Health doesn’t consist in feeling good. Feeling good is the consequence of health. Attempting to feel good by force or contrivance won’t make you healthy, in fact it may harm you even worse by removing your ability to perceive your sickness. Our culture is terribly averse to pain of any kind. We want to ameliorate all kinds of suffering, because suffering is bad. We love our painkillers.
But suffering isn’t bad. Pain is only a signal, a sign, a warning. It has real utility, real value. Cows at the feedlot are happy because they have no understanding of where they’re headed. Pain and discomfort shouldn’t be an ultimate terror or evil to us. Yes, they’re unpleasant. But they’re there to help us, to guide us, to make us better.
To quote a very simple axiom: no pain, no gain. You don’t get any stronger if you never suffer any adversity, any challenge. That’s true of muscles, of people, of societies. If you try to remove all adversity, even in the interest of kindness, you’ll only succeed in removing everything that made life worth living, that made us strong enough to live it. Happiness and comfort are the consequences of a life well lived, not the goal.
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