Why is there so much pain in the world? Why do so many people appear to be hurting? Is there more pain now than there was 100 years ago? What if we are running from something that we actually need? What if we have avoided discomfort and in doing so we have been making ourselves miserable?
What are the actual distinctions between pain and pleasure? We have a huge pain-killing industry for both physical and emotional pain. From doctors wanting you to take 400mg of Ibuprofen or a vallum because your wife left you. What if you allowed yourself to experience that pain? What would you learn?
Brock Bastain Has many interesting and insightful points about the thoughts of pain and whether we should be avoiding it or not. When you make everyone a winner you get a lot of mediocrity and our inner human fights against being middling.
Our bodies need to have stress and discomfort to get better and healthier. So to keep us safe all the time and not expose ourselves to the outside world is going to keep us unhealthy.
Interesting how he shows the fact that eating chocolate at first is very pleasurable but after many more, we actually get sick of eating something pleasurable. We can take nice stuff and turn it into a struggle.
Now one thing I found fascinating is that having a hard life full of pain and suffering doesn’t help you. Nor does having a life of ease. You need moderation.
Everything in life is about moderation. Too much of a good thing is bad. Too much of a bad thing is bad. However a little bit of bad mixed in with the good and suddenly you have a damn good life. Life truly is about having all of the experiences. Not avoiding the hard times but stepping into the painful parts and embracing them as the experiences that they are so you can have the great experiences be even better.
