The Pleasures of Suffering

Those of you who grew up in the 80s may remember a bubble bath product known as Mr. Bubble. If you sent in two box tops and $5, they’d send you a t-shirt. Mr. Bubble’s motto? Makes getting clean almost as much fun as getting dirty. I have always loved that — the reminder that getting clean is part of cycle of gratifying human experience … and the getting dirty part is half the fun, maybe more. After a massage, in a state of bleary-eyed gratitude, I once said to the masseuse — “you make getting relaxed almost as much fun as getting stressed.”

In recent decades, psychologists have begun to study the science of human flourishing. There has been much discussion of optimal cognitive states, such as flow, and the conditions that lead to optimal human experience — deep sleep, vigorous exercise, a healthy diet, mental challenge, and a warm and engaged community. Many of us have been conducting studies of one, trying to assemble the right ingredients for the perfect productive, gratifying day. What has often gotten lost in this analysis, in my opinion, is the possibility there is no ideal human state of mind, but rather there are optimal cycles of human experience. Those cycles include stress and relaxation, pain and pleasure, regret and recalibration, aspiration, and eventually, achievement.

No two people better understand the nuance and modulation that are critical to a fully realized human experience than Paul Bloom, author of the masterful new book, The Sweet Spot: The Pleasures of Suffering and the Search for Meaning, and Susan Cain, author of Quiet, and now the forthcoming book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.

Paul and Susan in conversation? Well, that is a recipe for magic. I relished this conversation, and I think you will, too. Listen to it below, on?Apple Podcasts or Spotify , or read the highlights below and let’s discuss in the comments!

Why are we drawn to unpleasant experiences?

Susan Cain: It feels to me, reading your book, as if you started off wondering about these questions of why we are drawn to unpleasant experiences, whether it's horror movies or sad songs. But I feel like your book actually ends up becoming a real instruction guide—and meditation on—the nature of happiness and meaning.

Paul Bloom: I don't know if this happens with you, but the book is somewhat unrecognizable from the proposal. I was going to call it The Pleasures of Suffering, and it was going to be about why we willingly do things like eat spicy foods and take hot baths. Why do we seem to take pleasure in suffering? It was going to explore the psychology of it. But as I began to do that, I became interested in suffering more broadly. I became interested in human motivation. And in the end, it's an argument for what I call motivational pluralism. We don't just want pleasure; we want other things, too. Want to be good. We want to have meaningful lives. We want to have a range of different experiences. We want different things, and suffering could be a route to getting many of these things.

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Negative emotions aren’t always negative. It’s about perspective.

Susan: You talk about negative emotions not necessarily being unpleasant, which sounds like a paradox, because if they're negative, then by definition they would seem to be unpleasant. Can you tell us more about what you mean?

Paul: So one way to approach this issue is through David Hume and his famous paradox of tragedy. He’s interested in fictional experiences, like books or plays, and he says, Why do we sometimes go through sorrow and terror and anxiety even though those things are inherently unpleasant? It’s an enormous puzzle, and people have wrestled with it since.?

One response to this is: These feelings, although typically negative, are not in themselves bad. Sometimes we can take pleasure from them. Sometimes we can get insight from them. Sometimes they are unpleasant, but we can revel in them nonetheless.

One way to think about this is fear. Imagine a case where you're really afraid. Like, I don't know— It's the middle of the night and you hear heavy footsteps and people running towards you. It's very scary. But what makes it unpleasant? I think what makes it unpleasant is that this is a situation that could involve injury or death or something like that.

Imagine you could feel fear in a case where there's no real threat to you. You're fantasizing, you're dreaming, you're in a haunted house. Now it takes on a different texture. You say, “I love being afraid. I want to be afraid. I came here to be afraid.”

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You can play with pain to give yourself subsequent pleasure.

Susan: Tell us about the contrast theory of happiness.

Paul: So, sometimes suffering is part of fun. You can ask, “Why do we have hot baths and saunas and spicy foods? What's going on?” One thing is simple contrast. The brain is a difference engine. Experiences are not typically thought of in terms of absolutes, but they're relative to what we've thought of before, relative to our expectations, and relative to what we're feeling. So, you know, going without food for a while makes food taste better. Eating spicy food and having your mouth burn sets the stage up for drinking some cool beer. You're not going to get that kind of relief without the pain to begin with.?

I gave a talk in Finland a few years ago, and my host took me to a sauna. Classic Finnish sauna. You're in there, and you're broiling. You're just broiling. It feels awful. But it's built so you hop right out into a lake. And it is blissful. It is mind-blowingly blissful. And then when you're done—broil, lake; broil, lake; broil, lake—you’re sitting there in a bathrobe and attractive people give you beer and sausages. It’s just bliss.

You play with pain in order to give yourself subsequent pleasure. I don't know that there's a deep evolutionary story here. It's a hack people use.

These highlights were edited and condensed. You can hear the entire conversation between Paul and Susan on?Apple Podcasts , Spotify , or wherever you listen.

Episode Notes

• Check out Paul's Book Bite
• Grab a copy of The Sweet Spot
• Preorder a copy of Bittersweet
• Follow ?the The Next Big Idea wherever you listen
• Download?the Next Big Idea app !
• If this topic interests you as much as it does me, check out my conversation with Anna Lembke , author of Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, about the neurochemistry of pleasure and pain, and the importance of challenge in our age of over-abundance.