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If You've Ever Thought Life Is Too Painful to Be Worth Living, This Piece Might Just Change Everything

You know, the cynics are wrong.

Well, maybe not all the cynics. For instance, people who are cynical about the Kardashians’ effect on good taste and women’s mental health are right. But there’s a broader class of cynic out there — the cynic who says that pain is the most real thing we ever experience, and because pain is so much more excruciating than peace is comforting, it’s better to stop living or even to never have lived at all.

They measure life’s worth on a scale. On one side, they heap life’s pain, and on the other, they heap life’s comforts, joys, and happinesses. (We might call those things “peace” for shorthand.)

In their calculus, if the intensity of pain outweighs the comfort of peace, life simply wasn’t ever worth living.

If you’ve lived through the lingering cancer death of a parent or the unexpected suicide of your child, you know what those cynics mean. In those moments — and in later memories of those moments — what they say seems so true. The pain collapses the side of the scale it’s heaped onto.

That pain can have the depth and pull of a supermassive black hole, devouring dust and dirt and planets and stars and whole solar systems; and it seems that no peace, no comfort, could ever outweigh it.

Against pain like that, even the happiest memories aren’t much of a match. And over time, as you feel like the searing flames have died down to embers covered over with a thin layer of dust, all it takes is a fleeting thought, and those flames flicker back to life … and burn.

So is the jaded Wesley in “The Princess Bride” right? Is it true that “life is pain, Highness — anyone who says differently is selling something”? And if pain can be so much more powerful than peace, is it better to have never lived?

For the answer, let’s look back to Horatio Spafford, a man who lost much of his wealth in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Soon after that, he sent his wife and four daughters ahead of him on a ship to Europe. Their ship sank in the cold Atlantic Ocean. Their daughters were all lost.

Days........

© Western Journalism