Through carefully crafted examples, [Setiya] makes the case that philosophy can help us navigate the adversities of human life: pain, loneliness, grief and so on. He, too, is trained in the splitting of hairs. But this is not primarily a book of argument. It is a reflection designed to offer us new ways of thinking about ordinary hardships ... Philosophy’s role here is not primarily analytical. We cannot be argued into coping with suffering. Instead, Setiya’s book is guided by an insight from Iris Murdoch: that philosophical progress often consists of finding new and better ways to describe some stretch of our experience ... And if the prescriptions sometimes seem a little pat, that is a danger inherent to the project. Setiya’s targets are the infirmities of human life in general, but many of the problems that bedevil us are as individual as we are. A philosophy that spoke to our idiosyncratic fears would amount to personalised healthcare. Setiya has his sights on something more fundamental: the problems that afflict us simply by virtue of being human. Any advice offered at such vertiginous levels of generality will always risk sounding platitudinous.

Setiya’s treatise belongs to a particular genre: brainy books for the general public that present lessons for modern living from Aristotle, Montaigne or the Stoics. Unlike with most of his predecessors, however, Setiya’s main goal is not to describe how things should be; in his view, given that there is much in life that makes us miserable, and that we can neither change nor ignore, we might as well find ways of dealing with the reality. Trying to live a perfect life in difficult circumstances, he states, 'only brings dismay' ... pushes back against many platitudes of contemporary American self-improvement culture ... Setiya’s liveliest writing is on the subject of infirmity, no doubt because of the chronic pain he has suffered for years ... Although Life Is Hard claims to be a work of accessible philosophy, many of its insights are borrowed from other areas — literature, journalism, disability studies...Setiya’s approach blends empathy with common sense ... Setiya offers neither simple takeaways nor explicit instructions. Instead, he invites the reader to join him as he looks at life’s challenges — loneliness, injustice, grief — and in turning them over to examine every angle. Sometimes these twists make it difficult to grasp his ultimate point ... Written in the first year and a half of the Covid-19 pandemic, Life Is Hard is a humane consolation for challenging times. Reading it is like speaking with a thoughtful friend who never tells you to cheer up, but, by offering gentle companionship and a change of perspective, makes you feel better anyway.

If life is hard, as Setiya posits in the title and introduction to this book, the following chapter headings do not seem to offer much reassurance: Infirmity, Loneliness, Grief, Failure, Injustice, and Absurdity. Readers who persist, though, will find the MIT philosophy professor’s engaging musings on the definitions and properties of these emotional, intellectual, and physiological conditions as defined by both ancient and contemporary philosophers and social commentators. Setiya pulls examples from literature, poetry, movies, comedy, religious tracts, and personal anecdotes to illustrate his points, managing to make abstract theories and arguments accessible ... Readers will find much to ponder.

Mr. Setiya’s path avoids the easy answers. He does not say that everything happens for a reason (it does not) or that virtue secures a good life (it might not) and certainly not that we can know the cosmos is guided by a loving, providential hand (we can not). Rather, the consolation he provides is 'a handbook of hardships,' a guide to navigating through life’s challenges. His analysis combines philosophical arguments and personal reflections on his own experience. He offers this in the hope that it will help readers better understand their own suffering and perhaps ease the weight of it. The result is a deeply personal exploration of six forms of human suffering—infirmity, loneliness, grief, failure, injustice and absurdity—with a final reflection on the one virtue he offers as necessary to navigate them all: hope ... One limitation of the book is that Mr. Setiya’s own life hasn’t been too hard. Unlike many philosophers before him, he’s never experienced the atrocities of war, been unjustly imprisoned, found himself caught up in political intrigues, buried a child, lived under the boot of a wicked tyrant, and so on. Rather, his hardships will be familiar to the members of his social class: He was a lonely but brainy kid; as a teenager he was unceremoniously dumped by a girlfriend; he suffers chronic but manageable pain; older loved ones have become sick or have died; and he’s had a midlife crisis. There is no high drama here, which may either exasperate readers or endear him to them ... His use of the great philosophers is decontextualized and somewhat scattershot; it often consists of not much more than a quotation or summary. The inevitable result is a loss of depth and, in some cases, caricatures of thinkers who surely deserve better treatment ... Perhaps that is no matter, since Mr. Setiya’s aim is to help his readers practice philosophy rather than to teach them the history of ideas. The ultimate test of the book, then, is whether it consoles. On this matter I think we’re likely to run up against the inevitable tensions between consolation and inspiration. The consolation Mr. Setiya offers is that, while life is hard, we can still live well, because living well isn’t a terribly demanding standard ... I confess that I find this deeply puzzling. Given the amount of injustice Mr. Setiya thinks exists, and given that he thinks fighting injustice is the only route to a meaningful life, you might expect that he would argue for heroic efforts and sacrifices. But we needn’t be heroes or saints in this vale of tears, he tells us. We can navigate the hardships of our lives without too much sacrifice and without beating ourselves up too much about what more we might have done ... While there is much I disagree with, I enjoyed Mr. Setiya’s book and hope it will find success. Any attempt by a philosopher to help us live well—not in spite of human suffering but in full acknowledgment of it—is a welcome respite from so many too-tidy philosophical theories of human well being. A more honest and humane treatment is long overdue, and even if they are not ultimately consoled, readers will surely find themselves more connected to their own humanity from reading and reflecting on this book.

... insightful ... The critical engagement with historical philosophers gives the impression of a lively debate, and Setiya excels at discerning which ideas speak to modern maladies and which don’t hold up. This thought-provoking treatise enlightens.