The Good Pain

It would be entertaining and amusing to fill a lengthy post every day with the follies of mankind, courtesy of the massive aggregating power of the Internet; indeed, the Opinion Journal’s James Taranto does something like this daily with his Best of the Web, though he mixes news and commentary in with the egregious examples of human folly.

Like many of you, I have various Google Alerts and email subscriptions to a wide variety of material, and of course much of what is delivered is immediately discarded. Just as in panning for gold, however, the occasional nugget is found mixed in with the sand and pebbles. Yesterday I received an emailed link to a blog post on how to keep your children off drugs and alcohol and was rewarded with an insight of much wider application than that worthy goal:

The need to eliminate disappointment is a reflection of today’s social norms. Recall the commercials featuring a man suffering from severe heartburn after eating a slice of pizza. The next clip shows the same guy polishing off a double-cheeseburger, smiling calmly at the camera as he holds a bottle of white pills that eliminated the symptoms of heartburn. Have you ever wondered what kind of message that sends our children?

Simply stated, the moral of the commercial is this: You do not need to endure pain!

Similar advertisements for depression drugs or even pain-relieving pills abound. While I would never discourage you from swallowing some Excedrin to rid yourself of a headache, the reality is that we are living in an unprecedented age of ‘I-should-not-feel-any-pain’.

I, too, have nothing against drugs properly used; I do have a big problem with the mentality illustrated by the commercials in question. Until recently most people endured certain things as part of normal life: The signs of aging, the impossibility of curing all ills, the fact that when Rover got old and sick it was time to put him down, imperfect cleanliness, imperfect diets, imperfect bodies--the fact that life would in turn bring the good, the bad and the ugly.

In the last couple of generations we’ve experienced unprecedented prosperity and technological advancement, yet it all seems not to be enough for many people today, and it can all be beautifully summed up and symbolized by the anti-acid commercials and the “reality” shows featuring “celebrity” surgeons cutting people open and inserting plastic shims into their cheeks and bags of liquid into their breasts. It’s even more extreme than the blogger quoted above said; not only do a large number of people believe they shouldn’t experience pain, they even believe they shouldn’t experience an uncomfortable look because of their physical appearance, whether the problem is congenital or self-inflicted. And a good portion don’t believe they should experience an uncomfortable emotion, either, with a pill or a lawsuit as the two preferred methods of obtaining relief.

One interpretation of how the Roman Empire fell is that eventually the ruling classes became all too comfortable and were no longer willing to expend their blood and treasure to secure the State. In the meantime, the people living on the frontiers were hardened by life and battle, and eventually all the genius of Roman society was not enough to hold them off. Luckily, it seems to me that my country, the United States, still has a core of steel, of men and women who do not fear and avoid pain when their long-term interests are at stake. This core might be said to be surrounded by a layer of brine, though, of people buying new breasts on credit and suing when they feel offended, or when someone declines to save them from the consequences of their own stupidity. As long as we maintain that steel core we’ll be all right.

Let us hope it grows fast enough to keep up with the corrosive effect of the others.

(Cross-posted at Eternity Road)