Pain Tolerance, Pain Aversion

Daily Meditation 580–9/28/2023

We humans — and really all animals — are designed avoid pain.

Makes sense, right?

Who wants to get burned? To stub their toe? Have their heart broken…

No one…Even our pets show signs of distress when they see us packing to leave for vacation!

But, is avoiding pain all the time any way to live life?

This isn’t to say go out and risk life and limb skydiving without a parachute or trying to lava-surf off a volcano.

Certainly avoid unnecessary risks to your health.

But don’t avoid risks to yourself overly much.

Try to occasionally ask yourself:

“Am I living? Or am I living?”

Because there certainly is a huge difference.

If you wake up, shower, go to work, come home, make dinner, watch Office reruns, and go to bed every single day, well sure you're “alive…”

But that’s not living. That’s routine.

Arguably, of all the pains we seek to avoid the most, it’s heartbreak. This can be in the form of love-heartbreak (obviously) or also in the form of avoiding betrayal.

We seek to wall ourselves off from others — friends, family, possible romances — to “protect our hearts.”

And this may be sensible (for you and them) for a time after a different heartbreak — after all, we shouldn’t seek to hurt others, either, and “rebounding” to someone else right after a break up is a surefire way to hurt them.

Building a fortress around the self in order to close it off from future heartbreaks, however, will make you a bitter, nasty person to deal with.

So heal when you must, but then get up and be ready to be hurt again.

Live and learn…
Don’t run from pain.

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These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”