The School of Hard Knocks

Nobody likes hardship. A challenge or test can be enjoyable, but nobody in the world wishes for their life to be filled with suffering and misfortune. Humans are motivated by the quest to find happiness, to find fulfillment. The harm that comes from a life of hardship is contrary to that end, yet, at the same time, life will be full of hardships. There will be all kinds of things we’ll have to endure, unpleasantries we’ll have to experience, and burdens that we’ll have to carry.

I wrote an essay a while back about how life is a gift, an inherently good thing. This essay is a complement to that one. While the previous essay talked about how life gave one the ability to experience all kinds of good things, this one talks about the flip side: that life will be full of bad things we’ll have to endure to fully enjoy it as a whole.

There’s nothing wrong with people who suffer from misfortune. Having difficulty bearing life’s hardships is neither a symptom of mental illness nor punishment from God. It’s the human condition. All great religious, philosophical, and artistic traditions give us the wisdom to understand and live with life’s problems. It’s a shame that so many people are ignorant of them. Too many kids were and are being raised on toy commercials and digital Skinner boxes and thus deprived of these necessary tools.

Having this problem isn’t your fault, but it’s still a problem that can’t be solved simply by therapy. To experience tragedy, to get that feeling now and again that getting out of bed in the morning might not be worth the effort, is an intrinsic part of the human experience. If you give yourself an excuse to stay there, you’ll drown. You need something real, something that gives strength and hope. That’s more than what therapy can give you.

Nothing can “solve” the hardships of life, but you can learn to live with those problems.

People with autism or other disabilities face many of the same difficulties as everyone else. They might have a harder time dealing with those difficulties, but the struggles they face are the struggles you and I face. For example, we all struggle to eat right. Autistic kids tend to have very picky diets, and this can make eating healthier foods more difficult. Still, the same principles for living with this difficulty apply to them as they do to those without autism. The key is to push oneself out of complacence – out of bad eating habits – into trying new, healthy foods.

Sometimes, hardship is placed on us by the people we love for our good. Caring for someone means sometimes sacrificing niceness for tough love. People talk a lot about being “hateful” – hatefulness means wanting what’s bad for someone, wanting their destruction. If you are driving down the road and a friend came by to warn you that a bridge was out up ahead and that you were risking your life by continuing in that direction. Suppose that, for whatever reason, you insisted on driving down the road, determined to drive off that cliff. Would it be hateful for your friend to do his very best to prevent you from driving any further? Of course not. Wanting what’s best for someone cannot possibly be hateful. Rather, a “friend” that lets you drive off the cliff wouldn’t be a friend at all.

As the example with the friend driving up the road or the person with autism being pushed out of complacence, hardship can be redeemed for one’s benefit. There’s an old saying about how the School of Hard Knocks is the best teacher – that misfortune can humble us and lead us to the path of success and fulfillment. The way to live well is to learn from this school – a school that all the great prophets, philosophers, and poets all went to – to better understand the problems we face. Of course, they don’t always have an answer for how to solve these problems, as some of them don’t have a solution. They can, however, help us live happily despite the hardship. Maybe once we graduate from the School of Hard Knocks, the hardship won’t be so bad.