After last week's blog post I couldn't stop thinking about pain. I keep noticing how many people seem to have an unhealthy relationship with pain. And it's not the masochists.
There is one particular quote from H. P. Lovecraft that stuck in my head: "As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is based on lessening the agony of existence". Although the quote seems unremarkable and even straight forward, I always thought it perfectly encompasses the human condition, portraying it as a constant flight from what makes us miserable. It emphasizes how suffering is an inseparable part of existence and will never seize to exist as our only option is to minimize it as much as possible. It may seem weird, but I always found comfort in that quote. Only recently I realized that it's wrong.
Lovecraft was absolutely correct in proposing that agony is a part of existence and we can never rid ourselves of it. But he was wrong in proposing that we should try to minimize it. As I wrote last week, pain is a fundamental force of intelligent life. We are designed to feel pain as it drives us to improve. If you rid yourself of one source of pain, a new one will emerge. If you rid yourself of that one, your body just keeps going. If you blindly keep going, these problems will become increasingly difficult to solve or even to understand. Our bodies are not designed for our modern life and how successful we are at solving any minor inconvenience. The result: depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness.
Yes, it may seem contradictory, but I believe many people today suffer because they suffer too little. They have so little to suffer from that they just suffer from anything: bad smells, loud noises, aesthetic defects of their body, rejection by certain individual or wrong interpretations of something someone has said. Please don't get me wrong, I'm not saying these are not valid reasons to suffer, nor am I trying to debase people who are suffering from something like this. I'm just saying: would these people really suffer as much from *these things* if they were confronted with death, violence, disease, war or torture? Again, please don't get me wrong, I'm not selling this as a solution. They would undoubtedly suffer more overall, the only question relevant for this thought experiment is: would these "minor" sufferings be perceived to be as severe? I don't think so. Pain, like any other perception adjusts to a base line, as our brains process information only in relative terms.
So, assuming I'm right and people actually suffer too little, isn't that a bizarre problem to have? What are we supposed to do about it? Are we even supposed to do anything about it? And if people will always suffer, were all our advancements in medicine, technology, society and politics in vain? My answer to that is clearly: no. We are in a brilliant situation. All we have to do to solve this "problem" is to change our attitude towards it. Do you want to hear my attempt at fixing the Lovecraft quote? Here we go: "As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is based on *controlling* the agony of existence".
The best situation imaginable, the pinnacle of human achievement, the goal to strive towards would be the ability to freely pick what to suffer from. If we had fully conquered nature and were in full control of any force in the universe, we could freely pick from any shape of pain we could conceive. But we still had to pick something in order to exist, for agony *is* existence.
So, to work towards a better relationship with pain, ask yourself: what do you like to suffer from? It may seem like a bizarre question, but we ask about what we like to enjoy all the time. And don't mix the two up, it's not a question about things that other people would suffer from but you actually enjoy. No, think about all the moments in your life where you suffered, where you were in agony, where you just wished it'd stop, maybe you were even in tears. Try to recollect as many as you can.
Now, which of them was your favorite?
