The question up there occurred to
me as I was waking up; I don’t generally mind getting up, but I’m sure you can
relate to this experience:
The Self: “Wake up.”
The Body: “NEIN.”
The Self: “It is time for us to all
wake up and work together in harmony, that we might accomplish tasks and utilize
our capabilities to the mutual good.”
The Body: “DIE WELT IST KALT UND
BRUTAL, UND ICH BEGEHRE NUR DEN TOD.”
Yes, today was one of those days,
and it got me thinking: when you get to feeling awful, wouldn’t it be better to
just… not? Wouldn’t it be nicer if my back/neck/legs/existence was less
uncomfortable? Wouldn’t I feel better if I couldn’t remember the suffering in
the world (the tiny fragment of it that I’m momentarily aware of, anyway; I don’t
think a human exists who can feel the whole world’s pain and survive)?
I thought about it for a while, and
I came to a surprising realization: no, no I would not.
Aside: this post will not degenerate
into either of the tropes “the pain makes y’feel ALIVE” or “Oh my Gwaaaad, I am
so LUCKY!” Both of these things are in the unique position of being both completely
true and completely useless to talk about.
Anyway, if pain both physical and spiritual
ceased, I don’t think I would feel better, and here is why.
Physical pain is essential; evolution
is a highly conservative process, and as odd as it may sound, there is nothing
whatsoever in your body that doesn’t serve some specific purpose. Yes, that includes
your appendix; ours seems to have functions in immunity and the maintenance of
gut flora, and marsupials evolved theirs independently, so it’s important.
I’m not saying physical pain is a
good thing. Pain sucks. It’s not like
I had an epiphany or saw the face of God when I was chopping salad and decided
to chop my hand too (I did say something involving God, though; sorry, God). It
would indicate a very severe problem indeed with my mental state if I banged my
head on a doorway and announced “Ah! A gift of understanding, from the Universe!”
But I need it. Physical pain’s an
investment, to put it simply. My body maintains this preposterously expensive
network of neurons so I can feel it (without instruction from my conscious
self), and the pain of an injury persists long after it’s “needed;” we get the
message, and then our ankle keeps hurting anyway.
I said this was an investment, and
here’s the payoff: I’m 99% percent less
likely to cut myself chopping a salad, at least in that same way. After about
the third session, I don’t think
about keeping my fingers clear, but some reptilian part of my brain is aware
that a failure to do so will hurt us. I duck reflexively when I go through a
low doorway, my ankle was really just trying to tell me: “squat better
(dumbass).”
To cut a long story short, it’s a
good thing that knives hurt, because I don’t fancy finger salad.
“Aha, Peter!” I hear you cry. “Physical
pain is a cautionary investment, but we knew that, and you didn’t explain
emotional pain, you absolute cuck!”
You’re half right, so let’s think
about that. A friend of yours is suffering under some emotional burden, and
assuming you’re not too preoccupied with your own desperate existential
struggle, you’ll automatically ask why.
Okay, stop, back up. Your friend
was suffering, and you knew. You didn’t
ask them if they were suffering, and
you skipped right to what the cause was. That sense for the pain of others
might be automatic, or even unconscious, but I don’t think it’s trivial that
you can infer someone’s emotional state from tiny details that are otherwise
irrelevant. With people you know very well, the signs become obvious: Person A
only bites her nails at times of heightened anxiety, Person B always plays a
certain song on good days.
But try this sometime, dear reader.
Go to a public place, a coffee shop or a supermarket or what have you, and try
to assess people at a glance, listen to overheard conversations, and so on. I
think it will surprise you how appallingly easy it is to “feel” other people,
even total strangers.
So, at least part of the utility of
emotional pain is the establishment and maintenance of relationships with other
people, people who also suffer. It
sounds rather like the lyrics to an emo song to say we’re all bound together by
pain, but I think it’s also true. We’re social animals, and we notice when
other members of the pack are in distress; even reduced to the cold level of
self-interest and threat identification, that’s still a pretty heartening
message.
Picture somebody who doesn’t hurt,
and doesn’t hurt along with others either. I don’t know about you, but most of
the people who come to mind are either fictional supervillains or real supervillains
of the very worst sort. Such people are at best nihilists, simply indifferent
to the pain around them because they don’t feel it matters, and at worst they’re
Carl Panzram; my advice is to stay away from them.
So, this sense is useful with
regard to other people, but why do we need to feel our own problems so acutely?
Physical pain is one thing, but emotional pain can be so, so much worse, and where’s
the utility in all this awful torment people go through?
I think it works out like this:
when someone else suffers, you ask what the cause is. This might be fairly
silly if you’re the one doing the suffering; you probably know what happened.
What you can then ask yourself is why. There are two main things that can
happen here: one of them is wicked bad, and the other one can be wicked good.
Bad news first: when you ask
yourself why you’re suffering, you might come up with a couple of terrible
answers. Bad Answer One is that everyone suffers, all the time, and any joy you
experience is illusory. Bad Answer Two is that you, in particular, are
suffering while others revel in the good life.
Bad Answer Three is both the best
and worst of the bad lot: that you’re suffering, and it’s your fault.
Depending on your mindset, Bad
Answer Three means different things. If you run high in the negative end of
things like I do, you might just conclude that you’re trapped in an endless
cycle of self-inflicted damage. You might infer you should just go ahead and
step off this here mortal coil, because it sucks, and people cause themselves constant
pain.
You might even think, because
people are so blinkered and cause themselves such pain, that the best plan is to
take as many people with you as possible.
But here’s the upside of Bad Answer
Three, the answer a more positive person might encounter: if it’s your fault, it
means you can fix it. That’s a bitter
pill for sure, but it reveals a dim little glimmer of light in the bleak little
tunnel of nihilism we’ve dug here.
Speaking of that tunnel, here’s that
other good result of suffering I mentioned: we now have something that we distinctly
want to move straight away from. This isn’t some magic cure-all realization, mind
you; we’re still in the tunnel, and
we’re still suffering, but we’ve at least become aware that this is, indeed, a
tunnel.
Tunnels are structures, and they
have endpoints. There was some part of this tunnel where we entered. We’re
sitting in the darkest part, the part that smells like cigarettes and human
waste and always seems to be squishy somehow. But because it hurts, we know we’re
in a structure, and we’ve arrived at a split in the tunnel; one fork has a
poorly-resolved, nebulous light of hope flickering at the end, and the other goes
all the way down.
Not as easy a choice as you might
be led to believe, but there’s an answer when it comes to that. A good answer,
even, a morally right answer.
So, cutting a very long story
short, I think that’s why we feel emotional pain so acutely. Physical pain
tells you things about the physical world: “knives are sharp, stoves are hot,
cactuses give us the needles in our nose.” Pain and injury provide simple,
direct guidance for your navigation of the mundane world. Step here, not here; eat
this, not that.
Emotional anguish, I think, works
the same way but on a higher, much more consequential level. Burning myself on
the stove is a pretty bad result, but if I let nihilism and resentment consume
me the results can be horrific. Cactus
spines hurt, and we steer away from the cactus; when we discover someone’s been
lying to us, automatic systems kick in and get us variously disappointed,
critical, and right pissed off. None
of these are comfortable sensations (very few people really like to be angry), and if we’re healthy
and capable we leave the situations that cause them, seeking something better.
That has a downside, obviously; pain
avoidance can turn into a pathology all on its own. Anybody who’s a little too
into alcohol or opioids can tell you that. Similarly, the bereavement you feel
at a funeral might make you want to avoid forming any relationships at all, for
fear of loss, and that’s clearly no good. But that’s a topic for another time.
The point here is that the pain you feel, physical and emotional both, has a
purpose: it wakes you up, tells you something’s wrong, and then shows you,
maybe, in about 240-pixel resolution, what might be better.
To put it in a vignette, the
process goes (or generally ought to go) like this:
“Ow! Shit! What’s happened? I have
identified what happened. That’s no good, doesn’t work for me, bub. We’re goin’
over here to try somethin’ else.”
I think I’m off topic and starting
to sound a little schizophrenic, so I’m gonna cut it there for today. I hope
you can see what I’m getting at, though; it’s not for nothing that we suffer,
and pain’s not just a trivial, fleeting trick of brain chemistry like some of
the more nihilist parts of society might tell you. It exists, really, and it’s for something.
This may sound strange, but I don’t
hope you encounter zero suffering; I hope you find suffering that’s minor, and
that ends up pointing you in the right direction.
These are all my thoughts, dear
reader, and I’d love to hear any and all of your thoughts about them. Comments
are always welcome, private messages are always encouraged and both are always
appreciated. Enjoy the rest of your day, night, wherever you find yourself in
the flow of time. C:
TL;DR Pain can (should) lead to progress.
Maybe not directly, one-to-one, right away, but ultimately it should be a
catalyst for change.
