Life Is Hard, Is That Good?

Thinking philosophically about the answer

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them — Hamlet, Act III

Imagine a billion-dollar biotech company releasing a revolutionary new product called BetterLife3. To use the product, you have to enter a lab, meet with staff, sign a bunch of papers, and discuss what you want your ideal life experience to be. Then they put you in a permanent — yet controlled — coma. Multiple electrodes are plugged into your head, and your body is placed in a liquid tank in a huge room, along with hundreds of others stacked on shelves three stories high.

Once in the machine, you experience everything you ever dreamed of, always pleasurable, never painful. It might all feel real, but it’s a simulation. You never interact with the real world, but you won’t know that.

What if such a machine existed? Would you plug in?

This experience machine thought experiment was first devised by Robert Nozick in the 70s; I just modernized the setup. It’s meant to provoke philosophical debate about whether our well-being is entirely determined by pains and pleasures.

I tend to think that some motivations one would have to enter the machine might come from a place of pain or extreme unhappiness, similar reasons one would contemplate suicide. I’m sure it could also be motivated by a desire for constant pleasure or permanent bliss.

I asked MIT Professor of Philosophy Keiran Setya, and author of the book Life Is Hard, How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way, about all this. Keiran offered some food for thought as to why one might want to avoid plugging in, starting with defining what living well really means.

Happiness is not the same as living well.

Plugging into the experience box is over-optimizing for happiness, and “happiness” is subjective. I’m not saying don’t try to be happy, I do think it’s an unalienable right — but while placed in a box with machine-sourced streams of pain-free consciousness might create happy feelings, it’s not really living well IF it’s living at all.

When pondering the plug me in question, I wonder, without pain, can I really feel anything deeply meaningful or moving?

Would not a feeling of aliveness contain the bittersweet?

Pain and pleasure might be the yin and yang of a life well lived, two halves that complete the other.

Life generally is not a dichotomy. It’s not this …

It’s a totality containing everything, making up the whole, like this …

And it’s more than just interconnected; Heartache, for example, is the flip side of love, meaning you have loved or were loved, but that person or relationship is no longer. You experience one because of the experience of the other.

Without pain, can I really feel anything deeply meaningful or moving?

The depth of that sadness is likely in proportion to the size of the love lost.

One of the happiest and most likable people I know is someone who, in every memory and image I have when thinking of her, she is smiling. Her name is Mary Wetherby, and she has been dealing with Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis since age 12. I was going to say “suffering with,” but she probably wouldn’t want me to put it that way. Mary is a living version of the Mr. Glass character in the movie Unbreakable. Her bones are fragile; you cannot hug her too hard for fear of injury, and she’s in constant pain. Mary has had 13 surgeries (and counting), many to replace joints multiple times from top to bottom, including shoulder, elbow, knuckles, wrists, hips, and ankles.

Life for Mary is unquestionably hard but spend time with her and her family, and there will be laughter, there will be joy. After a while, you might even envy her life. She is no pollyanna by any stretch, but I’ve never, ever heard her complain about her condition or anything for that matter.

I don’t see Mary as some bulwark Stoic standing against her pain; she is somehow in relationship with it.

We should not at all idealize pain or hardship in any shape, way, or form; I just want to consider what it means to face the unchangeable and difficult givens of life.

Acknowledging the struggles we face and how to look at them philosophically is my discussion with Keiran on this podcast.

How do we live in the world as it is, not the world as we wish it would be?

There are no easy answers here, and maybe that’s the point. In his book, Keiren has a really great phrase, “the digressive amplitude of being alive.” Being alive IS oscillation; it’s up-down, backward-forward, and expecting anything different is a setup to suffer, adding to whatever hard thing one experiences.

If you were lucky enough to get a ticket to the ride called life, expect both the fun twists-turns as well as the occasional scary slow climbs and stomach-churning drops.

I really enjoyed talking with Keiren, and hope you enjoy listening.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bounce-conversations-with-larry-weeks/id1254440575