We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain.

The line distills a bleak, working-class stoicism: the speaker’s ambitions have been lowered by repeated disappointment until “happiness” feels like an unrealistic luxury. What remains is a modest, almost bureaucratic request—less suffering rather than joy. In Bukowski’s typical worldview, life is not a moral arc toward fulfillment but a grind of bodily, economic, and emotional abrasion; survival becomes the primary victory. The quote’s power lies in its inversion of self-help optimism: it suggests that for many people, the baseline is pain, and the most attainable form of “hope” is simply a reduction in it.