Life will hurt you. This is what it means to be alive; selection pressures, the difficulties circumstance brings, have been intimately connected with who we are since the microbial days of yester-eon, and there is no reason to suppose ourselves exempt from this process. What we Have done, however, is develop a much faster strategy of dealing with such problems. Where nature from time immemorial has seen lifeforms change and reform in response to adversity, we humans have learned to adapt our circumstances to ourselves. It is the world that now learns to meet our demands, not the other way around. We haven't quite taken to calling ourselves gods, for after all who wants that kind of responsibility?, but have at least gone so far as to proclaim ourselves second only to a God.
This attitude promotes numerous problems on the very simple basis that it discourages addressing causes and encourages finding fixes. Each generation is born into a giant stew pot of social problems and expected to solve them without making any fundamental changes to the systems for which they Are problems; education will be improved by having better schools and better teachers(however that happens), not by considering how children learn; poverty can be addressed by giving things to its victims, not by considering how they come to be such.
Further, this strategy we are encouraged to pursue finds its way into our daily lives. Our health problems are the fault of the medical industrial complex not healing us sufficiently, rather than having anything to do with nutrition or lifestyle. Depression, dissatisfaction with one's life, is actually treated by chemically altering the brain rather than modifying the life; I cannot stress enough how amazing and disturbing I find this approach, tantamount to pleasing a dog by grabbing its tail & wagging it manually. Even our relationship problems become a matter of convincing the other to change for us. It has become commonplace to view problems as isolated events to be tackled like math problems, a job for this or that product or service to deal with, rather than as the logical consequences of our previous actions.
I cannot say at this point that one strategy is fundamentally superior to another; such a distinction hinges on the consequences of each, and I am not sufficiently educated as yet to make it, either with regard to social problems or individual ones. Though the history of the planet is rife with hardships which were best suffered by adapting to them, can't say that this is universally the case. I Can, however, note that one's ability to fix problems, to modify one's circumstances in response to adversity, declines with age in our society; old people are naturally less physically able, and in a world that identifies one as their job this translates into a loss of power. Sooner or later, we all find ourselves at the mercy of our circumstances, left with nothing and no one but ourselves to count on(if you're lucky and they aren't, the significant other you're counting on to save you from this will outlive you). The life you build will fall apart as surely as everything else, and in the end your only resource will be the person it has made you, the experience and lessons of hardship, triumph, and failure. If you endlessly demand that the world shield you from these lessons, you are in essence starving yourself of this resource.
