The organizing principle of the modern world is pain. Not just avoiding it — also trading in it, taking refuge in it, and using it to justify our actions. Pain has so many uses. Why would you ever give up such a versatile tool?
Simple Picture
ELI5: pain is a Swiss Army knife. You can use it to prove you care (“look how much I’m suffering for this”), to hide from complexity (“at least the pain is simple”), and to dodge responsibility (“I’m already at my limit, you can’t ask more of me”). Giving up pain means giving up all three — which is why almost nobody does.
Three Uses of Pain
We trade in pain when we use it to bargain for progress. The assumption: the bigger the impact you want, the more you must suffer. The depth of your sacrifice becomes the measure of how much you care. But suffering can become its own metric, optimized to an extreme as all metrics eventually are. When the world does not yield to your efforts, it is easier to use the pain you are enduring as a proxy for the progress you have not made.
This is locally-optimal behavior at the motivational level. The strategy works: suffering does signal commitment — to yourself and to others. But it locks you into a game where the only way to prove you care more is to suffer more. The finite player trades pain for titles; the infinite player asks whether the game itself is worth the candle.
We take refuge in pain because it is self-annihilating. Pain temporarily turns off the ego that accuses you of not doing enough, not being enough. It is a refuge where the overwhelming complexity of modern life is reduced to a simple, pulsating throb. This connects directly to depression — the psyche’s defensive shutdown is a form of refuge in numbness, which is pain’s quieter cousin. Both serve the same function: reducing an unbearable signal to a manageable one.
We use pain to justify ourselves when there are no other excuses. “Can’t you see I’m suffering? Can’t you see I’m at my very limit?” Pain passes the buck to some other cause, some other perpetrator. As long as I am suffering, I am shielded from responsibility for the consequences of my actions. But I have to keep suffering to keep that shield in place. This is suffering elevated to sacrament — pain converted from signal into shield, maintained because putting it down means picking up responsibility.
This is the mechanism behind choosing unhappiness: if you are unhappy, it is because you judged being unhappy to be good for you. Pain justifies inaction. It excuses the relationships you will not fix, the risks you will not take, the self you will not become. The self-acceptance reframe applies: self-rejection is not a defect but a strategy, and pain-as-identity is one of its most durable forms. The focusing problem is the specific delivery mechanism: there is always a problem — the job, the money, the relationship — and its permanent presence ensures the shield is always up. If one problem resolves, the next surfaces immediately, because the point was never resolution but the alibi that suffering provides.
What Giving Up Pain Requires
Giving up trading in pain means accepting that you cannot create change you have not experienced. You cannot create freedom for others through your own bondage. You cannot empower others through your own demoralization. You cannot create a fulfilling life for others by draining your own of its color. You are a seed, and that is not how seeds work.
This is the caring insight: caring creates an internally felt compass. If the compass runs on pain, it points toward sacrifice. If it runs on aliveness, it points toward contribution — which Adler distinguishes from self-sacrifice: those who sacrifice their own lives for others have conformed to society too much.
Giving up refuge in pain means getting back in touch with the body. The opposite of pleasure is not pain — it is dissociation, the departure of mind from body into a fantasy of its own creation. This is the same departure that focusing addresses: most people either analyze from outside or drown in emotion. The felt sense — the body’s pre-verbal knowing — is available only to someone who has not left their body behind.
Giving up pain as justification means taking responsibility. Not responsibility as blame, but responsibility as power. Taking responsibility for your past, your choices, your behavior, your life — while leaving aside shame and guilt, which are just another form of pain disguised as justice.
The Body as Compass
One measure of personal power is how much time elapses between when something happens and when you are able to feel it. The shorter that span, the greater your ability to respond to what is happening now instead of the story you create about it in your head.
This is emotional-wisdom made operational. Emotions carry information. The body never lies. We become better people not out of abstract duty but because we feel the pain of others directly in our body. The assertiveness framework says the same thing from a different angle: affection is automatically repressed with the repression of anger — the system does not let you selectively shut down. Open the channel to pain and pleasure both arrive.
The fear is that embracing pleasure means losing control — going off the deep end of self-gratification. We cannot escape the moralistic framing of pain as intrinsically good and pleasure as bad. But the idea is not ecstasy at all times. It is learning to sense when something is good for you, to feel what enough is. How much love would feel like enough? Can you imagine being happy enough? Having enough space in your life to actually live it?
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “just do what feels good — life is short.”
The midwit take is “this is irresponsible hedonism that ignores the necessity of discipline and sacrifice.”
The better take is that pleasure as an organizing principle is not the absence of effort but the refusal to use suffering as proof of virtue. The question is not “does this hurt?” but “does this make me come alive?” Head-driven desires require willpower; heart-driven desires do not — as emotional-wisdom puts it, if everything in your life requires constant effortful maintenance, the direction is wrong and the system is fighting itself.
Main Payoff
Until we know what we deeply, truly want, we are at the mercy of externally defined obligations that keep us docile and obedient. Pain is the mechanism of that docility — the internalized whip that makes external enforcement unnecessary.
The price of accessing the body’s intelligence is that you have to feel what it offers, directly and often without warning. As you expand your capacity to feel your emotions, you become more honest — because the body never lies. The shift is from organizing life around what you should endure to organizing it around what makes you alive. Not because pleasure is more important than pain, but because aliveness is a better compass than suffering.
References:
- Tiago Forte, Pleasure as an Organizing Principle, Ribbonfarm
- adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism