I could react with fear, resentment, acceptance, apathy, or I could think about it philosophically.
Upon reading or hearing this statement, I imagine the person saying it to be some Gen X or Baby Booming fireman, police officer, football coach, doctor, lawyer, or recovering alcoholic who goes to AA meetings daily and has 20 years of sobriety. Somebody who's successful, has never considered suicide, has always been moral and affectionate and lusting for life and ends up as a heartwarming father with a wife and kids.
That's totally not necessarily true of somebody who says that, but sometimes I just get a kick out of painting a picture like that, heh. And I don't intend a negative connotation if that's how it came across. That person is just not me.
I'm also not disagreeing with the statement and I'd hate to be sarcastic. I submit to it just as I submit to science and the laws of nature. I don't understand why they have to be true, and maybe they don't. I think science is depressing and boring, but it just can't be refuted. Somebody just holds up some concrete "evidence" to your face from using their scientific method that something has been proven and if you deny it and are ignorant, then you just look like an idiot. I just say "whatever" and don't care to put up an argument, because what do I have, after all, but a baseless front, although I do think there is validity to my skepticism, SOMEHOW, there has to be...
So equate that with the whole "life is supposed to be hard" thing. It shouldn't be "supposed" to be anything. That's a damning slavery embedded into the threads of the universe, whatever the supposed inherent quality is.
Whatever the supposition, yes, it seems very evident that life is a struggle for everyone, except for the golden kid who gets excellent grades in school with little thought or effort, has excellent physical attributes, a great sex life, gets into Yale, never does drugs, etc, you get the picture. Or a kid whose parents are millionaires or royalty or whatever. Sure their lives have their nuisances, but I think, little more than that. A lot of people are like this in upper-middle class America.
I could expand on this a lot more but I'm in a bit of a rush so I'll just sum it up like this. NO. Life is hard for most people except the lucky products of golden societies and circumstance. Yeah they have to try hard in sports and school, but comparatively this struggle is nothing to a person of the working class, or to a much more severe degree the third world resource-deprived people, the mentally ill or products of a trashy environment or trashy parents. It's kind of just luck of the draw, apparently. In general positive energy and output returns the favor onto the hardworker or welldoer, kind of like the moral actions of "what comes around goes around" but not necessarily; that is not law.
I'll add onto this or even introduce a new perspective if I come back and something else comes to me, but there's my two cents for now.
