194. Socially Necessary Pain

At some point in life, we will all have an experience where another person causes us to feel emotional pain. These experiences are sometimes as ordinary as someone making too much noise at night causing you to lie awake in frustration, and sometimes they are as heart-wrenching as someone telling you they no longer want you to be part of their life.

Experiences like these happen because we’ve collectively agreed that there are pain-causing actions we must be freely allowed to take in order for the social organism to function well. In the case of noise-making, we’ve decided that strictly policing rare occurrences of loud noise would too greatly restrict our freedom to enjoy ourselves. In the case of social rejection, we’ve decided that it’s a fundamental part of human relationships that we each have the freedom to choose whom we have them with.

Participation in society means we will all occasionally experience pain. To be well-adapted to this truth is to accept it as a necessary part of our social experience. Feeling pain is never enjoyable in itself, but there is still an opportunity to respond to it with compassion. In particular, we can offer ourselves compassion by accepting our own feelings and giving ourselves care, while also finding compassion for others — including those who are the source of our pain. At minimum, the latter means not lashing out in anger at those who act in ways that are socially allowed but also painful for us to bear.

We must keep in mind that there will also be situations where we will be the ones causing pain, and that the alternative to such pain would be much worse. For the only real alternative would be to isolate ourselves completely, to detach from the social fabric and escape from humanity altogether. But that would be no life at all. It would mean not only eliminating the joy of experiencing others, but abandoning the compassion for others that our own experience constantly compels us towards.