Living with Adversity | David Benatar

Welcome to Brain Nevada.

We are delighted to be rejoined by one of our favorite guests, David Benetton, and we're going to be speaking about his latest book, which is called Living with Adversity.

So the book involves a series of real life cases.

Would you like to start with the hypothetical one?

I'd rather not, and I'll tell you why.

I was once asked some years ago to write an endorsement for Thomas Ligotti's book, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race.

As I recall, this was his first work of non-fiction.

He normally writes horror.

And as I recall, the comment that I made included the claim that there's nothing so horror-inducing as real life.

And so it wasn't much of a jump for him to move from horror to nonfiction.

This is a work of nonfiction and it's filled with horror.

So David, could you tell us a little bit more about what's horrific about the book? So the book, as I understand it, is a series of accounts about living with adversity.

And that title, although it's accurate, maybe doesn't convey the full horror of that adversity.

As I was reading those stories, many of them are difficult to read because they're harrowing.

Every story is another account of suffering that people have endured over long stretches of time and often continue to endure.

Can you talk about the horror of that endurance? What makes the horrors in these stories horrific?