Men Should Suffer

I'm really starting to side with some of the Batman villains

At my first marathon, I was standing in a group of runners. It was the first organized run I had ever been a part of.

Before the start, someone asked what everyone was planning to listen to during the race. People mentioned podcasts or special playlists. One person mentioned “Make a Man Out of You”.

And my answer was “Oh. Uh… nothing. I’m just going to run.”

The response was blank stares.

Then someone replied: “That sounds awful.”

I was surprised that that was the consensus response. Aren’t we just supposed to be running? Like, more power to you if you want to listen to something, but just enjoying the thing I’m doing feels kind of like the point of doing the thing.

I’ve been called out for these kinds of habits for a long time. I don’t listen to music or podcasts when I lift weights, when I go on walks. Even on road trips, I mostly sit in silence. When my wife and I first met, we were long distance for the first three years of our relationship. And for 80% of my time on the road, I would just drive in silence.

And whenever I tell someone about these habits, I’m met with the same response the other runners had. “Why would you do that?”

Why do I do that? I didn’t have a coherent answer to that question. Not that people were actually curious, but after enough people thought it was peculiar, it made me want to find out.

The real answer was that as a kid, I never wanted to rely on anything. If I had a headache, I didn’t want an Aspirin, because if I was ever lost in the woods, I wouldn’t have any medicine. If I had a cut, I didn’t want a Band-Aid, because who was to say I’ll have access to Band-Aids forever. In math, I did my damnedest not to use calculators because I wanted my brain to be the calculator (I ended up with something closer to a random number generator).

That reason, in hindsight, was pretty stupid. But I’ve been doing this sort of thing for so long that even as a 34 year old man I’m pretty hesitant to rely on things when just sucking it up is an option.

At this point the logical thing to do would be to unlearn this type of thinking, and take advantage of modern comforts. Instead, I looked to science to hopefully validate my decisions.

And boy, did I validate them.

It turned out that my pointless little habits of self-deprivation to help prepare me for surviving the post-apocalypse likely had a pretty meaningful impact on my happiness (and probably no impact on my chances of surviving Mad Max). Because of what I found, I’ve expanded the number of simple pleasures I deprive myself from.

The key concept in neuroscience related to what I found is called hedonic adaptation.

Hedonic Adaptation means that when you’re exposed to good things frequently enough, they eventually stop being pleasurable and instead become requirements for your happiness.

Just think of air conditioning. If you took a caveman from the heat of the summer and threw them into an empty air conditioned room they would probably be very confused and at least a little angry, but they would probably feel so relieved to be out of the summer heat. Whatever this magic air stuff was, it was awesome. Put Mr. Caveman back in the summer heat and he’ll probably still be confused, but will remember it is an otherwise pleasant experience.

But when your air conditioning is on, that’s your baseline for happiness. If it suddenly stops working, your week is officially ruined.

That’s hedonic adaptation in action. Your brain isn’t designed for you to stay happy. It’s designed so that you continually find new things to keep yourself alive. If our poor, confused Caveman was satisfied after finding the first berry bush, he’d use that one up and have no guarantee of finding another. And if he didn’t find a replacement fast enough, he’d starve. So your brain doesn’t just let you enjoy something indefinitely. Your brain assumes that if you stop wanting more, you’ll die.

The study that best illustrates this is from the 70s. Researchers recruited recent lottery winners as one group and paraplegic/quadriplegics as a second group. And they asked them how happy they were. Sounds a bit like a shit question, but the results weren’t at all what researchers expected.

They compared these findings to ordinary people and found that within months, both groups had largely returned to the same happiness levels as ordinary people. To the lottery winners, their newfound wealth was their new air conditioning. For the paralytics, their unfortunate reality was their life as a caveman without it.

The even weirder finding, there was actually a benefit that paralytics had over lottery winners.

When they compared how much pleasure each group got from mundane everyday tasks like eating breakfast or talking with a friend, the difference between paralytics and ordinary people wasn’t statistically significant.

But lottery winners felt on average 13% less joy from those same activities. Lottery winners were experiencing so much good that everything else was worse in comparison.

Your brain won’t just accept that something is good forever without turning down the brightness on everything else. Comparison is the thief of joy, and your brain will compare, even between things within your own life.

This may seem sad, but you can use this to your advantage. Because it works in the opposite direction.

When you regularly choose things that are harder and less immediately rewarding, your brain recalibrates so that those same kinds of activities, the harder, less stimulating ones, become just as enjoyable as the easy, high-stimulation stuff used to be. It’s just easier to experience joy.

And the reverse is also true. Regularly choosing the easier, more stimulating activities, you end up making the higher effort, lower stimulating activities uncomfortable and boring. And now you have a lower threshold before something causes boredom and suffering.

We all have the same capacity for enjoyment, the question is how hard is it for you to access the higher ranges. Or how little does it take for you to experience something as suffering?

This demonstrates that every time you distract yourself from some uncomfortable experience, like a boring commute, or a workout, you aren’t just numbing the experience, you are actively training your brain to take less joy from your future mundane tasks. Eventually the podcast on your walk becomes a requirement, instead of an added bonus.

I’m not actually even saying “Don’t listen to music while you work”. I typically don’t, and for all the reasons I’m stating. I’m instead trying to point you to the fact that there is a cost for doing so. So before you think you’re cheating the gods of boredom, know that there is a price to pay. You just have to decide if it’s worth it.

After this discovery I’ve put in intentional work to decide where I think some suffering is worth it, and where I feel better off enjoying the modern conveniences. Folding laundry would be in my layer of hell, I have no problem doing something to make that suck less. I only have to do it once a week so it’s not frequent enough for my brain to fully adapt . From my perspective the cost is low and worth it.

The Optimally Fuckable Husband Project(TOFHP) has also been very helpful in just making these decisions for me. I don’t think there’s a parent on the planet who doesn’t at least occasionally dread hanging out with a bossy 4-year-old. I’m much more likely to show up for workouts in our cold garage when I’ve already deprived myself of other unnecessary comforts. Eating healthy in a culture of fast food requires you to accept that you aren’t getting the most possible enjoyment out of your food.

The very act of pursuing a Fuckable identity means accepting intentional deprivation. And the consequence is that the rest of my life becomes easier to enjoy.

You can’t minimize your suffering forever. Eventually the music stops working, and you’re back to suffering through the run anyway, except now silence costs you something too. Even the Caveman would eventually get used to the AC if you left him in there long enough.

So when you have the chance to suffer, know avoiding it isn’t free. Numbing your way through it requires you to borrow happiness from other places in your life. You have to decide if that’s a debt you’re willing to pay.