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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 Everestâhe did have to go to class, after allâbut 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 youâve done something similar. Perhaps you camp, forsaking your soft bed and hot shower. Or you might cycle, a sport where elite competitors rhapsodize about âsweet pain,â described by one cyclist as âthat 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.â
Iâm 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. Thereâs no real mystery as to why we enjoy feeling exhilaration and awe, or vicarious triumph, or sexual desire. But whatâs 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, Iâll 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 âStaple through the finger. Went through bone.â I went weak at the very thought and immediately moved to another screen.)
Maybe you like this sort of thingâmaybe youâve put down the book and are now checking out Netflix or Reddit to get a good look at what Iâm talking aboutâor maybe youâre 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 violentâwith rape, murder, and tortureâand 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. Iâll be using the words âpleasureâ and âpainâ in just the way everyone else uses themâroughly, to refer to the experiences that, respectively, make you go Ahh! or Ouch! But I am also going to talk about negative experiences that arenât physically painful, such as working long hours on a difficult project, obsessing over sad memories, or choosing to go without food when youâre hungry. Sometimes Iâll call this âsuffering.â This fits the standard dictionary definition: the state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship. (This definition doesnât say that it has to be a lot of pain, distress, or hardship.)
But Iâve 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 âtorture.â This might be fine as comic exaggeration, but to say it seriously is offensiveâit trivializes the real thing.
I wish that English had a richer vocabulary here, so we could more easily make the distinctions. But it doesnât, so Iâll continue to use the word âsufferingâ 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 donât like this way of talking, just mentally translate my usage of this word to the more awkward but maybe more accurate âexperiences that are typically aversive, for either physical or psychological reasons,â and weâll 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. Weâll 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 sufferingâfor pleasure and for meaningâdiffer in many ways. The discomfort of hot baths and BDSM and spicy curries is actively pursued; we look forward to itâthe activity wouldnât be complete without it. The other form of suffering isnât 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 donât want to lose, but if you know you will win every time, youâre 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 âshortage of scarcity.â 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 Supermanâs 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 wantsâsex, money, power. But boredom sets in, and then frustration, and finally he tells his guide that he doesnât belong in heaven. âI want to go to the other place,â he says. And his guide responds that this isnât heaven; he is already in the other place.
PHRASES LIKE âpain thatâs also pleasureâ and âthe joy we can get from sufferingâ make sense. Examples like saunas and torture porn make clear that we appreciate the lure of certain forms of pain and distress. âHurts so good,â 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 thatâs 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 waysâhe 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.
Lewisâs analysis here is subtle, but my reaction, and possibly yours, is that itâs not really pain after all. The madman might call it pain, but this confusion just reflects his mental illness. It canât be pain if it has no association with the negative, so heâs 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, youâll see that pain is âan unpleasant sensory and emotional experience arising from actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damageââand there it is again, the word âunpleasant.â How can an experience be pleasant and unpleasant simultaneously?
According to a certain way of seeing things, it canât. 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 canât have a state with both a low number and a high number associated with it. It would be like pouring a bath thatâs both hot and cold. Impossibleâit 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 canât 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 ânature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure,â 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?
Weâll talk about Freud in a little while, but Iâll 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 âis the avoidance of unpleasure and the obtaining of pleasure,â it follows that seeking out pain is âincomprehensible.â In such cases, âit is as though the watchman over our mental life were put out of action by a drug.â
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 driverâs 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 donât 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 donât 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 donât register these experiences as pain, and so have no intrinsic motivation to avoid them. Most people with this condition donât 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 painfulâbut they donât 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 itâs not as if they are numb; one patient reported, âI feel it indeed; it hurts a bit, but it doesnât bother me; this is nothing.â 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 syndromesâcongenital analgesia and pain asymboliaâcorrespond to a distinction sometimes made between two kinds of analgesics. There is the usual kind, which dulls or obliterates pain, and then thereâs 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 itâs a heart attack, but the doctor reassures you that itâs muscle inflammation and will fade soon. Your fear will go away and âyou will take a carefree attitude toward the pain, although the pain will still be there and will still be felt as unpleasant.â
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: âAll bodily pain begins with shock at the audacity of physical trespass.â But she then notes that over the months, âwe reached a cautious dĂ©tente, the pain and I, acknowledging each otherâs presence on the tacit condition of mutual noninterference, like exes swapping nods at a holiday party.â
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: