Under the right circumstances and in the right doses, physical pain and emotional pain, difficulty and failure and loss, are exactly what we are looking for. (Page 0)
the right kind of pain can set the stage for enhanced pleasure later on; (Page 0)
The importance of suffering is old news. It is part of many religious traditions, including the story in Genesis of how original sin condemned us to a life of struggle. It is central to Buddhist thought—the main focus of the Four Noble Truths. It is at the core of Max Weber’s notion of the Protestant work ethic. (Page 0)
Vinculable con el que hice sobre cómo el dolor une a un colectivo y al general de xygalatas.
“The purpose of life,” Peterson has written, “is finding the largest burden you can bear and bearing it,” while Žižek believes that “the only life of deep satisfaction is a life of eternal struggle.” I find these quotes a bit florid—does the struggle really have to be eternal?—but still, in their recognition of the centrality of suffering, these men are my brothers. (Page 0)
A lot of people think that humans are natural hedonists, caring only about pleasure. I want to convince you that a close look at our appetite for pain and suffering shows that this view of humanity is mistaken. It turns out that we are inclined toward something deeper and more transcendent. (Page 0)
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” wrote Shakespeare. (Page 0)
the World Values Survey found that 86 percent of people they assessed globally describe themselves as “rather happy” or “very happy.” When experts insist that their societies are awash in misery, they are unknowingly illustrating one of the big findings in happiness research, which is that people underestimate how happy other people are—we tend to think of ourselves as lucky exceptions. (Page 0)
In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger describes America at the end of the eighteenth century, with two civilizations fighting over the same land. It was a time, he says, when “factories were being built in Chicago and slums were taking root in New York while Indians fought with spears and tomahawks a thousand miles away.” In the course of this conflict, some of the colonists would be kidnapped, usually women and children. Surprisingly, despite the considerable deprivations and the estrangement from family and friends, many of those who were captured liked their new lives. They would marry their captors, become part of their families, and sometimes fight alongside them, sometimes hiding from their rescuers. In some cases, they had to be tied up in order to complete arranged prisoner exchanges, and when they were brought back to their original homes, they often escaped and tried to return to their Native American communities. (Page 0)
In his early years as a psychiatrist in Vienna, in the 1930s, Frankl studied depression and suicide. During that period, the Nazis rose to power, and they took over Austria in 1938. Not willing to abandon his patients or his elderly parents, Frankl chose to stay, and he was one of the millions of Jews who ended up in a concentration camp—first at Auschwitz, then Dachau. Ever the scholar, Frankl studied his fellow prisoners, wondering about what distinguishes those who maintain a positive attitude from those who cannot bear it, losing all motivation and often killing themselves. He concluded that the answer is meaning. Those who had the best chance of survival were those whose lives had broader purpose, who had some goal or project or relationship, some reason to live. As he later wrote (paraphrasing Nietzsche), “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how.’” (Page 0)
Sobre el poder y la importancia del sentido en la vida humana. Cómo la pérdida de sentido se puede, a veces, asociar a problemas de salud mental.
This book defends three related ideas. First, certain types of chosen suffering—including those that involve pain, fear, and sadness—can be sources of pleasure. Second, a life well lived is more than a life of pleasure; it involves, among other things, moral goodness and meaningful pursuits. And third, some forms of suffering, involving struggle and difficulty, are essential parts of achieving these higher goals, and for living a complete and fulfilling life. (Page 0)
THIS BOOK WILL explore two different sorts of chosen suffering. The first involves spicy food, hot baths, frightening movies, rough sex, intense exercise, and the like. We’ll see that such experiences can give pleasure. They can increase the joy of future experiences, provide an escape from consciousness, satisfy curiosity, and enhance social status. The second is the sort involved in climbing mountains and having children. Such activities are effortful and often unpleasant. But they are part of a life well lived. (Page 4)
omnipotence is boring. If there were no kryptonite, who would care about Superman’s adventures? Actually, true omnipotence would be misery. There is an old Twilight Zone episode that elaborates on this point. A gangster dies and, to his surprise, wakes up in what seems to be paradise. He gets whatever he wants—sex, money, power. But boredom sets in, and then frustration, and finally he tells his guide that he doesn’t belong in heaven. “I want to go to the other place,” he says. And his guide responds that this isn’t heaven; he is already in the other place. (Page 5)
A more puzzling syndrome is pain asymbolia. This is a condition wherein people feel pain and describe their experience as painful—but they don’t find the pain to be unpleasant. They offer up parts of their body to doctors and scientists for intrusions that, for you or me, would be agonizing. But it’s not as if they are numb; one patient reported, “I feel it indeed; it hurts a bit, but it doesn’t bother me; this is nothing.” This disorder is associated with damage to parts of the brain such as the posterior insula and the parietal operculum, areas that, more generally, respond to threat. (Page 8)
Distintos mecanismos a la base de la experiencia del dolor.
This sort of experience is usually negative. Being charged by a tiger is the worst. But the badness of the experience isn’t a result of the fear. It is because it would be awful to be maimed or killed by a tiger. Suppose you know that there’s no real risk (perhaps you are in a virtual reality simulation). You might still experience fear—your body might react in much the same way—but it’s not necessarily bad fear. It might be fun fear. (Page 11)
In studies I’ll describe later, researchers found that fans of horror movies experienced just as much fear when they watched a film like The Exorcist as those who dislike horror movies. Contrary to some theories, then, those who enjoy frightening movies are not emotionally numb. Rather, they like the fear. In fact, the more fear they experience, the more pleasure they get. (Page 11)
Cornett also notes the importance here, as in all negative experiences, of choice. To have just had a breakup and then suddenly, by chance, to hear a song like Adele’s “Someone Like You” would likely be an unpleasant experience. We like to have some control over when we burst into tears. (Page 12)
Many researchers in positive psychology avoid talking about happiness, replacing it with phrases like “subjective well-being.” One reason to avoid the term is that researchers often want to make comparisons between countries, and the words “happiness” and “happy” don’t translate well. An English speaker can say, “She is happy sitting here reading,” while speakers of French and German can’t use the equivalent words heureux and glücklick in the same context. That is, the English word is more expansive than its equivalents in other languages. It’s easier to be “happy” if you speak English. (Which does not mean, of course, that it’s easier to be happy.) (Page 16)
It turns out that for experienced happiness, money matters only up to an annual income of about 89,000 for inflation.) Apparently, the day-to-day experiences of a well-off person and a very rich person aren’t that different, perhaps because the sorts of things that lead to experienced happiness, such as social contact and rewarding work and good health, don’t necessarily become abundant as you get richer. What about the effects of money on satisfaction? Just as with experienced happiness, money is related to satisfaction, and again there are diminishing returns. But here’s the difference: While there is a threshold after which experienced happiness levels out, there doesn’t seem to be one with satisfaction. There is no point in their study where more money isn’t associated with more satisfaction. When the question is “How is your life as a whole?,” the more money, the better. (Page 20)