rhetorical question: "why is life so blinkin' HARD?!"

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no need to describe the particulars of a hard life, we all know what it is about. please philosophize/expound [IOW explain the whys] on this subject. I am guessing life is so blessed hard because we are supposed to learn something from the struggle just to survive. others here may have different opinions. the attached poll is a shortcut to expressing brief sample expoundings for those who don't want to have to spell it out.

I blame Adam and Eve.

there is a cost of living crisis. However happened before.

Oil crisis of 1973 was so impactful on cost of living I was old enough to remember my parents and other young families saving fuel and using buses and trains and neighbours relying on food parcels and church soup kitchens. I can still remember eating half boiled eggs for breakfast, vegemite sandwiches for lunch and canned spam every night for a whole year which my grandparents also had the exact same meals during food rationing in world war II in the 1940s.

So things are getting bad in 2026 (perhaps not as bad as 1940s or 1973) and now young people can't afford rent (let alone buying a house) and new challenges in a dwindling job market mean staying with parents to survive, cost of gas/fuel/electricity meaning ppl have no choice but switch off heating/cooling and food bills force living on boiled noodles. Melbourne Australia is one of the most expensive places to live on earth.

Read 'Straw Dogs' by John Gray. We're a layer of nature, not separate from it.

Boomers like to say we have it too easy and when we complain about things being too hard it's because we're too soft.

But didn't the Boomers want life to be easier for their children originally? Like, peace man, make love not war, ya dig?

Life is hard for two reasons. The first is that God made it that way for our benefit. After Adam and Even sinned, God made it difficult to grow crops. However, this was not difficult enough to stop humans from having every imagination of the heart only evil continuously. As a result after the flood, God changed our life expectancy to not be over 120 years. He also changed our genetics to make us vulnerable to diseases. He also changed our environment to have things like winter and drought. These difficulties were of such severity as to force us to need each other and set aside some of our selfishness.

The second reason life is hard is that we harm ourselves and others through our selfishness.

The bible calls the flesh our natural state

Gal 5:19  Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, 
Gal 5:20  Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, 
Gal 5:21  Envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God. 

Christians are supposed to grow in love (selflessness)

1Co 13:4  Love suffereth long, and is kind; love envieth not; love vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 
1Co 13:5  Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; 
1Co 13:6  Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; 
1Co 13:7  Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. 

Sadly, few Christians even know that growth and maturity are available much less try to follow it.

Life is hard because of the way society is organized.

There is no longer any intrinsic reason why life needs to be so hard. Thanks to a series of industrial revolutions plus farm mechanization, we no longer need the vast majority of people to work on farms. And worker productivity in general has gone way up.

Back in the old days, society's number-one problem was: There is so much work to be done! How will we get all this work done? To that end: slavery and serfdom.

Eventually the world graduated from slavery and serfdom to work-or-starve wage slavery.

And now, thanks to the advent of AI and robotics, there will likely be another huge leap in worker productivity.

We desperately need society to reorganize itself accordingly. The big problem now is finding jobs for everyone. Work-or-starve just doesn't make sense anymore, although work-for-a-nicer-life still does make sense.

(EDIT: Also, somehow, Western society needs to make it easier for people to find jobs. The current job market is extremely inefficient, at least from the worker's POV.)

Back in the old days, the solution to previous unemployment crises, caused by previous industrial revolutions (or by farmers having too many children), was to send people out to conquer foreign lands. In the U.S.A. it was: "Go west, young man!" -- to settle on land that had been freshly stolen from the indigenous Americans, and that the U.S. government then gave out, either for free or at very low prices, to settlers. Hence the U.S.A.'s traditional glorification of "frontier mentality."

Obviously it would be unethical to continue that pattern.

EDIT: Another variation of the conquest-for-profit pattern, from the U.S.A.'s point of view (although profit was not the primary motive in this case, despite the profitable result), was World War II. For about 25 years after WWII, the U.S.A. enjoyed a huge economic boom, thanks to the industrial near-monopoly we had, due to the entire rest of the industrialized world being almost completely smashed.

Obviously we shouldn't be trying to repeat that, either.

I think that it all comes down to the desire for the infinite in a finite world.

We have mountains of clothes. Most are made cheaply. We don't really need that much clothing. However, well made clothes that last a long time don't serve these companies well. You sell badly made clothes that don't last, well, that means you've got repeat customers in the future.

It gets to the point where clothes that were made ethically become too expensive for the average consumer. There's charity shops, sure, however you may have noticed they have raised their prices and sell overstock of fast-fashion. Granted, buying fast fashion in this way is better than it going straight to landfill.

People want cheap (although even designer stuff is often made in the same factory with a label thrown on it, let's be real) because employers want infinite profit. They'll have one person do the work of three and automate where they can. That's where they forget one very important detail. How do you earn next to infinite profit if no one's paying your potential customers enough to afford your product or service?

In the UK, there have been rises in the national minimum wage and this in turn has led to rises in all wages. Along with changes to taxation and employee rights, businesses have been less incentivised to take on new hires or post new job listings.

Unemployment is at an all-time high. As for the job listings that are posted, many are fake and all listings (regardless of what they are for) get so many applications due to everything being online. You want to work at the local corner shop? Great, so do two hundred other people. Good luck!

You end up fighting for gig work. Never having the job security that those who entered the game earlier than you like to harp on about. Which is exhausting. Entry level is removed. There's no clear career advancement anymore. Businesses wanted to save money. You're stuck. You never asked to be. Oh, but you're much too young to be bitter. Or maybe you're much too old for any of this to be a bother. Either way, you can't complain.

Sustainable industry (relating to waste, pollution and earth friendly products/services) combined with reducing consumption is not developing fast enough to keep up with our ballooning population. Mountains of waste (especially plastics and poisons) have found their way back to into our food, air and water.
While managing cost of living, cash flow, keeping one's head above water, we are all creating demand for products that will either kill us or pass on a toxic burden for future generations.
Fashionistas with giant wardrobes of clothes and shoes aren't cool anymore.