According to a study just released by scientists at Duke University, life is too hard. Authors of the twelve-hundred-page study were hesitant to single out any particular factors responsible for making life tough. A surprise, they say, is that they found so many.
Before the study was undertaken, researchers had assumed, by positive logic, that life could not be that bad. As the data accumulated, however, they provided incontrovertible proof that life is actually worse than most living things can stand. Human endurance equals just a tiny fraction of what it should be, given everything it must put up with. In a personal note in the afterword, researchers stated that, statistically speaking, life is “just too much,” and as yet they have no plausible theory how anyone gets through it at all.
Nine out of ten of the respondents, identified by just their first initials for the purpose of the study, stated that they would give up completely if they knew how. The remainder also didn’t see the point of going on any longer but still clung to a slight hope for something in the mail.
Why we were brought into the world in the first place only to suffer and die is an area of research in which much remains to be done. Like other problems thought impossible in the past, this one, too, will someday be solved. Then anybody afflicted with questions like “Why me?,” “What did I do to deserve this?,” “How did I get in this lousy mess?,” and so on could be given a prescription, maybe even through diagnostic services provided online. The possibilities are exciting.
At the same time, we must not underestimate our adversary, life itself. Uncomfortable even at good moments, difficult and unfair usually, and a complete nightmare much too often, life will stubbornly resist betterment, always finding new ways of being more than we can stand.

– Excerpted from a parody written by Ian Frazier originally published
in The New Yorker Magazine December, 2002.

Leave it to Jim to ask me a question nobody ever asked me….

Jim Blasingame is a charming man who hosts a wildly popular radio show for business people.  Unlike several radio hosts who interviewed me, Jim actually read the book and as a result had some great insights and questions including “Are the only wise people in your book women?”

Listen….

Look for more radio and TV interviews from my book tour in coming weeks.