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Anyone who spends much time writing things is probably familiar with the universal “dummy text” that begins Lorem ipsum dolor. Supposedly, typesetters in the 16th century used this scrambled Latin text to mock up books and show off designs. Lorem ipsum dolor now means something like, “don’t read the text; that will change when we have something better to say. Just look at the beautiful design. Oh, and also, something about pain.”

The dolor is the giveaway about the pain. Something like it means “pain” in enough languages that even most English speakers will get the reference. The rest of it is harder, since it is not good Latin. It is more like Sort-of Latin. It actually comes from a mangled passage in Cicero’s On the Extremes of Good and Evil, that says Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor, which means “There is nobody who loves pain itself because it is pain.” The whole passage is worth quoting and pondering deeply:

No one rejects, dislikes or avoids pleasure itself, because it is pleasure, but because those who do not know how to pursue pleasure rationally encounter consequences that are extremely painful. Nor again is there anyone who loves or pursues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but because occasionally circumstances occur in which toil and pain can procure him some great pleasure. . . . In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided.

That’s it. That’s the whole point of the great master: all things being equal, pleasure is good and pain is bad. We should enjoy pleasure and reject pain whenever possible. Pain is painful and pleasure is pleasurable. If it makes you miserable, don’t do it. It seems obvious, but Cicero was writing in a philosophical environment full of Stoics and Cynics and general tough guys who saw pleasure as morally suspect and pain as the sort of thing that real men embraced.



Cicero’s big takeaway–that pain is bad and pleasure is good–seems so self-evident that there would be no point in writing a book about it. But, really, it isn’t self-evident at all. Cicero was wrong about that. All kinds of people court misery for its own sake and reject pleasure because they see it as inherently tainted. Usually they think that this has something to do with religion. Human beings are messed up that way. Or, at least, some of them are.



I know because I’ve been messed up that way. I have actively sought out pain and pushed away pleasure for reasons that I once confused with religion. Throughout most of my 20s, I thought that being happy and enjoying things was sinful and that profound psychic pain–pain centered largely around guilt and anxiety–was a sign of my special status with God. I was miserable most of the time, and, somehow, this made me happy. Some people, you know, just can’t be happy unless they aren’t happy.

I don’t want to get into the details; I’m not ready for my closeup yet. But I do want to bear my testimony that Cicero is true, that being miserable really isn’t a sign of righteousness, and being happy really isn’t evidence of a broken soul. We can do all sorts of tradeoffs. We can look at lesser pains and greater pleasures and greatest goods for greatest numbers. We can examine how some short-term pain can produce long-term pleasure, or how one person’s willingness to endure pain can produce enduring pleasure for the many. It is a complicated moral calculus. But we need to start, I think, from the governing postulate that pain is bad and pleasure is good.



This does not mean that everything pleasurable should be pursued with abandon. Cicero was a long way from a hedonist, and, in fact, is arguing against the Epicureans in this very passage. He makes it clear that it would be foolish to pursue every pleasure, and avoid every pain, that we encounter in our lives. To do so would produce long-term pain and achieve only fleeting pleasure. We have to look to the future.



But we don’t have to look so far in the future that we ignore the life that we have to focus a life that we imagine. The purpose of life is not to be unhappy the whole time we are here so we can qualify for happiness in some future life. I’ve never actually seen a pig in a poke, but I’m pretty sure that this is one. I simply don’t understand enough about any life other than this one to make any such plans, and I am not convinced that anybody else does either.

Pleasure and pain occur in this life, and they translate pretty reliably into happiness and misery. And while there are certainly things that decent people should be willing to sacrifice pleasure and happiness for, setting out to try to be miserable is really pretty stupid. Pain should never be the point.

And none of this means that we are ever going to excise pain and suffering from the world. Both the Buddha and The Princess Bride got this right. Life really is suffering, and anyone who says differently is probably selling something. But it does not follow that pain is the point of life. Pain is never the point. As necessary, or ennobling, or inevitable as suffering may be, it is not the reason that we exist, and it is not the reason that anybody else exists either. It is OK to try to avoid it. And it is more than OK to try to help other people avoid it. Being happy is acceptable to God.

This has become the essence of my adult religious faith: I refuse to believe that pain is the point of life. I insist on seeing it, rather, as placeholder text–a sort of spiritual lorem ipsum dolor that keeps the shape of the soul and helps show off the design–but that can, and should eventually be replaced with things that makes more sense. In identifying these things, I can do no better than the vision invoked by the great American Jurist, Learned Hand, of a consciousness that “remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded” and acknowledges “the spirit of Him who, nearly two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.”

