Everything Is F*cked(53)
Children have a low tolerance for pain because the child’s entire ethos revolves around the avoidance of pain. For the child, a failure to avoid pain is a failure to find meaning or purpose. Therefore, even modest amounts of pain will cause the child to fall into fits of nihilism.
The adolescent has a higher pain threshold because the adolescent understands that pain is often a necessary trade-off to achieve his goals. The notion of enduring pain for some sort of future benefit thus allows the adolescent to incorporate some hardships and setbacks into his vision of hope: I will suffer through school so I can have a good career; I will deal with my obnoxious aunt so I can enjoy my holiday with the family; I will wake up at the ass-crack of dawn to work out because it will make me look sexy.
The problem arises when the adolescent feels that he got a bad bargain, when the pain exceeds his expectations and the rewards don’t live up to the hype. This will cause the adolescent, like the child, to fall into a crisis of hope: I sacrificed so much and got so little back! What was the point? It will thrust the adolescent into the depths of nihilism and an unkindly visit with the Uncomfortable Truth.
The adult has an incredibly high threshold for pain because the adult understands that life, in order to be meaningful, requires pain, that nothing can or necessarily should be controlled or bargained for, that you can simply do the best you can do, regardless of the consequences.
Psychological growth is an escape from nihilism, a process of building more and more sophisticated and abstract value hierarchies in order to stomach whatever life throws our way.
Childish values are fragile. The moment the ice cream is gone, an existential crisis sets in—followed by a screaming shit fit. Adolescent values are more robust because they include the necessity of pain, but they are still susceptible to unexpected and/or tragic events. Adolescent values inevitably break down in extreme circumstances or over a long enough period of time.
Truly adult values are antifragile: they benefit from the unexpected. The more fucked up a relationship gets, the more useful honesty becomes. The more terrifying the world is, the more important it is to summon up the courage to face it. The more confusing life becomes, the more valuable it is to adopt humility.
These are the virtues of a post-hope existence, the values of true adulthood. They are the North Star of our minds and our hearts. No matter the turbulence or chaos taking place on earth, they stand above it all, untouched, always shining, always guiding us through the darkness.
Pain Is Value
Many scientists and techno enthusiasts believe that one day we will develop the capabilities to “cure” death. Our genetics will be modified and optimized. We will develop nanobots that monitor and eradicate anything that could medically threaten us. Biotechnology will enable us to replace and restore our bodies in perpetuity, thus allowing us to live forever.
It sounds like science fiction, but some even believe that we could achieve this technology in our lifetime.27
The idea of removing the possibility of death, of overcoming our biological fragility, of alleviating all pain, is incredibly exciting on the surface. But I think it could also be a psychological disaster in the making.
For one, if you remove death, you remove any scarcity from life. And if you remove scarcity, you remove the ability to determine value. Everything will seem equally good or bad, equally worthy or unworthy of your time and attention, because . . . well, you would have infinite time and attention. You could spend a hundred years watching the same TV show, and it wouldn’t matter. You could let your relationships deteriorate and fall away because, after all, those people are going to be around forever—so why bother? You could justify every indulgence, every diversion, with a simple “Well, it’s not like it’s going to kill me,” and get on with it.
Death is psychologically necessary because it creates stakes in life. There is something to lose. You don’t know what something is worth until you experience the potential to lose it. You don’t know what you’re willing to struggle for, what you’re willing to give up or sacrifice.
Pain is the currency of our values. Without the pain of loss (or potential loss), it becomes impossible to determine the value of anything at all.
Pain is at the heart of all emotion. Negative emotions are caused by experiencing pain. Positive emotions are caused by alleviating pain. When we avoid pain and make ourselves more fragile, the result is our emotional reactions will be wildly disproportional to the importance of the event. We will flip our shit when our burger comes with too many leaves of lettuce. We will brim with self-importance after watching a bullshit YouTube video telling us how righteous we are. Life will become an ineffable roller coaster, sweeping our hearts up and down as we scroll up and down on our touchscreen.
The more antifragile we become, the more graceful our emotional responses are, the more control we exercise over ourselves, and the more principled our values. Antifragility is therefore synonymous with growth and maturity. Life is one never-ending stream of pain, and to grow is not to find a way to avoid that stream but, rather, to dive into it and successfully navigate its depths.
The pursuit of happiness is, then, an avoidance of growth, an avoidance of maturity, an avoidance of virtue. It is treating ourselves and our minds as a means to some emotionally giddy end. It is sacrificing our consciousness for feeling good. It’s giving up our dignity for more comfort.
The ancient philosophers knew this. Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics spoke of a life not of happiness, but of character, developing the ability to sustain pain and make the appropriate sacrifices—as that’s really what life was in their time: one long, drawn-out sacrifice. The ancient virtues of bravery, honesty, and humility are all different forms of practicing antifragility: they are principles that gain from chaos and adversity.