The Sweet Spot

The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning

Paul Bloom

• Publisher: Ecco
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062910585
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Emociones en psicología

"This book will challenge you to rethink your vision of a good life. With sharp insights and lucid prose, Paul Bloom makes a captivating case that pain and suffering are essential to happiness. It's an exhilarating antidote to toxic positivity." —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife

One of Behavioral Scientist 's "Notable Books of 2021"

From the author of Against Empathy, a different kind of happiness book, one that shows us how suffering is an essential source of both pleasure and meaning in our lives

Why do we so often seek out physical pain and emotional turmoil? We go to movies that make us cry, or scream, or gag. We poke at sores, eat spicy foods, immerse ourselves in hot baths, run marathons. Some of us even seek out pain and humiliation in sexual role-play. Where do these seemingly perverse appetites come from?

Drawing on groundbreaking findings from psychology and brain science, The Sweet Spot shows how the right kind of suffering sets the stage for enhanced pleasure. Pain can distract us from our anxieties and help us transcend the self. Choosing to suffer can serve social goals; it can display how tough we are or, conversely, can function as a cry for help. Feelings of fear and sadness are part of the pleasure of immersing ourselves in play and fantasy and can provide certain moral satisfactions. And effort, struggle, and difficulty can, in the right contexts, lead to the joys of mastery and flow.

But suffering plays a deeper role as well. We are not natural hedonists—a good life involves more than pleasure. People seek lives of meaning and significance; we aspire to rich relationships and satisfying pursuits, and this requires some amount of struggle, anxiety, and loss. Brilliantly argued, witty, and humane, Paul Bloom shows how a life without chosen suffering would be empty—and worse than that, boring.

1

Suffer

My younger son has an appetite for pain. He was always the kid who would get into a slapping competition with his buddies or challenge you to a wasabi-eating contest. For his senior project in high school, he climbed Everest. Not the real Everest—he did have to go to class, after all—but Everest is 29,029 feet tall, so Zach went to the climbing gym late each afternoon and climbed up and down for hours (just under a thousand feet a day, four to five days each week, for thirty days), keeping a blog of where he would be and what he would be seeing if he were actually departing from the base camp in Nepal, ascending the mountain, and returning. It was unpleasant and grueling, and he complained bitterly, and he loved it.

I bet you’ve done something similar. Perhaps you camp, forsaking your soft bed and hot shower. Or you might cycle, a sport where elite competitors rhapsodize about “sweet pain,” described by one cyclist as “that breathless and bone-tired feeling followed by a crooked smile when you see your time . . . the headspace you go to ignore your screaming legs approaching the crest of [a] really long brutal climb on the bike when all you do is pray to the endorphin gods.”

I’m no jock, but long ago I ran the New York Marathon. When I decided to do this, I was terribly out of shape, so it involved more than a year of preparation, some of it during a cold New England winter. I remember what it was like to run in the morning darkness, to feel my face go numb, to nurse my blisters and muscle aches. But these are memories I cherish.

Then there are the more passive masochistic pleasures. There’s no real mystery as to why we enjoy feeling exhilaration and awe, or vicarious triumph, or sexual desire. But what’s going on with horror? Years ago, I came across my older son doing his physics homework while watching, on his laptop, an artsy French cannibal movie called Raw. I took one look and it ruined my afternoon. This sort of thing is too much for me; when I talk about torture porn and the like, I’ll be going off secondhand descriptions.

(The same son cheerfully introduced me to a Reddit forum called r/wince, which is exactly what it sounds like. I clicked on it just now and the first item for today is a photo titled “Staple through the finger. Went through bone.” I went weak at the very thought and immediately moved to another screen.)

Maybe you like this sort of thing—maybe you’ve put down the book and are now checking out Netflix or Reddit to get a good look at what I’m talking about—or maybe you’re more like me, a sensitive soul. But still, everyone has some taste for aversive experiences. My own viewing pleasures include television series like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones. These are all violent—with rape, murder, and torture—and include depictions of all sorts of suffering and loss. But they have their hold on me, and I bet that something similar, perhaps with melancholy instead of violence, pushes your buttons.

The specific sort of suffering we like to indulge in, and how severe we want this suffering to be, differs from person to person. I like spicy curries and roller-coaster rides myself. Hot baths? Yes, though not too hot. Distance running? Yes. BDSM? None of your business. But while there are interesting differences, nobody is immune to the lure of suffering.

BEFORE GOING FURTHER, I want to address a semantic concern. I’ll be using the words “pleasure” and “pain” in just the way everyone else uses them—roughly, to refer to the experiences that, respectively, make you go Ahh! or Ouch! But I am also going to talk about negative experiences that aren’t physically painful, such as working long hours on a difficult project, obsessing over sad memories, or choosing to go without food when you’re hungry. Sometimes I’ll call this “suffering.” This fits the standard dictionary definition: the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship. (This definition doesn’t say that it has to be a lot of pain, distress, or hardship.)

But I’ve come to realize that there are some who are uncomfortable with, even offended by, this word choice. I once described some mundane activity (mild electrical shocks in the lab) as suffering and had an older woman angrily tell me that her parents had gone through horrific experiences during World War II, and that was suffering. For her, my broad usage minimized what happened to them. I get it. I feel the same way when I hear someone describe an experience such as waiting in a long security line at the airport as “torture.” This might be fine as comic exaggeration, but to say it seriously is offensive—it trivializes the real thing.

I wish that English had a richer vocabulary here, so we could more easily make the distinctions. But it doesn’t, so I’ll continue to use the word “suffering” for the full continuum of negative experience. Just as pressing a sore tooth with your tongue is still pain, forms of mild suffering are still suffering. But if you don’t like this way of talking, just mentally translate my usage of this word to the more awkward but maybe more accurate “experiences that are typically aversive, for either physical or psychological reasons,” and we’ll be on the same page.

THIS BOOK WILL explore two different sorts of chosen suffering. The first involves spicy food, hot baths, frightening movies, rough sex, intense exercise, and the like. We’ll see that such experiences can give pleasure. They can increase the joy of future experiences, provide an escape from consciousness, satisfy curiosity, and enhance social status. The second is the sort involved in climbing mountains and having children. Such activities are effortful and often unpleasant. But they are part of a life well lived.

These two sorts of chosen pain and suffering—for pleasure and for meaning—differ in many ways. The discomfort of hot baths and BDSM and spicy curries is actively pursued; we look forward to it—the activity wouldn’t be complete without it. The other form of suffering isn’t quite like that. When training for a marathon, nobody courts injury and disappointment. And yet the possibility of failure has to exist. When you start a game, you don’t want to lose, but if you know you will win every time, you’re never going to have any fun. So, too, with life more generally.

The impossibility of failure is one of the weaknesses of daydreaming. The behavioral economist and psychiatrist George Ainslie once complained that daydreams suffer from a “shortage of scarcity.” We can choose to put ourselves into a bind, but we can also choose to get out of it. This freedom can strip away much of the pleasure we get from solitary fantasy.

This is why, in case you were wondering, omnipotence is boring. If there were no kryptonite, who would care about Superman’s adventures? Actually, true omnipotence would be misery. There is an old Twilight Zone episode that elaborates on this point. A gangster dies and, to his surprise, wakes up in what seems to be paradise. He gets whatever he wants—sex, money, power. But boredom sets in, and then frustration, and finally he tells his guide that he doesn’t belong in heaven. “I want to go to the other place,” he says. And his guide responds that this isn’t heaven; he is already in the other place.

PHRASES LIKE “pain that’s also pleasure” and “the joy we can get from suffering” make sense. Examples like saunas and torture porn make clear that we appreciate the lure of certain forms of pain and distress. “Hurts so good,” says the philosopher-songwriter John Mellencamp, and we nod along. But if you think about it, the idea is a bit strange, even paradoxical.

After all, badness seems to be part of the very notion of pain. In a classic paper, the philosopher David Lewis imagines a madman who feels pain that’s different from ours. While our pain makes us wish for it to stop and might make us yell or cry, his pain makes him act in strange ways—he thinks about mathematics; he crosses his legs and snaps his fingers. And the madman that Lewis imagines has no motivation to avoid pain or make it go away once he has it.

Lewis’s analysis here is subtle, but my reaction, and possibly yours, is that it’s not really pain after all. The madman might call it pain, but this confusion just reflects his mental illness. It can’t be pain if it has no association with the negative, so he’s wrong to describe it as such.

And this is why pleasure from pain is so puzzling. Consider two definitions that pop up when you type the words into a search engine.

Pleasure: a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment

Pain: a highly unpleasant physical sensation caused by illness or injury

These look like opposites. If you check out the more technical definition by the International Association for the Study of Pain Task Force on Taxonomy, you’ll see that pain is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience arising from actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage”—and there it is again, the word “unpleasant.” How can an experience be pleasant and unpleasant simultaneously?

According to a certain way of seeing things, it can’t. Suppose every moment of experience corresponds to a number on a scale from 0 to 10, with low numbers being awful states that you avoid and high numbers being positive states you pursue. You can’t have a state with both a low number and a high number associated with it. It would be like pouring a bath that’s both hot and cold. Impossible—it can be hot, cold, or in between; it can be hot at 8 p.m. and cold at 8:15 p.m.; it can even be hot on the right side and cold on the left side. But the same water just can’t be simultaneously hot and cold.

To see the puzzle in a different way, think about the function of these psychological states. Jeremy Bentham said that “nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure,” and he saw them as inherently opposing forces, pushing us in different ways: approach and avoidance, carrot and stick. But how can you approach and avoid at the same time?

We’ll talk about Freud in a little while, but I’ll just note here that whatever one might say about his views, he did appreciate the weirdness of the phenomenon. He writes that since the primary aim of a person “is the avoidance of unpleasure and the obtaining of pleasure,” it follows that seeking out pain is “incomprehensible.” In such cases, “it is as though the watchman over our mental life were put out of action by a drug.”

PERHAPS THE WAY out of this puzzle is to conclude that pain is never pleasurable. We seek out pain, sure, but maybe we do so only because this provides other benefits. This sort of trade-off is the stuff of life. You run outside on a chilly day, shivering and uncomfortable, to retrieve an important package that has been left up the walk. Or undergo a painful operation to fix a long-standing medical condition. Or sit, bored and unhappy, in a government office in order to renew your driver’s license. Or even withstand torture so as not to reveal the identities of your comrades. There are many reasons to choose pain and suffering that don’t deny their awfulness. And the next chapter, on benign masochism, includes a lot about how we choose pain to obtain pleasure just a few seconds afterward. Such explanations don’t deny the badness of pain.

But it turns out that pain itself need not be negative. We can get some hint of the complexity here by looking at certain clinical conditions.

You may have heard of congenital analgesia. People who suffer from this can feel themselves being cut or hit, but they don’t register these experiences as pain, and so have no intrinsic motivation to avoid them. Most people with this condition don’t live past their twenties, and this illustrates the importance of pain, both in preventing injury and allowing injuries to heal.

A more puzzling syndrome is pain asymbolia. This is a condition wherein people feel pain and describe their experience as painful—but they don’t find the pain to be unpleasant. They offer up parts of their body to doctors and scientists for intrusions that, for you or me, would be agonizing. But it’s not as if they are numb; one patient reported, “I feel it indeed; it hurts a bit, but it doesn’t bother me; this is nothing.” This disorder is associated with damage to parts of the brain such as the posterior insula and the parietal operculum, areas that, more generally, respond to threat. Such a syndrome should open our eyes to the idea that the experience of pain need not be inherently unwelcome.

These two sorts of pain syndromes—congenital analgesia and pain asymbolia—correspond to a distinction sometimes made between two kinds of analgesics. There is the usual kind, which dulls or obliterates pain, and then there’s another sort (and morphine is sometimes described in this way) that, while it does have a powerful dulling effect, gives you a sort of pain asymbolia. You feel the pain, but it bothers you less.

The philosopher Nikola Grahek notes that we can get a glimmer of what pain asymbolia feels like in our everyday lives. He asks his reader to imagine going to the doctor because of a dull, nagging pain in the upper-left chest, radiating down the arm. You are worried that it’s a heart attack, but the doctor reassures you that it’s muscle inflammation and will fade soon. Your fear will go away and “you will take a carefree attitude toward the pain, although the pain will still be there and will still be felt as unpleasant.”

Sometimes the changing reaction to pain comes from a change of attitude. The writer Andrea Long Chu talks about a long, painful preparation for the surgery that would transform her penis into a vagina, and she begins by describing pain as it is often felt: “All bodily pain begins with shock at the audacity of physical trespass.” But she then notes that over the months, “we reached a cautious détente, the pain and I, acknowledging each other’s presence on the tacit condition of mutual noninterference, like exes swapping nods at a holiday party.”

This is said to be one of the powers that come from meditative practice. Robert Wright talks about an experiment he tried during a meditation retreat:

A tooth—which turned out to require a root canal—had started hurting me whenever I drank anything. The pain was sharp and could be excruciating, even if what I was drinking was at room temperature. So, just to see what would happen, I sat down in my room and meditated for thirty minutes and then took a giant swig of...