The Utility of Pain

A guide to what suffering can teach you

A lot of words have been spent on the question of what Humans really are, and what they’re “meant to” do. Victor Frankl said that humans were meant to find meaning. Nietzsche might have said power instead of meaning, and Freud might have said sex.

People debate whether people are good or bad. Jung emphasized integrating the shadow into one’s personality. Rutger Bergman and Steven Pinker state that the future is likely to continue humankind’s ongoing progress.

There is an answer to what humans are that incorporates all the above but is also simpler. Humans explain. Whatever life throws at them they ask why it happened. Often they do so unconsciously. They can be deprived of sex, cast to the margins of their social group, or lose a fortune, but if they feel they can explain why it happened, they’ll usually be OK. But if a person feels they have lost the ability to understand their reality, they’ll suffer in major ways.

Human explanation itself explains some universal truths about humans. One of these is that humans adapt to their surroundings. They have inhabited every kind of environment on earth. They do this via their explanations, which are formalized in science and engineering. By asking pertinent ‘whys’ about the environment they find themselves in, they discover what’s needed to alter it and what results that alteration will probably cause. No other animal has shown evidence of being able to ask Why. Computers can’t, either.

This is important to understand if one wants to examine the role of pain in human life. The conclusions I’ll draw will be about ‘pain’ as in the suffering we think of as the ‘human condition’ or existential suffering. That’s because training in psychiatry it’s the kind of pain I’ve had more professional as well as personal experience in dealing with. But they will be relevant to understanding physical pain as well because the two kinds of pain have similar explanations.

Pain Teaches

Richard Dawkins was once asked if he thought that animals could suffer like humans could. The questioner had an assumption that some people share, which is that intelligence makes suffering worse, presumably through some form of heightened awareness. Dawkins’s response was that it is very possible that animals may be more sensitive to pain than humans. Not having the cognitive armory of a typical human, pain could function as an alternative way of teaching an organism about its environment, especially what to avoid.

This was one of the insights that led me to see that pain is fundamentally a signal.

So often in modern society humans are beset with “noise.” Noise is bad quality information with more potential to distract than inform. It’s the crackly sounds made by old telephones unable to fully filter out irrelevant sound information, and which you must tune out in order to make out what the person is saying. It’s spam emails, celebrity gossip, the “next big” investment or the latest Trump tweet.

Generally, the more compelled a person is by noisy information the more anxious and neurotic they will be. Think Woody Allen freaking out about every headache, assuming it must be cancer. Or the news addict who sees a police shooting in a far away country as sure evidence that civilization is under threat, disregarding the hundred other harbingers of doom which he has long since forgotten about.

Signals are the information you need to pay attention to. When in early 2020 China shut down large parts of its economy over concerns about a new, little-known virus, a few prescient commentators became worried. The noise-saturated news media initially mocked these concerns.

Acute vs Chronic Suffering

Acute suffering is the best signal. It tells you unambiguously that you’ve done something wrong. Chronic suffering is when the signal turns to noise, when negative patterns of thought recur every day and cast their homogeneous interpretation over rich and varied situations.

As Schopenhauer wrote

“To a man possessed of an ill-conditioned individuality, all pleasure is like delicate wine in a mouth made bitter with gall.”

Examples of acute suffering:

• Personal rejection
• Standing on stage about to give a speech
• The loneliness of living in a new city on your own

They can all turn into chronic suffering, usually if you don’t identify the pain as a source of learning but instead allow it to color your view of the world. Nassim Taleb wrote in Antifragile that there is no long-term stability without short-term volatility. Often the answer to a chronic and harmful recurring pattern is to shake things up a bit. To say, “anywhere but here.”

Personal tragedy and or a major life disruption are Fate’s way of doing that for you. The acute shock forces your vision back into alignment with what matters. It reminds you of what was always true, that time is more limited than your intuition would have you believe. For some, life shocks are the things that make further self-delusion impossible.

Conclusion

Pain makes life’s rules viscerally understood. It animates the prescriptions you have been given by your parents, teachers and favorite self-help authors, so that you no longer have to follow them like a permanent disciple. When pain is examined, you won’t need any teachers for much longer.