Nearly everything we teach our children about the world is false — and much of what we teach them we know to be false even as we teach it. We lie to our chidlren because we fear causing them pain by telling them the truth about the often dire conditions holding in the world in which we live. I do not refer to our lying to children in telling them that there is a Santa Claus that gives them presents on Christmas or in telling them that there is an Easter Bunny who brings them candy eggs, but the lying we do in our attempts to shield our children from the reality that humans are unequal and will always be treated unequally, the reality that we are not all special, that reality that we are not all beautiful.
The sooner one comes to accept the conditions of the world, the sooner one can focus on what one actually is under one’s control. Or, as Nietzsche said,
The goal of philosophy is to determine all of those things that cannot be changed so that we can focus all of our effort upon all those things we can change.
Better than our habits was the way of the Aztecs, who said to their newborn children, “cry, cry: for you have been born to suffer”.
Best of all — my true pinnacle of humanity — is the view of life found in Duke Leto’s dying words in Frank Herbert’s Dune: “still, it had been good, much of this life”, an attitude that does not demand that life be ideal for it to be worth loving.
All of this is a general instance of the pattern in humans by which increased levels of civilization lead the civilized to attempt more and more to remove all forms of discomfort from life until one has removed so much discomfort from life, so many momentary discomforts, that one creates more severe, more lasting sources of suffering unwittingly. Suffering cannot entirely be eliminated — a certain quantity of it is absolutely inevitable in the education of a being capable of functioning in a world that is not ideal. What is called for is simply finding the absolute minimum with reference to a set of goals we establish.