Is adversity a necessity?

Humans have to have something to strive for. In times of peace, those energies can be turned to exploration, fighting disease or eradicating poverty.

We need new horizons, but those seem pretty limitless so I don’t think war is necessary for advancement.

though not essential to survival, I’ve found that it’s in human nature to not fully comprehend the meaning of appreciation or hard work unless they’ve lost something.

Me personally? I always listened to my family/teachers etc when they told me you have to work hard to get ahead in life, and I understood that, but I didn’t fully know what hard work was until I held a 60 hour a week job and was a full time student when I first left highschool.

I think in small examples like these we find the answer to your question. Most of America didn’t give a damn about hydrogen until gas prices hit 4+ a gallon.

yes

Where there is competition for resources, there is adversity. Without competition; without adversity, there would only be one form of life on the planet—and that form might not even be cellular. In any case, if the world was monovivial, it wouldn’t be for long. Something else would come along that was better suited for the environment, and it would take over.

We must constantly fight in order to acquire the resources we need to live. It’s not that adversity is necessary; it’s just that it is part and parcel of life.

Adversity is inescapable. In that sense it is a necessity, as there is no such thing as being without it. Can we turn it to our advantage? Yes. Most successful people do, How? They keep going in the face of it.

If there was nothing to work toward or strive for, what would be the point in life? Just sitting back and getting fat on twinkies?

It’s not that we need adversity. Adversity will always be here.

@The_Compassionate_Heretic Hmm, not sure what you mean…can you elaborate?

@ronski There’s no such thing as life without adversity. We can’t live without adversity anymore than we can live without time.

Peace and adversity are not opposites. We need trials to strengthen us. Idleness does not grow us any muscles but makes us weak. Everyone has troubles to overcome, whether they are financial, emotional, physical, or other, and every kind of privation or struggle is a kind of adversity. But all these things can happen in peacetime. Peace does not mean freedom from struggle.

It is rare but possible to lead a completely protected life, but that is a kind of adversity in itself because it separates you from reality and leaves you unprepared for the inevitable sickness and death. Shakyamuni Buddha was completely isolated from the unpleasant realities of life by order of his father the king, and he chose to leave the shelter of his father’s palace to see what the world was really like. He said that life is suffering because there is always something we long for and cannot have or have but fear to lose, and those feelings trouble every one of us.

I’m not certain we require misfortune, but challenges inspire us to try new things and grow and learn. I believe we need challenges whether internally derived or placed on us by others or our environment or circumstances.
See ya….Gary aka wtf

One person’s challenge is another person’s misfortune.

To answer the question as bluntly as I can; People will always need things to bitch about.

@Jeruba: Peace and adversity are not opposites True! Like others stated above, adversity will always exist and it’s to our benefit to challenge it, use it as a tool when possible. Malcolm X understood adversity as being part of nature.

What?

@hungryhungryhortence But can peace exist with adversity?

@ronski: I think so, to me adversity is a degree less than conflict and has better odds of resolution than apathy or all out aggression, offense or hatred. Of course I’m thinking of what peace is to me, my own subjectivity in play; peace being the opposite of active hostility/war. To me, all else is doable and fluid.

Yes! This isn’t heaven. This is the place where we are shaped. You have to have sunshine and rain. The going gets way heavier when it gets into not just adversity but tragedy. Times that produce post trauma and fallouts from shock. These are times that shiver our timbers right to the core. These are times when we need much love, help, support to get going again and learn a new way of living our lives. Tragedy causes the deepest of soul searchings, the deepest of yearnings. We may lose loved ones, seeing them perish horribly before our eyes. These are events where forever more, levels of us have “died” too.
We learn to live in this tension of what was versus what is now. We have to carve out new lives for ourselves, forge them in whatever ground is there to work with. But we can be majorly put back together again as the wonderful flutherite, bkcunningham has done.