Life Is Hard For A Reason. A Good Reason. Plus Hot Chicks.

“Life’s short and hard like a bodybuilding elf.” – Bloodhound Gang

Regardless, the people at his funeral will be called Paul-bearers.

I bought the book Dune by Frank Herbert when I was a kid.  I still recall buying it as it was on one of the monthly trips we took to the book store when we ventured off of Mount Wilder.  Ma Wilder was horribly indulgent when it came to books or other healthy creative outlets, like model kits.  Books had an unlimited budget around the house, and she never particularly cared which books, as long as I was reading them.  As such, at two or three novels a week from age 10 to 16, I read a lot.

I still do.

Dune was one of those.  I read it before I started driving.  I remember reading it in the time after finishing mowing Grandma Wilder’s lawn and before I was picked on a beautiful summer day decades ago.  One thing that struck me is the description in the book of the planet Salusa Secundus.  As a kid I mentally pronounced it “Salsa” Secundus, and, well, it is a pretty spicy planet.

I was told to bring an extra jar of liquid cheese, in queso-emergency.

In Herbert’s description, Salusa Secundus was a hell world, horrible weather, murderous beasts, extreme temperatures, awful terrain.  It was also the Emperor’s prison where he tossed away the worst criminals of his interstellar empire.  “ . . . the mortality rate among new prisoners is higher than sixty percent.”

Yet, here was where the Emperor got his fanatical and tough warriors, the feared Hardeharhar.  Oops, different book.  I mean the Sardaukar®.

Why there?  Well, if you could survive there, you could survive on any planet that a man could live on.  And if you could make it though the gauntlet of prisoners trying to kill you, congratulations, you survived the initiation process.

The guards at Big Ben in London look tired!  I guess they’re working around the clock.

The idea isn’t a new one.  The Spartans had a similar story, as retold by Plutarch, who, despite his name, was not Mickey Mouse’s™ dog:

Another boy . . . when some of his companions had stolen a young fox and delivered it to him . . . hid it under his gown; and though the angry little beast bit through his side to his very guts, he endured it quietly, that he might not be discovered.  When the searchers were gone . . . [his friends] chid him roundly, saying, ‘It had been better to produce the fox, than thus to conceal him by losing your own life.’  ‘No, no!’ said he, smiling, ‘it is better to die than to be detected in a base attempt at theft.’

Our teacher told us this story when I was in second grade.  Yes.  They told it in a somewhat different variation, but they were telling it to seven-year-olds.  No trigger warning.  No safe space.  Just a story about a kid who was so tough that he’d let a fox eat his intestines rather than show weakness.

I think I have an idea where Herbert took his inspiration for the Hardeharhar from.

But at the Best Buy© in Athens you can get advice from the Greek Squad©.

This is a story that resonates, and the deeper it resonates the truer it is.  We don’t become strong by being bathed in rose water and sleeping on satin sheets and eating our fill of lemon-cream PEZ© every day, and sailors don’t become captains on calm seas.

We don’t become emotionally strong by never facing hardship.

We don’t become physically strong by sitting on a couch.

We don’t live lives of purpose without getting bruised.  Any thing of purpose and worth that one might do will be opposed.  Period.  Either the odds are against it, the gods are against it, or other people are against it.  Sometimes all three.

These are the good fights, if founded in the True, Beautiful and Good.  These are the things that are worth the time and effort and pain.  These are the things that my scar tissue prepared me for.  A life that is based on something that Epictetus said:

Don’t you understand that amounts to saying that I would so prepare myself to endure, and then let anything happen that will happen?

An Epic Cow is really Legend Dairy.

That’s a strong statement.  And in a life filled with challenges, it’s hard to understand sometimes why we faced the challenges we did, why we have the scars and bruises that we do.  I think it’s because if they didn’t break us and they made us better prepared.  Yeah, even Nietzsche was right a time or two, if you include his magnificent mustache.

What then, does this leave us with?

We have today.  We have this moment.  We have the amazing gift that we can do anything we wish to right now.  We can make vows to change the world, we can dedicate (or rededicate) ourselves to fighting for what we know is True, Beautiful, and Good.

And that’s why we’re here.  We’re not here for comfort.  We’re not here for leisure.  We’re not here for quiet.  A quiet universe is a dead universe.  A universe without conflict is a dead universe.  A universe without purpose is a dead universe.

How much mass is in the universe?  All of it.

We do not live in a dead universe.  We’re breathing, fighting, aberrations, statistical flukes and inconvenient, stubborn fools fighting against entropy and common sense.  We see the world and keep going, because, deep down, we have our choices, our reasoned choices that allow us to get up to fight another day.

Or give up.

Me?  I choose to keep going, come what may.

Besides, now I’m hungry and am looking for chips and salsa.

Extra spicy.  I think I’m ready.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

42 thoughts on “Life Is Hard For A Reason. A Good Reason. Plus Hot Chicks.”

  1. ….and eating our fill of lemon-cream PEZ©

    Wait, you aren’t going to provide any more details on this???? Does such a magical candy flavor truly exist?

  2. Despite reading massive quantities of books as soon as I learned how to, I somehow didn’t get around to Dune until 2014 – when I was in my mid ’50s and had made the journey from liberal to patriot to genuine conservative to hard right ethnonationalist. While I enjoyed it, it didn’t/doesn’t resonate with my life the way it seems to for men – and that makes absolute sense. My husband and I were talking about the same issue of purpose and life challenges the other day – although the Bible tell us we were sent out of Eden and would have to work and suffer to live due to sin, I cannot imagine God intended Paradise to be a life of endless ease and comfort and purposelessness (other than to worship him). He made man in his image and gave him free will to be more than a rote acolyte. And that brought to mind the movie Wall-E (at least as I remember one of my sons telling me about after he saw it) and humans becoming obese, lazy, purposeless slobs with robots to do everything for them.

    I’m not a total luddite, but I am definitely techno-skeptic. In many ways the old, traditional ways became such because the other ways created chaos and entropy. My older son is definitely one who was meant to born in the age of piracy or exploration, and modern life has very limited places for such men.

    1. Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The knowledge of good and evil is called a “conscience”. Before Adam and Eve had a conscience, they were animals. The character who stole knowledge from God and gave it to man, so he could become man instead of being an animal, should be called “Prometheus”.

  3. I got great inspiration from what my wife would later call “sea trouble” books. Capsized, sunk, stranded, storms in ’round the world races, etc. It shamed me into not being a pussy when I wanted to quit my truck driving job during blizzards and such.

    The book/movie Papillon and the movie The Way Back are two great “don’t be such a pussy” inspirations.

    1. Yes. I need to re-watch Papillon. Hadn’t heard of The Way Back, That one looks very good.

    1. I still have my copy from 1972. I reread it a few weeks ago. The movies always leave out the most interesting character Count Fenring. He could have taken Paul out but decided not to.

  5. Also actually useful from Knee-Chi: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Which is part of the reason young people today seem so soft. Their why was stolen.

    An interesting related book: The Worthing Saga – X thousand years in the future, a race of powerful psychics decided to take care of the rest of humanity. They removed or eased away almost any pain, physical or emotional. Then they awoke someone from their distant past, a founder whom they honored. He was horrified at what they had done to people and called it evil. This book is partly about what happened when they stopped.

    Of course, right now, if you’re buying books, you should buy them from the Based Book Sale: https://basedbooksale.substack.com/p/the-summer-2026-based-book-sale

      1. Yes, obviously young Americans are responsible for all the jobs being given to H1-Bs and DEI hires, responsible for housing costs rising to complete unaffordability, responsible for our currency being devalued to near-worthlessness, our churches being neutered into women-run social clubs. Yup, that was all the doing of young white Americans. They were consulted at every step.

        1. Really job choices are choices young white electricians, welders and machinist are doing just fine. Your indians and DEI hires are just like some of our youth they don’t want to get dirty. And those church pews are filled voluntarily. Everybody does not live in a race of psychics world.

          1. Right, because that’s the message young people have been getting their entire lives: Go out and be an electrician, welder or machinist. That’s what their elders were steering them to, as wise counsellors.

            Oh, no, no, it really wasn’t. They’ve been told to go to college and pursue white collar work. So if they followed the advice of their elders, they were completely betrayed.

            And for that matter, does society recruit its leaders from electricians, welders and machinists? Will they be in a position to influence the future of their country from those jobs?

          2. I’m really sorry you’re too stupid to understand my point regarding The Worthing Saga. I’m not surprised, but I’m sorry.

        2. No one told ANY section of the population to be fat, play video games, question their gender, be phone addicted, or smoke dope. And living in a fantasy world doesn’t help anyone do anything, escapism is cowardice and promotes nothing but a victim mentality.

          1. “No one told ANY section of the population to . . . question their gender”

            Are you lying or just completely unaware of the world around you? Have you been paying any attention whatsoever?

            “And living in a fantasy world doesn’t help anyone do anything,”

            Understanding that a science fiction novel is also an analysis of the problem of pain is not “living in a fantasy world,” you arrogant moron.

          2. It seems to me that you’re more interested in me being wrong than you are in understanding what I’m actually trying to say. It’s making you say some truly stupid things.

          3. That’s obviously untrue. Vast sums have been spent creating media/ propaganda to push exactly those things, as well as the education system explicitly pushing some of those things.

        3. I do know that you are not capable of debate without name calling. LOL you are a victim.

          1. Zorro

            We have a different concept of one. The uniparty wants depopulation and Satan wants company.

          2. Ok, I’m willing to retract if proven wrong. Explain what I actually meant when I talked about The Worthing Saga and why I thought it was relevant.

            (Hint: I don’t think it’s our real situation, nor even particularly analogous to it.)

      2. The young cannot give anything away. They are not the ones in charge.

    2. zak-

      Just like the scientist that created a “mouse heaven”. Plenty of food and water. Initially, the population zoomed. Eventually, total social discord and all died. And didn’t take long.

      Didn’t Churchill, or someone quite prominent, said that “success was achieved by progressing from one failure after another”? Or something like that.

      1. I think it was because the mice were trapped with a “surplus” of mouse kibble and “comforts”. They couldn’t escape.

        Better the real stuff with hardship in, than fake and gay ease.

  6. we are entering a time of testing the world has never seen before

    Ephesians 6:12

  7. another good one! can’t help but think (or maybe it’s pessimistic optimism) that we’re in a cycle of disfunction that the next generation is born to correct. not by any mystical way, but mathematically speaking, the numbers add up – as the function we were a part of produced us, and the function we built based on how we were raised produced the next, and that next function is going to produce the minds that will ‘fix it all’ (4th turning style). it makes me feel better about the current conditions, but also that we’re due for some crazier/harder times. darkest before dawn vibe.

  8. I too read Dune when I was young. It helped when the movie came out (the 1980s version) because I could explain it to my friends. But I’ll be honest and state that I wasn’t that impressed with it at the time. When I reread it (and the rest of the series–the ones Frank Herbert wrote, that is) in my 30s, I had a much greater appreciation for the story.

    1. The really cool stuff was left out and replaced with the silly bits from the movie. Another hour and better FX and it might have been great.

  9. “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.” — Booker T. Washington

  10. I love that scene in Idiocracy where he tells prison guard I’m supposed to get out today and the turrets shooting each other.
    A heavy metal album where you can hardly read the band logo or record label has a life’s not hard, you’re just soft sample from a movie.
    Saw a Coca-Cola ad with black metalers but I’m too clowny and can do it froggy style to get demoralized.

    1. Oh, I just took Sunday completely off, had steak with the boys, watched a movie (that I’ll write about for Friday). All is very well!

  12. Actually, a lot of young people were encouraged to learn those trades. I’ve been recommending it for 30+ years.
    I’m from and live in a rural area, and know a lot of such tradesmen. I’ve recommended college to those who want a career in fields that require it, but a lot of young men want to just get started on earning a living, and want a job that pays well. Quite a few of these young people do attend some classes once they’re a little older, and they see what types of knowledge will actually benefit them (as opposed to just getting a degree so they can say they have one, or because ‘everybody needs a college education’).

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