I believed this firmly for most of my life, and still think there’s some value in it, but I’ve learnt that this is a pretty privileged take on things. Targeted at a LW audience, it’s probably true and useful to a majority, but that’s because most of us (I believe) are living better lives than at least 80% of humanity, and thus fall into the truthish region of these ideas.
Most of humanity lives in uncertainty, instability, and the myriad day-to-day pains that are ultimately rooted in those. Most people don’t have the privilege of sorting through multiple sources or spending time gaining enough background knowledge, such that learning something becomes the joy it should be.
When your very survival, barely holding together a family and a home, takes up 15 hours of your day, it’s going to hurt if you’re trying to advance yourself with education or other self-improvement, it’s going to take a necessary toll on your physical and mental health. The reason “pain is the unit of effort” is such a common idea is that it was true for the majority and still is (if to a slightly lesser extent than back then, because of slowly declining poverty rates). For people in bad life situations, almost any extra effort is pain, so if you’re supposed to be working and are not experiencing pain, it’s a good heuristic that you’re most likely avoiding actual work by some means, because that’s such a tempting prospect, rather than that you’ve somehow cleverly worked around the pain.
The post is (likely) a good lens to evaluate your own life, and especially to leave behind baggage from previous less-privileged generations that might not apply any more, but make sure not to misapply it as a lens to view the rest of the world, to whom it likely doesn’t apply and may even be counterproductive.
I think this is an important consideration, and the picture does look different if you are living with chronic (physical or psychic) pain, but I disagree with the overall claim.
When your very survival, barely holding together a family and a home, takes up 15 hours of your day, it’s going to hurt if you’re trying to advance yourself with education or other self-improvement, it’s going to take a necessary toll on your physical and mental health.
This seems like an over-generalization, and does not mesh with my experience talking to family members who escaped poverty. If anything they found escape and respite in working on their education, and having hope and a direction to work towards increased their subjective well-being. The mindset may be determined by personality differences more than differences in circumstance.
I think what is true is that when you are carrying a huge amount of pain and urgency in your body day-to-day, you become numb to the amount of annoyance that is “studying for the fourth hour in a row” or “sharp pain in the wrists from bench pressing.” Depending on the situation this can be either marginally effective or actively dangerous, but regardless pain is not an accurate unit of effort or progress here. Perhaps the fourth hour of studying causes more than half of the total pain, but it is highly unlikely that the fourth hour of studying was responsible for more than half of the total learning that occurred. Of course, the fourth hour could very well still be worth doing, simply because any marginal speedup on “getting out of my current situation” is worth massive amounts of temporary unpleasantness.
If anything they found escape and respite in working on their education, and having hope and a direction to work towards increased their subjective well-being.
I think there’s a useful distinction to be made here between general mental state and specific moment-to-moment emotional experiences. Working on something, that gives hope and respite from a feeling of helplessness, increases overall well-being in the general sense, but doesn’t fully make up for the difficulties and annoyances that crop up while doing the work day after day after day, so in the moment it’s still pain that dominates their experience. (So maybe here is part of the answer to applying this advice in these situations—if what you’re working on improves general life satisfaction, even if it’s painful at the moment, then that’s an indication that you’re doing it right. Although, caveats: (A) it’s often difficult in these situations to tell if your life satisfaction is improving or not, both because −49 to −45 isn’t as easily felt as 2 to 6, and your life is unstable and fluctuating enough that there isn’t much of a reliable base state to compare to, and (B) this is more an indication of whether you’ve made the right strategic decisions—right course or career path that you feel good about - whereas I think the original point of the advice, and its maximum effectiveness IMO, is regarding tactical low-level decisions.)
I agree with your final paragraph entirely. Pain isn’t a reliable unit of effort beyond a point, even in these contexts. Over time, it starts growing super-linearly for linear effort.
I believed this firmly for most of my life, and still think there’s some value in it, but I’ve learnt that this is a pretty privileged take on things. Targeted at a LW audience, it’s probably true and useful to a majority, but that’s because most of us (I believe) are living better lives than at least 80% of humanity, and thus fall into the truthish region of these ideas.
Most of humanity lives in uncertainty, instability, and the myriad day-to-day pains that are ultimately rooted in those. Most people don’t have the privilege of sorting through multiple sources or spending time gaining enough background knowledge, such that learning something becomes the joy it should be.
When your very survival, barely holding together a family and a home, takes up 15 hours of your day, it’s going to hurt if you’re trying to advance yourself with education or other self-improvement, it’s going to take a necessary toll on your physical and mental health. The reason “pain is the unit of effort” is such a common idea is that it was true for the majority and still is (if to a slightly lesser extent than back then, because of slowly declining poverty rates). For people in bad life situations, almost any extra effort is pain, so if you’re supposed to be working and are not experiencing pain, it’s a good heuristic that you’re most likely avoiding actual work by some means, because that’s such a tempting prospect, rather than that you’ve somehow cleverly worked around the pain.
The post is (likely) a good lens to evaluate your own life, and especially to leave behind baggage from previous less-privileged generations that might not apply any more, but make sure not to misapply it as a lens to view the rest of the world, to whom it likely doesn’t apply and may even be counterproductive.
I think this is an important consideration, and the picture does look different if you are living with chronic (physical or psychic) pain, but I disagree with the overall claim.
This seems like an over-generalization, and does not mesh with my experience talking to family members who escaped poverty. If anything they found escape and respite in working on their education, and having hope and a direction to work towards increased their subjective well-being. The mindset may be determined by personality differences more than differences in circumstance.
I think what is true is that when you are carrying a huge amount of pain and urgency in your body day-to-day, you become numb to the amount of annoyance that is “studying for the fourth hour in a row” or “sharp pain in the wrists from bench pressing.” Depending on the situation this can be either marginally effective or actively dangerous, but regardless pain is not an accurate unit of effort or progress here. Perhaps the fourth hour of studying causes more than half of the total pain, but it is highly unlikely that the fourth hour of studying was responsible for more than half of the total learning that occurred. Of course, the fourth hour could very well still be worth doing, simply because any marginal speedup on “getting out of my current situation” is worth massive amounts of temporary unpleasantness.
I think there’s a useful distinction to be made here between general mental state and specific moment-to-moment emotional experiences. Working on something, that gives hope and respite from a feeling of helplessness, increases overall well-being in the general sense, but doesn’t fully make up for the difficulties and annoyances that crop up while doing the work day after day after day, so in the moment it’s still pain that dominates their experience. (So maybe here is part of the answer to applying this advice in these situations—if what you’re working on improves general life satisfaction, even if it’s painful at the moment, then that’s an indication that you’re doing it right. Although, caveats: (A) it’s often difficult in these situations to tell if your life satisfaction is improving or not, both because −49 to −45 isn’t as easily felt as 2 to 6, and your life is unstable and fluctuating enough that there isn’t much of a reliable base state to compare to, and (B) this is more an indication of whether you’ve made the right strategic decisions—right course or career path that you feel good about - whereas I think the original point of the advice, and its maximum effectiveness IMO, is regarding tactical low-level decisions.)
I agree with your final paragraph entirely. Pain isn’t a reliable unit of effort beyond a point, even in these contexts. Over time, it starts growing super-linearly for linear effort.