Freedom From Pain Guarantees Failure
How one mistake of modern society explains so much of what's wrong with it
After the first successful uses of anesthetics, medical science rejoiced.
Finally, doctors had a way to perform shock-inducing therapies without having to do the grisly work of tying down patients, slugging them with whiskey, and stuffing their mouths with leather to avoid the accidental biting off of tongues from unbearable pain.
Amputations stopped being the deadly procedures they were before.
To be fair, they were still deadly as antibiotics and proper sanitation was still decades off, but they weren’t instant killers.
These procedures became more commonplace and acceptable. Surgeons stopped being butchers, and started getting respectable. All thanks to painkillers.
Fast forward to today, and we’ve moved beyond pain management, to outright pain avoidance.
More people than ever are hooked on legally-prescribed opioids while governments move to legalize stronger and more potent drugs. While it shouldn’t be a question whether to let people access methods to avoid death by pain, we do need to reconsider what we are doing when we make it easy for people to avoid pain altogether.
The thing with painkillers, is that while they make pain tolerable, they often immobilize the person taking them. But it doesn’t just hurt to lose parts of our bodies, it hurts just as much to grow our spirits. Sadly, a world where pain-numbing medication, food, pornography, videogames, TV, movies, and limitless entertainment doesn’t distinguish between the two.
When I first started meditating in the lotus posture, the pain was excruciating. My legs are tied up in an unnatural pretzel, everything aches and threatens to fall apart. Holding the position only makes it worse but letting go threatened to mess things up further. Plus I hated the pain of defeat, so I held on and I’m glad I did. Meditators are taught to really notice this pain. They are told to watch it, to feel where it emanates, how it begins, how loudly it screams, and ultimately, they watch how it becomes the new norm.
Like a bad smell or a terrible haircut, one eventually grows used to it, even to like it. It is in that moment of noticing that you can overcome pain simply by staying with it that we grow. And it is in that moment of growth that pain stops.
This is what we deprive ourselves of when we are quick to press the morphine drip in life. To take the myriad varieties of Soma now being offered to us. We never become accustomed to pain and we forget that we can work through far more of it than we think. As a result, we become convinced that we can’t do without our drugs. Worse still, we stop challenging ourselves and only do things insofar as we can guarantee that they return more pleasure.
The result? We can’t handle as much pain as we used to, so when we are hurt without our painkillers, we die. On the other hand, exposure to poison makes it harder for us to succumb to poison. When Richard Branson soared across the Atlantic in a hot air balloon in 1991, he took a Swedish co-pilot named Per Linstrand with him. When they were forced to ditch the Irish Sea, Lindstrand jumped into freezing waters and was forced to fend for himself for nearly 20 minutes before being fished out by the Royal Navy. How, when the average person in freezing waters would succumb to hypothermia in a matter of minutes, did Lindstrand manage to survive? Being a Swede, Per’s father had him swim laps in sub-zero temperatures since he was a lad, spending upwards of 40 minutes in the freezing waters of their homeland. His father’s cold exposure training saved him.
It may be too late to roll back all the pain avoidant mechanisms available to us today. Nor should we want to. Times are getting hard once more and there may come times when we will need some of these tools to survive. But the best way to avoid dependence is to avoid the painkiller, not the pain. To lean into and face our discomforts first, to practice and train and cultivate a mind and body that can endure. As Bruce Lee once said, “Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.”