The way to chronic pleasure

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 ;)

We shall overcome!

On June 19th in 2020, when the former guy was in the Oval Office, and with the pandemic beginning to wreak havoc in our lives, everything seemed dark and gloomy.  On top of that, I knew that I would be laid off because of the financial hole that the university's managers had dug and led us to, and I was doing all the prep work at home for an unemployed future.

On that June 19th in 2020 I blogged about Juneteenth.  Despite the overall sense of doom and gloom, and despite my own General Malaise personality, I wrote then that some day Juneteenth will become a national holiday.

Back in 2020, I would never, ever have bet that Juneteenth would become a national holiday the very next year.  In 2021.

If ever I need to remind myself that I should never give up hope, this is the best and most recent example.

I was so happy with Juneteenth becoming a national holiday that I organized a celebratory dinner at home.  It is humbling to think that the enslaved lived in terrible conditions in a completely alien land under the white supremacist savagery, and yet they survived and prospered.  About time we paid homage to the phenomenally resilient people and celebrated them.

I thought through the dishes that would resonate well with the culinary traditions that people brought from West Africa to the US.  I wanted to celebrate it through a vegetarian version of the foods and colors that are typically included in Juneteenth celebrations. 

And thus the menu became:

Tomato Rice (similar to jollof) 

A dish with okra 

Boiled peanuts (சுண்டல் sundal in the old coutntry)

Watermelon with feta and mint

Red cherry sauce over vanilla ice cream

(We learnt from High on the Hog, a four-part Netflix documentary, about the connection with okra and watermelon, and the red-colored foods and dessert.)

I am glad that we now have a national holiday, which will at least tempt many to Google for what Juneteenth is all about.

The following is my blog-post from June 19th in 2020:

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Source

Some day, soon, we will have a truth and reconciliation commission that will help us collectively acknowledge the sin of slavery, come to terms with that horrible past, and launch us on a path forward.  And in that process, Juneteenth will become a national holiday.

For now, here's a Langston Hughes poem that I first blogged ten years ago:

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides, 
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America.

It is father's day ...

Father's Day is on Sunday.  Over the years, I have blogged in plenty about this day, which was not something that we grew up with in the old country.  Everyday was father's day and mother's day in the multi-generational context in which we lived.  Parents reigned supreme ;)

But, over the years, the American Hallmark Cards days have spread all over the world including to India.  Though I talk with my parents every couple of days, I make sure I call them on Father's Day and Mother's Day too.

One year I didn't call my father because I was having a great time in Costa Rica.  It was a long-delayed trip to a country that had enchanted me forever.

The following is a post from June 2013. 

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After checking in, when chatting with Andreas, I understood he was a father.  I didn't know if he had sons or daughters or how many children he had. He was a dad, and that much I knew.

Andreas looks about my age.  Perhaps I am at a stage in my life that I can relate to the trials and tribulations and joys that fathers go through.  At least a little bit of resonant emotions.

It was Father's Day Sunday.

I wished Andreas a happy Father's Day.

And handed him a bar of Trader Joe's Belgian chocolate.

I almost never, ever travel without those chocolate bars.  When I am alone, they comfort me.  When I am excited, they share that with me. When I want to give somebody, especially students, a gift, those bars are awesome.

Orosi is quite a picturesque town

Once, at a crowded Lufthansa checking-in, a stern young German woman completed the process and handed me the boarding pass.  Thankfully, the paranoid self looked at them to make sure it was kosher. It was a surprise--business class.  A free upgrade!

That was one of the many free upgrades I have had over the years. The pleasures of a free upgrade are immeasurable especially when flying halfway around the world.

When it was time to board the aircraft, I noticed the same young woman verifying the passports and boarding passes.  I dug into my backpack and kept ready in my hand a bar of Trader Joe's chocolate bar.

First, I gave her my passport and boarding pass.  She handed them back to me when she was done.  

I then gave her the chocolate bar and said "thanks."  The stern German simply nodded her head as she accepted it.  True to the German stereotype, not even a smile!

Now, it was another German to whom I gave another chocolate bar.  Andreas was visibly excited, unlike that Lufthansa woman. "Thanks.  It is my son who should give me a gift" he said.

Connie, his wife, chipped in: "he is sleeping and won't get up for a while. I don't think he has any gift for you."

So, there was a son.

The following morning, I saw a young man working with Andreas and Connie.  "You must be the son" I said.

"One of the two" Andreas said.

"Twins" said Connie.

"Thanks for giving my father a gift on my behalf" said the son with a huge grin on his face.

Father and son: Andreas and Sebastian