 there's something very distracting about pain that could kind of take you take your mind away from its troubles and then there's suffering in the quest in the service of a larger goal you know take raising kids as a good example where where it's difficult it involves sleepless nights you lose a lot of pleasure but it's valuable and part of the reason why things become valuable is you gotta work together what's up everybody and welcome to the show today we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends well welcome to the show paul thank you for joining us thanks for having me on now your latest book the sweet spot the pleasures of suffering and the search for meaning is out and we'd be remiss without starting with what is the sweet spot the sweet spot is the right balance between different human goals like the right balance between pleasure and happiness and meaning and morality and it's what we all have to struggle to find out ourselves and what the book is about is the role of pain and suffering and difficulty and struggling and struggle in getting there I think many of us don't view pain and suffering as a way to meaning or happiness and we're gonna unpack some of the science behind what goes on there I think it's really important for us to at least start defining some terms for our audience as Thanksgiving is approaching many of us might consider time with the family as suffering but what does science consider suffering um suffering has different has different meanings the meaning I use throughout my book is the sort of experiences you'd normally want to avoid it could be physical pain could be emotional pain could be anxiety and stress and struggle and it's kind of complicated here because I think some suffering is genuinely bad and I'll call it unchosen suffering to take it to extremes having your child die getting sexually or physically assaulted getting a terrible illness that's suffering that just sucks and you want to avoid it I'm not telling anything you don't know but my book is about chosen suffering and and I started I got interested in this because I noticed that a lot of pleasure involves some degree of suffering be the SM and scary movies training for a marathon that sort of thing and then I sort of started to think about the role of chosen suffering as part of a good life more generally yeah you introduced a term that I'd never heard before benign masochism yeah and this idea of horror movies mountain climbing war roller coasters bdsm why is it that we so often seek out sorrow fear and pain it's a great question and it doesn't have just one answer so one reason and benign masochism was taught up by my friend paul rosin and he he really noticed that well you know humans are the only animals that like tabasco sauce we like spicy foods some of us like roller coaster rides and scary movies and what's going on here and a lot of things one thing is contrast we like to play with contrast a bit one reason why it's funny really hot foods is because you drink some beer afterwards and that makes it feel so nice a hot bath hot sauna feels great because it's a coolness that that follows and that's part of it part of it is control the feeling of control and mastery over struggles and pain part of it is that pain can kind of get you out of your own head this is I think what goes on with some forms of extreme exercise or bdsm where you know there's something very distracting about pain that could kind of take you take your mind away from its troubles and then there's suffering in the quiet in the service of a larger goal you know take raising kids is a good example where where it's difficult it involves sleepless nights you lose a lot of pleasure but it's valuable and part of the reason why things become valuable is you got to work together it also begs the question of how much of our narrative and story building around these events and experiences color the meaning that we have and how much do we can how much control do we have over that framing in our own lives it's a good question so my my interest is in suffering and pain that we choose but then there's the suffering and pain that just come to us that just you know part of life and you're right we're good storytellers we often try to tell stories where there's an ultimate purpose for it you know sometimes these stories are religious you know god is testing me i'll be rewarded in heaven i'm uh you know it's part of some sort of divine plan but sometimes the stories we tell is we would say everything happens for for a reason or um this is making me stronger and more resilient sometimes the stories are true sometimes they're not so true but yeah we tend to um we i think suffering has real benefits but even when it doesn't we tend to think it is we drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell and if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends yeah i know in my own experience when i was training for the half marathon with johnny and we were going through the pain of running long distances and now even thinking about potentially running a full marathon part of that suffering had meaning for me in i was doing it with others i was sharing that experience with others and i know in the book there are some examples that you can certainly do solitary marathons you can do mountain climbing on your own but it was interesting to me how much of this experience involved others and being connected to others in that shared chosen suffering there's a lot of evidence both from the lab and from the real world where um joint suffering does bring people together and um and it connects people and you know this is true even for um chosen suffering there's a wonderful book called a paradise built in hell that looks at uh hurricane katrina and nine eleven and other you know major crises around the world and these often bring people together they often often people don't pray on each other and descend to savagery actually they become much kinder and much closer to one another so suffering does have that power but even solitary suffering let me just push back a little bit my bed is training for well i remember i trained for a marathon a long time ago and it was really tough and when we decide to do these things you don't say oh i'm looking forward to the blisters and the body aches and and you know and maybe failing and exhaustion but if you didn't have that you wouldn't have to glow in your eyes when you're talking about it if it wasn't tough it wouldn't be valuable i remember thinking during all that training and and a j i kept pointing to to him about the idea of how that beer after half marathon is is going to taste and i put a lot of of energy to thinking about that beer now however all done and gone it wasn't really the beer that i thought about and how good it was for me it was that summer of training all summer for it and feeling more engaged every day than i was like i i felt that i lived more in the moment that summer due to that training than i have so much so that i continued to run regularly after that and at that time the half marathon was the longest that i run since then i had run past that multiple times because i just felt so good there was the amount of chemicals that were released through the brain how i felt about myself how i felt about the world around me the way i would be able to think more clearly as i would trance out during those runs and and would wander through my mind those were the things that even to this day when i think about training again or getting back involved in that that that i'm looking for not the beer not the beer the beer does taste better afterwards and you know um and and you're touching upon a lot of the the virtues of suffering in this context one is it makes the beer taste better it makes it really it really adds to the pleasures later on um another is it makes the whole thing worthwhile looking at you guys while you talk about it you know you can tell this is a worthwhile experience and but and yet another while you're doing it and steve's still you right now there's a feeling of mastery of like you know you you have control over your body you have control over your pain yes it hurts yes it's going to be tiring yes your heart's going to pound you're going to breathe really hard but you've got it and maybe maybe and that takes time it takes time to develop the controlled ability to cope with the you know the pain training and running hard does to you and there's a deep satisfaction in doing it you none of these things would be possible if it wasn't hard well what i've noticed and obviously humans have been on this planet a while there really aren't many feats that only one person can accomplish so whether it's climbing Mount Everest you join a club of people who've reached the summit completing a half marathon i found even if i didn't run the half marathon with someone just hearing that i ran they got excited because they had that shared experience and i feel a lot of these choices and suffering and you talk about in the book those members who join isis for instance are looking for some form of connection even if they're suffering through the pain to get to that connected place suffering is a great source of community and you know it's it's it's something which can happen in a glorious and wonderful way it could happen in kind of an awful way you know hitler commented on how suffering brings people together and the value of suffering and struggle and you know you don't want to be like Hitler but one of the things people say about going to war is that they are never closer to anybody than the people they serve with and and i think that you know without going to war without a military context endeavors like training for a marathon are climbing Mount Everest have the same sort of feature