That Life is a Struggle, Susceptible to Success and Failure

To those who would deny the reality of human volition and choice, I have but one thing to say, after the manner of a sound bite perhaps: we must make choices constantly in life, and have no choice about it. We must make choices, and every day must do so; we do not have the option of refusing to choose, and even the hard determinist must make choices, and cannot avoid them--though he denies that they are real.

Life is a trial and struggle, and many fail in this trial, many others succeeding. To delineate just what life constitutes success or failure would be too long a process; and the variations in just what constitutes success, what failure, are almost as variegated as human lives themselves. Suffice it to examine the nature of the struggle.

Life is a constant challenge; and just as we have no choice but must make choices, we have as little choice as to whether we shall engage the challenge. We must engage the struggle, and cannot refuse it; merely refusing to engage the struggle does not wipe out the need to struggle, but is rather a class of succumbing to hardship, and giving up--losing in the struggle.

There are many classes of failed lives--drug addicts who never get sober, career criminals who end up in prison, homeless alcoholics and so on. We are given a trial in this life, all of us with uneven luck, uneven health, unequal magnitudes of obstacles. Though for each and every man and woman life is a trial, susceptible to success or failure; yet the tools, abilities, luck, health, intelligence, and circumstances for all humans are widely varied and widely unequal. But the meaning of life--or its end and purpose--is to succeed, to have a successful life, to overcome life’s trial and win. I take this as a self-evident truth for anyone who has experience with life; I do not think it will be much contended. If life be not susceptible to either success or failure, what basis could there be for deciding all our choices; what ultimate criterion would there be in choosing this or that career path, education, and so on, if there were not really such a thing as a successful life, or a failed life? The problem of life--its meaning, if you like--is to succeed, to overcome, to meet the trial that is life, with what tools we have and what resources fall to our lot, and win. This is the problem of life, and life is a struggle; our task is to succeed, and avoid failure; this is the ultimate--most abstractly-stated--basis upon which we make our choices.

But again, the manifested successful life, the manifested failure at life, are both too variegated in nature to enumerate examples that can cover all classes of these, or a fraction of all. There are, too, endless gradations between what may be called a success or a failure; there are those with incredible success, those with abject failure; and every gradation between these. There is a completely fluid transformation from day to night too; but this does not mean there is no such thing as day or night, or any sensible distinction between them: certainly there is.

Suffice it to say that we are here to meet the trial that is life, and any tool that we can come across to aid us with its power, should and ought to be picked up and used for that purpose.