For example, ADOM is a very hard game to beat, because you have only one life, roughly five (complicated) ways to win, and a few hundred ways to die along the way. In this game, one of the bosses is called the Ancient Chaos Wyrm and is very difficult to fight because he shoots you with bolts of great nastiness and confuses you, making you stagger around like an idiot while he bolts or claws you to death.
The Ancient Chaos Wyrm constitutes legitimate difficulty and can be beaten with sufficient knowledge, preparation, and skill. However, another event in ADOM: any time you walk into a dark area, there is a very small chance you will be "eaten by a grue" and killed instantly, with no recourse to any sort of defense or reaction on your part. The grue event is, in my opinion, extremely cheap difficulty. It can happen at any time, to any character, no matter their power and preparation, and there's no defense against it.
Real life, oddly enough, is even more full of cheap difficulty than most video games. Reality has an incalculable amount of randomness in it, regardless of how reckless or cautious you are. This is not a card game we live in, where you can carefully watch the board and your single opponent and evaluate each play. Life is much more akin to rolling dice every time you take an action. It turns out that, rolling that many dice over the course of a given day, a certain number of them come up with very poor results.
Other times, life isn't just hidden probabilities, discoverable and otherwise, turning over and around. There are times when life is like playing curling in pitch darkness, but that's a different matter.
Emotion is often a major source of life's cheap difficulty; I once heard it said that everything you say would offend at least four people. This person is preposterously oversensitive to blue silk shirts, and so you never even got a fair chance at the job interview. That person is a staunch vegan, and your joke about bacon got about a zero out of ten. Again, sometimes life's variables get into a configuration that just isn't on your side (see the Occam's Razor shenanigans for more about life's configurations), and you would have to get a 12 on a six-sided die to come out ahead.
My point is that people have all sorts of little triggers that set them off, for whatever reason and to whatever extent. I don't intend to blame people for this or make fun of them. One of my triggers personally is the sound of one person (specifically one person) softly clapping their hands. There's no "reason" behind any of it, and there's no way to anticipate or prepare for all the possible mines you may step on while navigating around humans.
Take heart! What I said was that there's no way to anticipate or prepare for all the possible, individual mines, which sounds a little dreary. From my perspective, however, this is actually awesome. Nobody can be ready for all the mines, so what the hell? Stop worrying and trying to plot a safe path, and just get your plow out and run for it! Mines will go off in your face, and some of yours will undoubtedly blow up on some other people, but in the long run it will (not always, but often) be a memory the two of you laugh about someday.
The important thing is not to be worried about which types of mines there are and where they may be. The important thing is to be aware that you are standing in, and a contributor to, a minefield of infinite danger, complexity, and beauty. Some of the mines make beautiful fireworks displays in the distance when you step on them! Others release deadly nerve gas. It's a flexible thing.
My point is this: life's hard, but the thing is to not make it excessively hard. Be polite to people, but don't be a pill-bug. Understand that people are neurotic, compulsive, and insane, just like you. You're going to make some people really angry in life, and some others are going to make you tear all the wiring out of your office in a fit of rage. This is a fact; the important thing is to be aware that your mines are there waiting to be stepped on, and try to control your reaction. Because that's all it is, a reaction, and you want to mount a response.
TL;DR ADOM is fun, if you're a masochist; life's tough, but so are you.
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