“We have to imagine Sisyphus as a happy person,” this is how the famous essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” by the French philosopher Albert Camus (1913-1960) ends, in which he examines how to deal with what he calls the absurd. The absurd is – briefly and by no means exhaustively – the contradiction between people's desire for goodness, meaning, and the reality of life, which often lacks both. The concept therefore includes concrete negative events as well as abstract feelings of the meaninglessness of existence. According to Camus, the only way to deal with this is “revolution.” This term describes the mental attitude that derives comfort and even happiness from the fact that there is freedom in one's decision to accept what is given to him.
Camus is not the first author, and certainly not the last, to look to philosophy for a solution to dealing with the bad in the world. The spectrum ranges from texts that have had a lasting impact on Western thinking (such as Camus's essay mentioned above) to superficial guides along the lines of “becoming happy with ancient Stoicism.” Where does Kieran Setia's 'Life Is Hard' fit into the series? it is not easy to answer this question. The author, who teaches philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, assumes that the ideal life is unattainable, and that blind optimism only ignores the negatives. In this way, it dampens the feeling of compassion and the desire for change, both of which are necessary to improve one's life. Even here you get the impression that you are looking at a very American book. Because it explicitly contradicts the widespread advice literature out there, which often presents optimistic thinking as having no alternative and thus remaining superficial from a philosophical point of view.
Happy in the matrix?
Essentially, the author's goal is to convey that suffering must be allowed in order to enable growth and improvement. However, these plausible ideas are developed from premises that are not always fully understood. Setia puts forward the thesis that “being happy” and “living a good life” are not identical. He justifies this by referring to the situation of people in the classic science fiction film The Matrix (1999): they are in containers and serve as energy sources, while their consciousness lives in a simulation (the matrix of the title). There they can be theoretically happy, but not live an objectively good life, because their environment and everything they do is a simulation, a lie. However, it is not explained why a subjectively happy life in lies is less desirable than an unhappy life in reality.
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