‘Pain and Pleasure: Part 2’
CAERS Substack Article #74
Pain is a very strange thing. As much as we are programmed to avoid it because it can be so unpleasant, many of us know that it has the potential to not only make us better people but perhaps paradoxically happier people as well.
I love the sport of ice hockey. Beyond the enjoyment of watching the best players demonstrating their enormous skills, I always make a point of watching the National Hockey League (NHL) championship games, known as the Stanley Cup finals, for one very interesting reason. Over many decades, without exception, I have noticed that the winners always emphasize the satisfaction of winning because of all of the adversity that they and their teammates faced together in reaching their ultimate goal. This is especially true if that team had lost in the finals in the recent past; it seems to make the present victory that much sweeter. In other words, the bitter sting of previous defeats, and the painful sacrifices made during their championship run, are critical elements of the ecstasy of reigning supreme.
The same can be said of pain that does not end in victory per se; it has the potential to distill life down to the most important essentials. There is nothing like surviving a serious illness to make one appreciate the simple pleasure of good health. There is nothing like the longing for a faraway loved one to make us treasure their long-awaited return.
It seems a truism for humans that shared pain is an opportunity for deepening relationships, not surprising given that we are the most social species on the planet. We learn so much about ourselves, and each other, when we face adversity together, especially when the outcome is uncertain. It is said that the ethics that we use to guide our lives are never more obvious, nor more reinforced, as when we follow them when nobody is watching, or when we face oppressive circumstances collectively, or when there is no guaranteed positive reward for following them. Sometimes all we can hold dear is the satisfaction of a life well-lived, which may only be appreciated in retrospect from a rocking chair in our old age. Many a lifelong friendship has its roots in situations where our collective moral mettle has been tested to the max.
The same is not always true of pleasure. People we consider good friends may vanish when the heat goes up, even though we may have shared many fun times together. As well, pleasure likely has more potential for addiction than pain; the powerful chemicals in our brain, like serotonin and dopamine, can lure us into wanting the regular ‘fix’ or ‘hit’ that they can provide. When the desire for pleasure controls us, rather than us controlling it, our lives can spiral out of control. We refer to this as addiction.
It is very easy to become addicted to aesthetic pleasure. Keeping things shallow allows us to avoid the reality of deeper pain and the anxiety that accompanies it. The more anxiety we have, or the less well we manage it, the more tempting it is to engage in escapist activities that ignore unpleasant aspects of our lives. Sometimes we can find quiet time or alone time unsettling because we are left with thoughts that may wander places where we don’t want to go. It is easier and safer to just keep really busy instead, pretending that our troubles will disappear if we simply avoid acknowledging them. This partially explains why it is not uncommon to stay in dysfunctional relationships rather than face our loneliness where we might examine how we ended up in such a situation, prompting re-evaluation of our life priorities, worldviews and values.
Pain and pleasure often underpin our fear of change. Much like our reluctance to break in a new pair of shoes, we may tend to stick with the same old patterns of thinking and behaviour. They are safer and more familiar, even though they may have worn out their usefulness for us. New data and alternate ways of looking at life can frighten us, even in the abstract. We are frequently only drawn to people who share our firmly held perspectives and values; we search for those sources that only serve to reinforce our present understanding of the universe. We commonly resist looking at the world through different lenses than the ones to which we have become accustomed.
In other words, we can take on a very utilitarian methodology in our lives: avoid deep change and instead focus mostly on maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. That’s more comfortable than challenging ourselves with potentially dangerous questions about truth and morality, for example. All humans do this to some degree, in part because we learn that life involves constantly weighing and balancing different priorities. Compromise is inevitable in a complex world; even highly ethical principles come into conflict on a regular basis.
For instance, I suspect that few of us work for organizations that operate in ways with which we always agree and respect; little white lies and cutting corners seem inevitable in the real world. How much of this we can tolerate will vary on the circumstances; the greater the company’s moral transgressions the more discomfort we experience. However, often we feel compelled to sacrifice some of our ethical principles when we weigh all of the options available to us. Unemployment and the potential for poverty, for example, are seldom in the best interests of the families to whom we have a moral responsibility. We may struggle with this, or we may lull ourselves into a silent sense of complacency; after all, everybody else does it, don’t they?
But we ought not be too hard on ourselves. Gullibility and naïveté, combined with our desire for pleasure and loathing of pain, can steer us down what may feel like a one-way street where we can feel trapped in a kind of moral no-win scenario. Life is difficult and ethical conundrums surround us, and some of those situations are deliberately manufactured by more powerful people who will utilize such prickly circumstances to control us.
It is human nature to spin things to our benefit; we can be masters of self-promotion, and self- deception. We commonly overestimate the contribution of bad luck when things don’t turn out well, and underestimate the contribution of good luck when they turn out favourably. No doubt our desire for pleasure and aversion to pain both play a role in this; moral distress can be as unpleasant as physical pain so utilizing denial and avoidance has its upsides.
Have you felt any moral distress during the pandemic? Did you feel compelled to go along with the authorities, or even the crowd, because the pain-pleasure ratio wasn’t worth doing otherwise? Now that the dust is settling, would you like us to take a long, hard look at how all of it went down, even if it is unpleasant to do so? How much pain are we willing to collectively endure to seek the truth?
J. Barry Engelhardt MD (retired) MHSc (bioethics)
CAERS Health Intake Facilitator
As always, your written views grab me and force a self evaluation of where we have folded and where we should stand strong. Thank you for your integrity, for your humanity, for your obvious hope. You have made a difference in my life.