What's Tony Thinking

Is Life Harder Now?

I liked this from author/ cultural critic Freddie DeBoer at his Substack site. It is part of a review of new book on the declining fertility rate in developed countries, a.k.a. “the fertility crisis.”

After noting most of the reasons for declining fertility cited in the book, DeBoer wonders if the now common zeitgeist of “everything is so hard now” is part of the problem. Here’s De Boer:

I personally think that another influence lies in the bizarre modern ideology that insists that everything that people have always done is so much harder now, against all evidence. There’s this pervasive cultural attitude that everything is so. damn. hard. now, that human beings have never faced so much difficulty just getting by. This notion is bipartisan, though I do mostly associate it with left-of-center culture, which for the record is politically ruinous.

The reality is that it isn’t, actually, uniquely hard to live now, and if you are lucky enough to live as a healthy person in the middle class or above in the United States, you enjoy a life that 99.99% of human beings in history would look on with incredible envy.

Which is not to say that life isn’t hard; life is very hard, for big-picture reasons that I’ve laid out many times. It’s just that life was always hard. It’s hard to be a person. Our existence is a cosmic accident, our lives are outside of our own control, and we inevitably die, so of course life is hard. But it was always hard, and that which is hardest about being a human is that which never changes. There’s nothing special about now.

It’s just that a lot of people have made the bizarre choice to promulgate an elite culture in which everyone complains all the time about how hard everything is, to socially deleterious effect. (And, for the record, the only real escape from the hardships of life is to find the dignity to bear them without showy complaint, which is the opposite of what everyone is doing.)

Though I am not on board with “our existence is a cosmic accident,” I appreciate DeBoer’s thoughts here, especially the last bit, “. . . the only real escape from the hardships of life is to find the dignity to bear them without showy complaint, which is the opposite of what everyone is doing.”

I recall the famous opening sentence of Scott Peck’s 1978 best-seller, The Road Not Taken. “Life is difficult,” wrote Peck.

While I am basically on board with DeBoer that life is intrinsically hard, that “it’s hard to be a person,” and mortality is ever with us, I do wonder, and pose the question to you my readers: is life today harder in some way that is unique to our time? Or have we, as DeBoer puts it, simply fabricated “a bizarre modern ideology” in order to make ourselves feel special?

I’d love to hear from you on this one! Since I don’t do a comment thread with my blog, I’ll share responses that are, i.m.h.o., interesting/ insightful.

While DeBoer is right to say life is intrinsically hard, a couple things may be different now. One is that we don’t think life is supposed to be hard. It is supposed to be — and you are supposed to be — joyous, fun and happy all the time. If that’s your starting point, it’s no wonder things seem wrong.

I do think that life is more complex in our technological age than it probably was for much of human history. True, much of that technology brings benefits. But the promise of simplifying life through technology is mostly a life. What it does is increase our capacity, and  hence our expectations.

Moreover, life today is over-optioned. That is to say, we have too many choices. Somewhere the novelist Walker Percy mused that humans today have a thousand (was it a “million”?) choices, almost none of which really matter. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of returning from a country in the so-called less-developed world, and then going to a grocery store here. You stand stalled in aisle 8 paralyzed by over choice.

So I think that’s part of it. What do you think? Is life harder now, in some way uniquely more difficult? If so, what’s making it that way? Or with DeBoer, do we just need to suck it up?