'The Princess Bride,' one of my favorite movies, has a lot of quotable lines, but the one that's on my mind right now was spoken to Princess Buttercup by Wesley (still disguised as the Dread Pirate Roberts): 'Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.'
Those were words spoken by an angry man, who thought the love of his life had moved on to marry the odious Prince Humperdinck. After Wesley realizes Buttercup still loves him, his tune changes.
Those words, however, seem to be a motto of the Left.
To the point where there are now 'anti-natalists' who think we should stop having children because life is, as the Dread Pirate Roberts asserted, nothing but pain.
The “anti-natalist” philosopher David Benatar believes that life is so painful that human beings should stop having children for reasons of compassion. https://t.co/RSEijTDvwy
— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) May 12, 2025
Here's more:
People, in short, say that life is good. Benatar believes that they are mistaken. “The quality of human life is, contrary to what many people think, actually quite appalling,” he writes, in “The Human Predicament.” He provides an escalating list of woes, designed to prove that even the lives of happy people are worse than they think. We’re almost always hungry or thirsty, he writes; when we’re not, we must go to the bathroom. We often experience “thermal discomfort”—we are too hot or too cold—or are tired and unable to nap. We suffer from itches, allergies, and colds, menstrual pains or hot flashes. Life is a procession of “frustrations and irritations”—waiting in traffic, standing in line, filling out forms. Forced to work, we often find our jobs exhausting; even “those who enjoy their work may have professional aspirations that remain unfulfilled.” Many lonely people remain single, while those who marry fight and divorce.
This is, of course, the natural outcome of people who see everything through a political lens of oppressor/oppressed, and who find victimhood gives them moral and political currency.
Yes. There is pain in life. Sometimes, there is tremendous pain. I spent the longest week of my life caring for my father, during a pandemic, as he died while on home hospice. Thanks to COVID, there were no nurses making visits. Just phone calls. A wonderful home health aide came once. The rest of the time, it was me: administering comfort medications every two hours like clockwork. See, dad had a bad back, and lying in bed was usually painful. He was not in any pain. Then, on an April Thursday morning, he slipped away. With my mom holding his hand.
Shortly after that, I -- who worked in a hospital -- became a hospice nurse myself. I spent a lot of time with patients in the final hours, days, or weeks of their lives, and the families who were staring the pain of loss head-on. I cried with them, I held some of their hands as they took their final breaths, and I still think of all of the surviving families from time to time.
In January of last year, my ex-husband died after a brief illness. Our children were 16, 14, and 10 years old. His absence is notable on every holiday, and keenly so right now as our eldest -- now 18 -- is set to graduate high school in a little over two weeks.
The pain of life doesn't have to come via the permanence of death. It can come in the little things, too. Break-ups, divorce, job losses. House fires, car accidents, and financial woes. The suffering that comes with mental illnesses like anxiety or depression, or the pain of physical ailments, whether acute or chronic.
Yet, those sufferings are all temporary, fleeting. And plenty of joy can be found if we know and choose to seek it.
Some of the hardest laughs I've ever had were around the deaths of loved ones. Because of COVID, we didn't have a proper memorial service for my father until June of 2022. While we were at his church, greeting loved ones, I happened to notice something odd about my mother's sweater: she had it on backward.
I pointed this out.
And then we laughed. We laughed so hard we cried. Three years on, we still laugh about it.
When my ex-husband was in the hospital, I called his priest, who is French and still has a thick French accent. My ex's nephews were doing terrible French impressions while I was on the phone with that priest, and I almost broke a rib trying not to crack up.
But, like the suffering, the joy doesn't have to come in big moments like that. It can be as simple as riding in the car with your youngest son, and both of you singing along (badly and off-key) to 'Who I'd Be' from 'Shrek: The Musical.' It can be sitting on a boat off the coast of Hawaii, looking at Azure waters that continue off into the horizon, eating Hawaiian pulled pork and rice from a cardboard box. It can be your son, tucked into bed, telling you, 'Mom, I'm glad we're friends,' as my middle son used to do when he was younger. It can be seeing your eldest in his graduation cap and gown, on the edge of entering the real world (and knowing he'll do great things).
Or it can be a beautiful sunset after a horrible storm.
After the storms blew through, a beautiful sunset. pic.twitter.com/IMzJu8D0dy
— Amy Curtis 🇮🇱 (@RantyAmyCurtis) May 16, 2025
Through all of this, two things are true: not seeing everything as a series of political victim-oppressor trade-offs but rather as the fullness of life and having children (or someone to love more than yourself) are the balms that make the sting of a sometimes painful existence easier to bear. It makes the hurtful times shorter, it makes the good times richer, and it makes life—in the grand scheme of things—more of a joy than a pain.
Guys like David Benatar, through whatever choices or circumstances, see life as the Dread Pirate Roberts did: nothing but pain. It's not. But misery loves company, so Benatar wants to drag the rest of us down to his level.
He's the one trying to sell us something: misery.
Don't buy it.
