I’ve been sitting with this post for a couple days and I’m starting to feel like it is only the tip of the iceberg. Here are three more pieces of the phenomenon to add some color:
1. My brain may be artificially injecting unpleasantness into effort. When engaged in activities that fall into the category of “work” I think my brain adds additional, unnecessary doses of drowsiness, anxiety, and feelings of low status and low agency. While doing the same activity, I can make these feelings disappear by remapping the activity in my head as “play.” I hypothesize that this is an attempt to prove to myself that I am the kind of person who tries hard.
2. In attempts to reintegrate old memories of working hard in school, I feel a mental flinch every time I suggest the hypothesis that “In this instance, I put myself through a ton of pain for no reason.” I predict that the primary immune reaction people will have to reading this post is the feeling of “This can’t be true, or else all my suffering would have been pointless!” People like very much to ascribe meaning to suffering. This also maps onto behaviors like “Back in my day...” complaining and slapping people down for looking for easy weight loss solutions “because losing weight is supposed to be hard.”
3. Part of the “pain is the unit of effort” heuristic is that pain is supposed to be the signal that you’ve exhausted your mana bar. Part of why it’s so attractive is the idea that if you don’t spend your mana, you’re wasting it. So you work up to your pain tolerance to spend it all. My rebuttal to this model is that human energy is really frigging weird and a fixed mana bar is not a good model for it. I can have an entire afternoon of small group meetings and come out of them feeling more energized than I went in. Others have claimed that human energy is even weirder; for example in the discussions around Kensho I recall Valentine making a claim (can’t find the exact place) indistinguishable from “There is a way to input ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA into the brain through meditation practices that unlocks infinite energy mode.”
Semi-related to point 2, I often think about a quote from the end of the 4th season of Six Feet Under. One of the members of the family goes through a pretty traumatic ordeal where his life was threatened by a criminal, and has been processing it through the season. His dead father talks to him and says the following, at the climax of the final episode of the season.
“You hang onto your pain like it means something, like it’s worth something. Well, let me tell ’ya, it’s not worth shit. Let it go.” — Nathaniel Fisher, Sr.
I meditate on it sometimes, when I wonder if I’m putting myself through too much pain because it’s supposed to narratively be worth it or something.
In the late 00′s, I was made aware of the Hero’s Journey memeplex, the sequence of all Western stories, based on Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. At some point after that, I recognized that it’s the same set of instincts as the Stages of Grief—or rather, the stages of grief, when experienced as a Hero’s Journey, lead to the successful end of a particular grieving.
The first stage of grief is denial, and the first step of the hero’s journey is life in the “doomed village”: things look normal and sound normal, but something’s profoundly wrong in the world, and it’s about to crash in on the hero.
What really spun my head around was realizing my emotional traumas were imposed on me by someone whose subconscious was abusing my Hero’s Journey instinct to make me walk through his pain to slay his demons for him. After that, I was able to let go of his narrative thread and try to find where I’d dropped mine five years before.
I have the feeling that there’s a cycle most non-overachiever get stuck into, when buying in to this whole “no pain no gain” nonsense. Pain and exhausting oneself would lead people to distance themselves from whatever they are attempting. In those case where people can’t just give up on something (for example, university students can’t just choose to drop their studies without facing some serious negative emotions), the pain causes them to slack and then, when they try to catch up with the time loss, they try to reproduce the classic “training from hell” popular in anime applied to studying.
“See, if I’m struggling to keep awake, I’m at the tenth coffee cup, it’s four a.m. and my eyes hurt like hell, it means I’m surely learning a lot, since I’m in so much pain...” and since the last study session was that unpleasant, the cycle just goes on and on...
“This can’t be true, or else all my suffering would have been pointless!” People like very much to ascribe meaning to suffering.
I think this is mainly cognitive dissonance at work, trying to send away the discomfort. You might get some insight reading about it, if you aren’t familiar with the process already.
I’ve been sitting with this post for a couple days and I’m starting to feel like it is only the tip of the iceberg. Here are three more pieces of the phenomenon to add some color:
1. My brain may be artificially injecting unpleasantness into effort. When engaged in activities that fall into the category of “work” I think my brain adds additional, unnecessary doses of drowsiness, anxiety, and feelings of low status and low agency. While doing the same activity, I can make these feelings disappear by remapping the activity in my head as “play.” I hypothesize that this is an attempt to prove to myself that I am the kind of person who tries hard.
2. In attempts to reintegrate old memories of working hard in school, I feel a mental flinch every time I suggest the hypothesis that “In this instance, I put myself through a ton of pain for no reason.” I predict that the primary immune reaction people will have to reading this post is the feeling of “This can’t be true, or else all my suffering would have been pointless!” People like very much to ascribe meaning to suffering. This also maps onto behaviors like “Back in my day...” complaining and slapping people down for looking for easy weight loss solutions “because losing weight is supposed to be hard.”
3. Part of the “pain is the unit of effort” heuristic is that pain is supposed to be the signal that you’ve exhausted your mana bar. Part of why it’s so attractive is the idea that if you don’t spend your mana, you’re wasting it. So you work up to your pain tolerance to spend it all. My rebuttal to this model is that human energy is really frigging weird and a fixed mana bar is not a good model for it. I can have an entire afternoon of small group meetings and come out of them feeling more energized than I went in. Others have claimed that human energy is even weirder; for example in the discussions around Kensho I recall Valentine making a claim (can’t find the exact place) indistinguishable from “There is a way to input ↑↑↓↓←→←→BA into the brain through meditation practices that unlocks infinite energy mode.”
Semi-related to point 2, I often think about a quote from the end of the 4th season of Six Feet Under. One of the members of the family goes through a pretty traumatic ordeal where his life was threatened by a criminal, and has been processing it through the season. His dead father talks to him and says the following, at the climax of the final episode of the season.
I meditate on it sometimes, when I wonder if I’m putting myself through too much pain because it’s supposed to narratively be worth it or something.
In the late 00′s, I was made aware of the Hero’s Journey memeplex, the sequence of all Western stories, based on Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces. At some point after that, I recognized that it’s the same set of instincts as the Stages of Grief—or rather, the stages of grief, when experienced as a Hero’s Journey, lead to the successful end of a particular grieving.
The first stage of grief is denial, and the first step of the hero’s journey is life in the “doomed village”: things look normal and sound normal, but something’s profoundly wrong in the world, and it’s about to crash in on the hero.
What really spun my head around was realizing my emotional traumas were imposed on me by someone whose subconscious was abusing my Hero’s Journey instinct to make me walk through his pain to slay his demons for him. After that, I was able to let go of his narrative thread and try to find where I’d dropped mine five years before.
I have the feeling that there’s a cycle most non-overachiever get stuck into, when buying in to this whole “no pain no gain” nonsense. Pain and exhausting oneself would lead people to distance themselves from whatever they are attempting. In those case where people can’t just give up on something (for example, university students can’t just choose to drop their studies without facing some serious negative emotions), the pain causes them to slack and then, when they try to catch up with the time loss, they try to reproduce the classic “training from hell” popular in anime applied to studying.
“See, if I’m struggling to keep awake, I’m at the tenth coffee cup, it’s four a.m. and my eyes hurt like hell, it means I’m surely learning a lot, since I’m in so much pain...” and since the last study session was that unpleasant, the cycle just goes on and on...
I think this is mainly cognitive dissonance at work, trying to send away the discomfort. You might get some insight reading about it, if you aren’t familiar with the process already.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tMhEv28KJYWsu6Wdo/kensh?commentId=wgb3wu6kQYdCpoehL This reply to Kensho seems to be what you’re talking about.