief confronts absence. Setiya treats grief not as pathology but as moral intelligence—proof that we love. Drawing from Joan Didion, Roland Barthes, and Annie Ernaux, he shows how mourning resists rational control. It’s a process, not a state; its oscillations mirror love’s evolution. We grieve three things at once: fractured relationships, the harm death inflicts on the dead, and the sheer loss of life itself. To grieve well, he insists, is to sustain love on new terms—not by forgetting but by transforming connection.

Against Stoic Detachment

Ancient Stoics like Epictetus advised accepting death coolly: “If you kiss your child, remember it’s a human being that may die.” Setiya calls this perverse. Quelling grief by extinguishing attachment diminishes love. We should not pretend that lost things aren’t worth having (Virginia Woolf’s warning). Living well includes the pain of loss; unhappiness, paradoxically, is part of moral maturity. Stoic serenity risks becoming moral blindness.

Continuing Bonds With the Dead

Drawing on philosopher Samuel Scheffler, Setiya explains “archived relationships” with the dead: love persists even after death, demanding respect and memory. Julian Barnes writing to his late wife—“I talk to her constantly”—embodies this continued relation. Mourning navigates two errors: denying the death and abandoning the bond. True grief accepts change without betrayal. Rituals of mourning—religious or secular—help transform the chaos of feeling into practices of reverence. From Jewish shiva to Zoom memorials during Covid, such rituals let communities “map the terrain of grief.”

Why Grief Never Ends—and Shouldn’t

Setiya wrestles with a philosophical puzzle: if death is permanent, shouldn’t grief be endless? Yet most people recover. This doesn’t mean we loved less—it means grief evolves like love. Feelings follow not just reasons but time; mourning completes an emotional process even when facts stay fixed. That process, though painful, affirms the dignity of the lost. “If we did not grieve,” he writes, “we would not love.”

Setiya insists that failure is universal—and often instructive. Through stories ranging from baseball’s Ralph Branca to Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, he explores how failure illuminates our obsession with narrative success. Our culture divides winners and losers, teaching us that a good life must “add up.” He exposes this belief as a moral and existential mistake: coherence is not necessary for meaning. You can live well even if your life looks chaotic, incomplete, or imperfect.

Life Beyond the Dramatic Arc

Modern self-help and psychology often assume we must construct life as a linear story with triumphs and resolutions (as argued by Alasdair MacIntyre or Oliver Sacks). Setiya counters with examples of lives that resist narrative—philosopher Galen Strawson, writer Iris Murdoch, and baseball innovator Bill Veeck—all lived richly without grand coherence. He celebrates digressive, meandering forms of life, citing Nicholson Baker’s novel The Mezzanine where an entire story unfolds on an escalator ride. Meaning, he argues, lives in detail, not destination.

Process Over Projects

Drawing on Aristotle and the Bhagavad Gita, Setiya distinguishes telic (goal-oriented) from atelic (process-oriented) activities. Building a house ends when the goal is met; thinking, conversing, or learning are inexhaustible. To live well, you must rediscover the atelic value of living—doing something for its own sake. Prince Myshkin in The Idiot exemplifies this. Though his actions often fail, he lives beautifully by caring in each moment. Projects end; processes remain. Focusing only on terminal goals sets you up for despair when perfection stays out of reach.

Making Peace With Imperfection

The moral heart of this chapter is humility. Failure should make you less self-absorbed, not more ashamed. Everyone is a partial story, full of contradictions and blind spots. Accepting that truth frees you. Life’s meaning isn’t in winning—Joe Moran reminds us that “a life can’t really succeed or fail at all; it can only be lived.” To reject perfectionism is to reclaim presence and gentleness toward yourself.

Setiya moves from personal affliction to collective suffering, examining global and structural injustice. Reading headlines about Covid, climate catastrophe, and inequality triggers “doomscrolling”—a paralysis familiar to us all. Philosophy’s task, he writes, is not abstract proof but moral attention: learning to read the world as Simone Weil prescribed. Justice begins by seeing suffering clearly, without denial.

Seeing Others as Real

Through Weil and Iris Murdoch, Setiya explains that moral life starts with vision. Compassion derives from perceiving that “something other than oneself is real.” Like Melville’s lawyer trying to describe the inscrutable Bartleby, ethical attention means struggling honestly to represent others’ pain in words. Philosophical reasoning can follow, but empathy comes first. Affliction demands acknowledgment before action.

From Attention to Action

Setiya critiques Plato’s utopian idealism and argues for “non-ideal theory”: philosophy must diagnose injustice in the real world, not imagine perfect societies. Citing Critical Theorists like Theodor Adorno and Iris Marion Young, he stresses structural responsibility—our duties as participants and beneficiaries of unjust systems. Buying a home in wealthy Brookline, he notes, implicates him in unfair educational structures. Responsibility doesn’t mean guilt but obligation to reform what we uphold.

The Courage to Do Something

Working with students at MIT, Setiya describes his involvement in Fossil Free MIT, a movement urging divestment from fossil fuels. Though small in scale, such activism concretizes moral responsibility. Quoting Adorno’s bleak maxim—“wrong life cannot be lived rightly”—he reframes it as challenge, not excuse. We may never do enough, but one step toward justice counts. Hope, guilt, and humility intertwine: progress depends on our willingness to act despite imperfection. As philosopher Richard Hugo said, “You have a right to your life”—and to your efforts.

In the book’s most sweeping chapter, Setiya confronts existential absurdity—the sense that life’s vastness and pain make it meaningless. He traces this feeling from Sartre’s tree-trunk anxiety to Camus’s defiant Sisyphus, showing that absurdity arises when our craving for reason meets the universe’s silence. The modern question “What is the meaning of life?” only emerged in the nineteenth century, he observes—it’s a symptom of lost religious certainty.

Understanding “Meaning”

For Setiya, “meaning” isn’t linguistic or functional—it’s significance: a truth that tells us how to feel about existence. Religion once offered that truth through metaphysics; now we must find it ourselves. The question persists because we suffer and want reconciliation. Drawing on William James and Albert Einstein, Setiya suggests the meaning of life lies in our total reaction to the cosmos—in how we face suffering, injustice, and love’s limits.

Human Extinction and Collective Meaning

To probe meaning, Setiya imagines the infertility apocalypse of P. D. James’s Children of Men. If humanity were sterile, would our pleasures lose purpose? Samuel Scheffler’s concept of the “collective afterlife” answers yes: value depends on faith in human continuity. Yet Setiya finds resilience even in extinction. Art, love, and justice have immediate value; the final generation could still live well, mourn, and create. Meaning isn’t cosmic immortality—it’s ethical progress.

Justice as the Meaning of Life

For Setiya, “the truth that tells us how to feel” is justice itself. The moral arc of history is our collective afterlife. Borrowing from Hegel, Marx, and the theologian John Bowker, he argues that the hunger for cosmic fairness underlies religion and secular ethics alike. Our task isn’t to find transcendence but to bend history toward justice—to give coherence to human suffering through moral repair. Climate change, he warns, threatens that meaning entirely; it could end not in absurdity but in shame. Action now is no longer optional—it’s existential.

Setiya ends where philosophy and emotion converge: with hope. Quoting Diogenes calling hope “the most precious thing,” he reexamines Pandora’s jar, where hope is both curse and consolation. Why? Because hope both sustains and deceives. It can motivate action, but it can also anesthetize effort or breed greater sorrow when dashed. To live well, we must practice hope judiciously—as a virtue, not a drug.

The Double Nature of Hope

Hope fuses desire and belief: you want something and treat its possibility as real but uncertain. It’s passive when you only wish; active when it empowers action. Rebecca Solnit reminds us that hope is not a lottery ticket—it’s the permission to act for change. Yet, as Setiya notes, what truly drives activism is not hope but anger, grief, and fear. Hope clears space for those emotions to work. It is motivation’s spark, not its fire.

Hope as Virtue

Drawing from Thomas Aquinas, Setiya treats hope as a moral virtue—a mean between despair and delusion. Being hopeful means envisioning possibilities without lying to yourself. Excess hope denies reality; hopelessness denies possibility. Hopefulness demands courage to face risk without denial. Rebecca Solnit’s history of real-world change—from the fall of apartheid to the rise of Black Lives Matter—shows this virtue in practice: belief in possibility grounded in evidence.

The Horizon of Human Hope

Hope has limits: death ends individual possibility. But humanity itself still harbors hope. We can hope for justice, for a livable planet, for truth illuminated by new concepts, as Iris Murdoch envisioned. Climate action exemplifies “radical hope” (Jonathan Lear): faith in goodness we can’t yet imagine. Setiya closes with Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, where the chorus pleads, “History says, Don’t hope on this side of the grave… But once in a lifetime / the longed-for tidal wave of justice can rise up.” Hope and history may not rhyme—but through action, philosophy, and empathy, we can make them sound closer.