I am pretty confident that most of the readers--subscribed or accidental--of this blog are middle-aged. It is, therefore, with supreme confidence that I ask you to think about the physical and mental pains that you have suffered through or are dealing with even now. I mean, is there anyone who has lived 50 or 60 years without pain?
Now that you are thinking about pain, you have also had chronic pain, correct? The National Institutes of Health defines and explains chronic pain as "pain that lasts more than several months (variously defined as 3 to 6 months, but longer than “normal healing”). It’s a very common problem."
It's a very common problem!
You've been there, you say?
How about I ask you to think about the other extreme of chronic pain. Have you experienced chronic pleasure?
Take your time to think about it. Chronic pleasure. Any experience of it?
If you have no personal knowledge of chronic pleasure, do you know of any friend or relative who suffers from chronic pleasure?
Of course not!
So, if there is no chronic pleasure in life, but a person will invariably have to deal with chronic pain, and if we do know this for a fact, then isn't it rather bizarre that people have kids? Fully aware that the child that they beget (finally I get to use this word!) will experience pain and chronic pain but never any chronic pleasure, people decide to reproduce?
Back when I was a teenager, which is when I first knew that I didn't want to have kids, I didn't think about such pain or pleasure. I simply never found any compelling reason to have kids. As I got older, when I understood that my birth and death do not make a damn difference in this cosmos, whose mystery continues to fascinate me, I became even more convinced about my decision.
The chronic pain versus pleasure argument is something more recent that I read almost five years ago in The New Yorker's profile of an anti-natalist philosopher, David Benatar.
According to Benatar:
While good people go to great lengths to spare their children from suffering, few of them seem to notice that the one (and only) guaranteed way to prevent all the suffering of their children is not to bring those children into existence in the first place
He anticipates the objections that you might have:
"Many people suggest that the best experiences in life—love, beauty, discovery, and so on—make up for the bad ones. To this, Benatar replies that pain is worse than pleasure is good. Pain lasts longer: “There’s such a thing as chronic pain, but there’s no such thing as chronic pleasure,” he said. It’s also more powerful: would you trade five minutes of the worst pain imaginable for five minutes of the greatest pleasure? Moreover, there’s an abstract sense in which missing out on good experiences isn’t as bad as having bad ones. “For an existing person, the presence of bad things is bad and the presence of good things is good,” Benatar explained. “But compare that with a scenario in which that person never existed—then, the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn’t be bad, because there’d be nobody to be deprived of those good things.” This asymmetry “completely stacks the deck against existence,” he continued, because it suggests that “all the unpleasantness and all the misery and all the suffering could be over, without any real cost.”
Some people argue that talk of pain and pleasure misses the point: even if life isn’t good, it’s meaningful. Benatar replies that, in fact, human life is cosmically meaningless"
In my classes, I have often asked students to think about the fact that people have far fewer children than ever in the past. During those discussions, sometimes I have also joked that if people say that their children are their greatest happiness, then why are they choosing to have few--only one or two--and not many more? Don't they want to multiply their chronic pleasure, er, happiness?
These questions too are part of trying to understand our my existence. I don't pretend that my interpretation of any aspect of life is the correct one. Que sais-je? I do know that a life examined makes it worth the existence that followed a fateful encounter between my parents ;)
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