The meaning of life is to be happy… I call bullshit.
Pursuing happiness as the make-all-ends-meet only reinforces the happiness that you do not already have. In the attempt to attain happiness through the avoidance of pain, we end up with more pain than what we started with.
Though happiness is foundational to success, it is fleeting and impossible to sustain. Purpose is enduring.
Pain may be inevitable, but there are productive ways to deal with it. Here are 6 reasons why we should strive to embrace pain rather than avoid it.
1. Neurologically, pain is impossible to avoid
The avoidance of pain can be characterized by the need to pursue comfort in every given scenario. From a neurological standpoint, this is a pointless pursuit.
Our mood is wholly determined by our brain chemistry and is thus governed by the release of neurotransmitters. The dominant forces being: serotonin (joy), dopamine (motivation), oxytocin (love), and endorphins (physical pain).
Consequently, our mood is limited to how our brain chemistry is regulated. Material and other external pleasures can only make us happy for so long, but eventually, they will become familiar and all the more insignificant.
This is the law of familiarity. It doesn’t matter how meaningful an event, person, or possession is in the moment, your brain will familiarize the experience the more you surround yourself with it. Neurotransmitters rise and drop an infinite amount of times throughout your life. When they drop (and they will), your pain will increase.
The most productive way to cultivate good feelings, therefore, is to consciously alter your perception of them. Gratitude, acceptance, and love are some of the best ways to treat negative emotions because they reinforce a positive experience. This translates to more positive connections in the brain, and helps quell the intensity of emotional reactions.
2. Pain leads to growth
Pain is often an indication of what changes need to be made.
Let’s say there is someone who you really like and you’re dying to ask him or her out on a date. But every time you see them at a social gathering, you are left with a pit in your stomach and can barely utter four words. Every night you go home with guilt ridden all over your conscience.
Or, say you are planning to start a new e-commerce business. You have drawn up countless ideas and spent hundreds of hours designing an impeccable website, but ultimately, you are afraid to release it to the public for fear of being ridiculed.
Fear and pain share a very close relationship, and often, they are rooted in the same epidemic. This is why stepping out of the comfort zone is so difficult – the fear of the unknown is far too unbearable. Often, we fear ‘fear’ itself, more so than the actual cause of it.
Mark Twain said,
“Do the thing you fear most, and the death of fear is certain”
The only way out of fear is through challenging it. The same goes for pain. Emotional pain is the number one teacher we have at our disposal, and it comes at a cost far less than student loans. We grow stronger when persevere through times that are difficult.
3. The natural state of life is one of chaos
When we examine the animal kingdom, it becomes clear they have a set of unwritten rules. Animals live in harmony because of their lack of free-will – they abide by their own biological programming.
The same cannot be said about humans. We look at the deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest, the toxic waste in the Great Barrier Reef, the air pollution of industrialization, or any of the millions of wars that have been waged since the beginning of our species.
That is the work of consciousness. We are prone to chaos for the same reason we are prone to change – we are an evolving species. Fortunately, chaos can be a positive influence if it leads to an orderly result. For instance: organizations like Unicef or the Human Rights Watch make order out of chaos. Sometimes it takes the worst disasters to wake up a population.
On an individual level, the same occurs. Chaos, like pain, is an inevitable truth. We cannot avoid it, therefore, it is necessary to work with it and embrace it. Carl Jung said it best,
“In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order”
4. Pain only exists in relation to pleasure
This is why gratitude is so important.
In Montreal, Canada, we have some of the most ferocious winters on the planet. Car-crashing, power-outing, slip n’ sliding -40 °C disasters… When you’re no longer interested in building snowmen, winter sucks. And that’s why I love summer.
Pain compliments pleasure in the same way winter compliments summer – you can’t have one without the other. Polarity makes life interesting, and rightfully so. Those who have the lowest low often have the highest highs.
5. Avoiding pain leads to suffering
Addiction, depression, anxiety, and compulsion – the pain from all of these stem from deep-rooted problems that have not been confronted. Suffering is the result of neglected pain.
There is a metaphor that I truly admire:
“Stress is like holding a glass of water. Hold it for a minute, your arm will start to shake. Hold it for a day, your arm will go numb. The weight of the water is not dependant on its absolute weight, but rather how long it’s being held on for”
Pain should be looked at the same way. Running away from pain, or worse, using substances to neglect it is no better than giving heroin to a recovering alcoholic.
Carl Jung uses the shadow archetype to define the unconscious mind. He indicates that every element of the mind that we are not aware of – or that we do not want to admit – hides in the shadows of our ego. The interesting thing about the shadow: the more you suppress it, the darker it gets.
Understanding the source of your pain is crucial for not letting it manifest into other realms of your life. Becoming self-aware of your ‘shadow’ is necessary for self-development.
6. Pain is often the creation of our own doing
The funny thing about pain is that it is often the result of our own perception. Seneca said,
“We are often more frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality”
Most of the pain we experience is not even real – it is the result of a story we told ourselves.
Sadghuru explained this wonderfully in his interview with Tom Bilyeu. He explained that humans are incredible at recognizing the faults of others, but when it comes to ourselves, it is nearly impossible. It is hidden by our ego.
Often we fear what we do not like about ourselves, so for our own security, we put it in the back of our mind and keep it locked up for as long as we can. The irony is that the fear we lock up is hardly ever true – but putting it into the subconscious makes it so.
Journaling is a great exercise for making the subconscious conscious. If there is an agony I carry that has been a weight on my shoulders, I try to make sense of it on paper. Sometimes it takes a couple weeks for me to figure out why I’m feeling the way I am, but I always feel better after acknowledging it. Journaling has made it a lot easier for me to accept my faults and what I need to work on.
If there’s one thing to take away from this article, it’s that pain is only what we perceive it as. Embrace it, work with it, and integrate it into your life.