Reflections on “Pain is not the unit of effort” by Xiaoyu He

The same water that hardens an egg softens a potato

The article starts by pointing the index finger and fixing your gaze on a confusion that, much like a virus, has subtly spread to occupy part of our collective unconscious.

First, what’s the confusion? We believe the right way to know how much we’ve exerted ourselves is to measure the suffering/pain we feel as a consequence of that effort. For example (and here’s a personal one), I used to feel I was working hard when I got home, truly exhausted, with no energy for anything but eating something and going straight to bed.

Now, where does this confusion come from? It seems to come from a kind of saving optimism that tells us things will get better at some point in the future. We feel we’re delaying gratification and that it’s really okay to suffer “for now”: we think about the fruits of the seeds we’re planting. I think the main confusion here comes from living in the future. Our mind is excellent at searching for what it lacks so that, at some point, when we do get it, our real life can begin—when I have X job, when I’m with Y person. On a smaller scale, I recently went through a move and convinced myself that what I really needed to enjoy my home was a rug. (Or, another example, Oliver Burkeman’s BMX.)

Now imagine a similar situation, much more direct. Imagine you’re running and there’s a sharp pain in one spot of your knee. If you’re in a race and want to finish, obviously, you’ll keep running. But life isn’t a race: in a race, the goal is to finish; in life, it doesn’t seem so, does it? We project goals and try to reach them, but the point isn’t to reach the finish line ; the point is what you can do while you’re running. Life is a bit more like a song—you have to listen to it while it plays.

Final

None of this is to say we shouldn’t do hard things, but that it’s probably better to measure them by the input (let’s call it time) than by the output (positive results, negative pain). Likewise, I do think it’s possible to be too resilient. Humans are made to adapt, true, but also to walk and change our environment.