What brings you the most emotional pain on a day-to-day basis? Are they unfulfilling relationships, fear of rejection, or feelings of inadequacy? Think about the people around you, do you know what pain they most often grapple with, and what wounded them in the first pace?
Pain (and the avoidance of it) drives a good majority of our decisions, which in turn shapes our life over the long run. It is the “flinch”-ing away from pain — a term introduced by Julien Smith in the namesake book —that subjects us to habitual living, to know our lot, and live life firmly within our comfort zone.
It is often said that pain is built-in to protect us from danger. It is manifested in the nervous system of most living creatures, and it served to ensure our survival. But in our man-made and complex world, pain can be maladaptive. In fact, most of them are — artifacts of callous upbringing, traumatic events, spurned bids at connections. They show up as irrational pains that hinders one’s full expression and enjoyment. These acquired pain mechanisms may have served to protect the individuals in their darkest times, but they haunt their hosts years after they have outlived their usefulness. These acquired pain mechanisms shape the habits that their hosts fall into, dictating the troubles, sufferings, and cycles that entrap them later in life.
Pain is there to be resolved. Like a toothache, it calls for attention and action. No matter its origin, each pain deserves to be acknowledged and treated with deliberation. Often it is tempting to numb pain with pleasure, for the modern world provides plenty of options for distractions. But these are not lasting solutions, just as numbing medication does not heal a decaying tooth. These hedonistic pursuits are pleasures without delight, consumed solely for the purpose of covering up the void within. Binging Netflix shows does not resolve the lack of human connection, it merely masks it.
The only antidote to pain is pain — of a different kind. Here’s on example: the chronic pain of loneliness can be traded for the temporary pain of potential rejection. The lasting pain of regret can be traded for the transitory pain of failure. The pain traded for may be more intense and causes greater flinch, but they hasten the process of recovery.
It is important to make the distinction that the pain of the former kind is often a signal of the lacking of need: the lack of connection, the lack of prospect, whereas latter kind is often associated with danger: rejection is a form of social loss, and failure is a form of material loss. One should evaluate whether the anticipated pain of the latter kind is actually justified by the magnitude of danger. The kicker here is that rejection and failure in our modern world is a far cry from life or death situations, and thus there is great value in working through the misinformed pain of perceived danger, and to just go right ahead with taking the risk.
The point being made here is worth emphasizing: the only antidote to pain is pain of a different kind, and where possible, one should strive to replace pain resulting from lack of need to pain resulting from perceived danger. Pain motivates action, and viewed from this angle, one sees that pain is nothing more than a useful mechanism to evaluate need against risk.
The question of pain has been addressed consistently across world religions, from the Buddhist dictum that suffering is universal to the Christian viewpoint that suffering are tests of human virtues. But there is a flip-side to this equation that has historically not been given its due treatment: pleasure. In the depraved living conditions of pre-modern agricultural societies, pleasure is a privilege and thus is easily associated with hedonism. The modern consumerist world however presents us with a new paradigm — opportunities for pleasure now is of such great abundance that knowing how to manage pleasure is almost as pressing as knowing how to manage pain! It is not something for the privileged few to ponder, each of us now has to decide whether to splurge our savings (in itself a modern phenomenon) and limited attention span on gratifying oneselves or channel it towards longer term goals.
Should we travel three times a year to see the world? The consumerist messaging that pervades us seems to suggest so: get out of the yoke of the boring office cubicle and immerse yourself in the vast beauties of Iceland! It is a win-win scenario for all parties involved — the tourist industry benefits from your consumption, and your own country’s economy benefits from your willingness to toil most days of the year in exchange for this escapade.
Think again. What truly brings you pleasure and joy? Each one of us has a different answer. It does not take a grand adventure, it takes only a little introspection. In your day-to-day, what brings you delight? Is it the joy of creating something new, the sparks of engaging conversations, the adrenaline rush of physical challenges? How can you orient your life so that more of these moments can occur, in greater frequency and variety? Planning for pleasure is not something that we are taught to do, but it is something we ought to do. Creating opportunities for higher-order delight brings about far greater satisfaction than grasping at lowbrow entertainment in the form of Netflix shows or binge eating.
While pleasure cannot fulfill pain, it certainly can give rise to pain. These are pain of the productive sort, they arise out of a lack of skill that needs to be resolved. Say you found yourself enjoying a nice paddle by the beach, and want to get better at swimming. You may soon find yourself struggling at lessons. That is okay — you have experienced something similar growing up: that pain emanating from your legs as your bones stretch to make you taller. These are productive pain, do not run away from them; embrace them and plan out how they can be resolved through action, converting pain of the first kind to the much more addressable pain of the second kind — of failure or rejection. When one adopts this practice, pain becomes the spice of life, the yeast culture in the yogurt.
Picture yourself taking the step towards the future that you imagined for yourself, a future of delight and joy. What pain lies along the way? Are they insurmountable, or do they sit calling for you to reach out and extend your embrace?
