Maybe You Can Live Fully Without Something Horrible Happening To You First
I try to live my life as if I'd been in a terrible car crash. By that I mean, there are those people who say, "I wasn't really living, and then I got in that car crash, and then figured out that I'd better seize the moment and not waste life." I thought, Why not live that way without the car crash?

Pico Iyar writes in The New York Times about "The Value of Suffering":

Occasionally, it's true, I'll meet someone -- call him myself -- who makes the same mistake again and again, heedless of what friends and sense tell him, unable even to listen to himself. Then he crashes his car, or suffers a heart attack, and suddenly calamity works on him like an alarm clock; by packing a punch that no gentler means can summon, suffering breaks him open and moves him to change his ways.

This bit below relates to how we adapt very quickly to both good and bad things that happen to us:

Occasionally, too, I'll see that suffering can be in the eye of the beholder, our ignorant projection. The quadriplegic asks you not to extend sympathy to her; she's happy, even if her form of pain is more visible than yours. The man on the street in Calcutta, India, or Port-au-Prince, Haiti, overturns all our simple notions about the relation of terrible conditions to cheerfulness and energy and asks whether we haven't just brought our ideas of poverty with us.

But does that change all the many times when suffering leaves us with no seeming benefit at all, and only a resentment of those who tell us to look on the bright side and count our blessings and recall that time heals all wounds (when we know it doesn't)? None of us expects life to be easy; Job merely wants an explanation for his constant unease. To live, as Nietzsche (and Roberta Flack) had it, is to suffer; to survive is to make sense of the suffering.

This is wise:

MY neighbors in Japan live in a culture that is based, at some invisible level, on the Buddhist precepts that Issa knew: that suffering is reality, even if unhappiness need not be our response to it. This makes for what comes across to us as uncomplaining hard work, stoicism and a constant sense of the ways difficulty binds us together -- as Britain knew during the blitz, and other cultures at moments of stress, though doubly acute in a culture based on the idea of interdependence, whereby the suffering of one is the suffering of everyone.

"I'll do my best!" and "I'll stick it out!" and "It can't be helped" are the phrases you hear every hour in Japan; when a tsunami claimed thousands of lives north of Tokyo two years ago, I heard much more lamentation and panic in California than among the people I know around Kyoto. My neighbors aren't formal philosophers, but much in the texture of the lives they're used to -- the national worship of things falling away in autumn, the blaze of cherry blossoms followed by their very quick departure, the Issa-like poems on which they're schooled -- speaks for an old culture's training in saying goodbye to things and putting delight and beauty within a frame. Death undoes us less, sometimes, than the hope that it will never come.

We, in America as of late especially, tend to expect things to be easy. Our lives are so physically comfortable that we really aren't used to discomfort at all. People often expect getting a romantic partner to just happen because they want one or for ambitions to be realized without much of a fuss.

To teach kids that life is hard and filled with setbacks and that failure is okay and a great teacher seems wise. But to also convey to kids -- and people -- that life isn't to be wasted, is an important thing. But maybe it just isn't something some people can truly get until something horrible happens.