Traveling at the Speed of Pain

Recently, I read a cool Albert Einstein quote on the internet: “A man should look for what is, and not what he thinks should be.” It was great. There was a cute little picture with him looking all science-y and everything. The quote is poignant and smart-sounding, and it engaged me for all of a couple of seconds before I scrolled on my phone to the next thing. Except there was one problem: Einstein didn’t say it. Here’s another viral Einstein quote that gets passed around a lot: “Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” That’s not Einstein, either. Or how about “I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots”? Nope, not him. Einstein might be the most ill-used historical figure on the internet. He’s like our culture’s “smart friend,” the one we say agrees with us to make us sound smarter than we actually are. His poor mug has been plastered next to quotes about everything from God to mental illness to energy healing. None of which has anything to do with science. The poor man must be spinning in his grave. People project shit onto Einstein to the point that he’s become a kind of mythical figure. For example, the idea that Einstein was a poor student is bogus. He excelled at math and science from an early age, taught himself algebra and Euclidean geometry in a single summer at age twelve, and read Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (a book that present-day graduate students struggle to finish) at age thirteen. I mean, the guy got a PhD in experimental physics earlier in life than some people get their first jobs, so clearly he was kind of into the school thing. Albert Einstein didn’t initially have big aspirations; he just wanted to teach. But being a young German immigrant in Switzerland, he couldn’t get a position at the local universities. Eventually, with the help of a friend’s father, he got a job at a patent office, a position mind-numbingly dull enough for him to sit around all day and imagine wacky theories about physics — theories that would soon flip the world on its head. In 1905 he published his theory of relativity, which launched him to worldwide fame. He left the patent office. Presidents and heads of state suddenly wanted to hang out with him. Everything was Gucci. In his long life, Einstein would go on to revolutionize physics multiple times, escape the Nazis, warn the United States of the oncoming necessity (and danger) of nuclear weapons, and be the subject of a very famous photo in which he’s sticking out his tongue. But today, we also know him for the many excellent internet quotes that he never actually said. Since the time of (real) Newton, physics had been based upon the idea that everything could be measured in terms of time and space. For example, my trash can is here next to me now. It has a particular position in space. If I pick it up and throw it across the room in a drunken rage, we could theoretically measure its location in space across time, determining all sorts of useful stuff like its velocity, trajectory, momentum, and how big a dent it will leave in the wall. These other variables are determined by measuring the trash can’s movement across both time and space. Time and space are what we call “universal constants.” They are immutable. They are the metrics by which everything else is measured. If this sounds like common sense, it’s because it is. Then Einstein came along and said, “Fuck your common sense; you know nothing, Jon Snow,” and changed the world. That’s because Einstein proved that time and space are not universal constants. In fact, it turns out that our perceptions of time and space can change depending on the context of our observations. For example, what I experience as ten seconds, you could experience as five; and what I experience as a mile, you could theoretically experience as a few feet. To anyone who has spent a significant amount of time on LSD, this conclusion might kind of make sense. But for the physics world at the time, it sounded like pure craziness. Einstein demonstrated that space and time change depending on the observer — that is, they are relative. It is the speed of light that is the universal constant, the thing by which everything else must be measured. We are all moving, all the time, and the closer we get to the speed of light, the more time “slows down” and the more space contracts. For example, let’s say you have an identical twin. Being twins, obviously you are the same age. The two of you decide to go on a little intergalactic adventure, and each of you gets into a separate spaceship. Your spaceship travels at a pokey 50 kilometers per second, but your twin’s travels at close to the speed of light — an insane 299,000 kilometers per second. You both agree to travel around space for a while and find a bunch of cool stuff and then meet back up after twenty earth years have passed. When you get home, something shocking has happened. You have aged twenty years, but your twin has hardly aged at all. Your twin has been “gone” for twenty earth years, yet on his spaceship, he experienced only about one year. Yeah, “What the fuck?” is what I said, too. As Einstein once said, “Dude, that doesn’t even make sense.” Except it does (and Einstein never said that). The Einstein example is important because it shows how our assumption of what is constant and stable in the universe can be wrong, and those incorrect assumptions can have massive implications on how we experience the world. We assume that space and time are universal constants because that explains how we perceive the world. But it turns out that they are not universal constants; they are variables to some other, inscrutable, nonobvious constant. And that changes everything. I belabor this headache-inducing explanation of relativity because I believe a similar thing is going on within our own psychology: what we believe is the universal constant of our experience is, in fact, not constant at all. And, instead, much of what we assume to be true and real is relative to our own perception. Psychologists didn’t always study happiness. In fact, for most of the field’s history, psychology focused not on the positive, but on what fucked people up, what caused mental illness and emotional breakdowns, and how people should cope with their greatest pains. It wasn’t until the 1980s that a few intrepid academics started asking themselves, “Wait a second, my job is kind of a downer. What about what makes people happy? Let’s study that instead!” And there was much celebration, because soon dozens of “happiness” books would proliferate on bookshelves, selling in the millions to bored, angsty middle-class people suffering existential crises. One of the first things psychologists did when they started to study happiness was to organize a simple survey. They took large groups of people and gave them pagers — remember, this was the 1980s and ’90s — and whenever the pager went off, each person was to stop and write down the answers to two questions: 1. On a scale of 1–10, how happy are you at this moment? 2. What has been going on in your life? The researchers collected thousands of ratings from hundreds of people from all walks of life, and what they discovered was both surprising and incredibly boring: pretty much everybody wrote all the time. At the grocery store buying milk? Seven. Attending my son’s baseball game? Seven. Talking to my boss about making a big sale to a client? Seven. Even when catastrophic stuff happened — Mom got cancer; I missed a mortgage payment on the house; Junior lost an arm in a freak bowling accident — happiness levels would dip to the two-to-five range for a short period, and then, after a while, would return to seven. This was true for extremely positive events as well. Getting a fat bonus at work, going on dream vacations, marriages — after the event, people’s ratings would shoot up for a short period of time and then, predictably, settle back in at around seven. This fascinated researchers. Nobody is fully happy all the time, but similarly, nobody is fully unhappy all the time, either. It seems that humans, regardless of our external circumstances, live in a constant state of mild-but-not-fully[1]satisfying happiness. Put another way, things are pretty much always fine, but they could also always be better. Life is apparently nothing but bobbing up and down and around our level[1]seven happiness. And this constant “seven” that we’re always coming back to plays a little trick on us, a trick that we fall for over and over again. The trick is that our brain tells us, “You know, if I could just have a little bit more, I’d finally get to ten and stay there.” Most of us live much of our lives this way, constantly chasing our imagined ten. You think, hey, to be happier, I’m going to need to get a new job; so you get a new job. And then, a few months later, you feel you’d be happier if you had a new house; so you get a new house. And then, a few months later, it’s an awesome beach vacation; so you go on an awesome beach vacation. And while you’re on the awesome beach vacation, you’re like, you know what I fucking need? A goddamn piña colada! Can’t a fucker get a piña colada around here?! So, you stress about your piña colada, believing that just one piña colada will get you to your ten. But then it’s a second piña colada, and then a third, and then . . . well, you know how this turns out: you wake up with a hangover and are at a three. It’s like Einstein once advised, “Never get wasted on cocktails with sugar[1]based mixers — if you need to go on a bender, may I recommend some seltzer, or if you’re a particularly rich fuck, perhaps a fine champagne?” Each of us implicitly assumes that we are the universal constant of our own experience, that we are unchanging, and our experiences come and go like the weather. Some days are good and sunny; other days are cloudy and shitty. The skies change, but we remain the same. But this is not true — in fact, this is backward. Pain is the universal constant of life. And human perception and expectations warp themselves to fit a predetermined amount of pain. In other words, no matter how sunny our skies get, our mind will always imagine just enough clouds to be slightly disappointed. This constancy of pain results in what is known as “the hedonic treadmill,” upon which you run and run and run, chasing your imagined ten. But, no matter what, you always end up with a seven. The pain is always there. What changes is your perception of it. And as soon as your life “improves,” your expectations shift, and you’re back to being mildly dissatisfied again. But pain works in the other direction, too. I remember when I got my big tattoo, the first few minutes were excruciatingly painful. I couldn’t believe I’d signed up for eight hours of this shit. But by the third hour, I’d actually dozed off while my tattoo artist worked. Nothing had changed: same needle, same arm, same artist. But my perception had shifted: the pain became normal, and I returned to my own internal seven. This is another permutation of the Blue Dot Effect. This is Durkheim’s “perfect” society. This is Einstein’s relativity with a psychological remix. It’s the concept creep of someone who has never actually experienced physical violence losing their mind and redefining a few uncomfortable sentences in a book as “violence.” It’s the exaggerated sense that one’s culture is being invaded and destroyed because there are now movies about gay people. The Blue Dot Effect is everywhere. It affects all perceptions and judgments. Everything adapts and shapes itself to our slight dissatisfaction. And that is the problem with the pursuit of happiness. Pursuing happiness is a value of the modern world. Do you think Zeus gave a shit if people were happy? Do you think the God of the Old Testament cared about making people feel good? No, they were too busy planning to send swarms of locusts to eat people’s flesh. In the old days, life was hard. Famines and plagues and floods were constant. The majority of populations were enslaved or enlisted in endless wars, while the rest were slitting each other’s throats in the night for this or that tyrant. Death was ubiquitous. Most people didn’t live past, like, age thirty. And this was how things were for the majority of human history: shit and shingles and starvation. Suffering in the pre-science world was not only an accepted fact; it was often celebrated. The philosophers of antiquity didn’t see happiness as a virtue. On the contrary, they saw humans’ capacity for self-denial as a virtue, because feeling good was just as dangerous as it was desirable. And rightly so — all it took was one jackass getting carried away and the next thing you knew, half the village had burned down. As Einstein famously didn’t say, “Don’t fuck around with torches while drinking or that shit will ruin your day.” It wasn’t until the age of science and technology that happiness became a “thing.” Once humanity invented the means to improve life, the next logical question was “So what should we improve?” Several philosophers at the time decided that the ultimate aim of humanity should be to promote happiness — that is, to reduce pain. This sounded all nice and noble and everything on the surface. I mean, come on, who doesn’t want to get rid of a little bit of pain? What sort of asshole would claim that that was a bad idea? Well, I am that asshole, because it is a bad idea. Because you can’t get rid of pain — pain is the universal constant of the human condition. Therefore, the attempt to move away from pain, to protect oneself from all harm, can only backfire. Trying to eliminate pain only increases your sensitivity to suffering, rather than alleviating your suffering. It causes you to see dangerous ghosts in every nook, to see tyranny and oppression in every authority, to see hate and deceit behind every embrace. No matter how much progress is made, no matter how peaceful and comfortable and happy our lives become, the Blue Dot Effect will snap us back to a perception of a certain amount of pain and dissatisfaction. Most people who win millions in the lottery don’t end up happier in the long run. On average, they end up feeling the same. People who become paralyzed in freak accidents don’t become unhappier in the long run. On average, they also end up feeling the same. This is because pain is the experience of life itself. Positive emotions are the temporary removal of pain; negative emotions the temporary augmentation of it. To numb one’s pain is to numb all feeling, all emotion. It is to quietly remove oneself from living. Or, as Einstein once brilliantly put it: Just as a stream flows smoothly as long as it encounters no obstruction, so the nature of man and animal is such that we never really notice or become conscious of what is agreeable to our will; if we are to notice something, our will has to have been thwarted, has to have experienced a shock of some kind. On the other hand, all that opposes, frustrates and resists our will, that is to say all that is unpleasant and painful, impresses itself upon us instantly, directly and with great clarity. Just as we are conscious not of the healthiness of our whole body but only the little place where the shoe pinches, so we think not of the totality of our successful activities but of some insignificant trifle or other which continues to vex us. Okay, that wasn’t Einstein. It was Schopenhauer, who was also German and also had funny-looking hair. But the point is, not only is there no escaping the experience of pain, but pain is the experience. This is why hope is ultimately self-defeating and self-perpetuating: no matter what we achieve, no matter what peace and prosperity we find, our mind will quickly adjust its expectations to maintain a steady sense of adversity, thus forcing the formulation of a new hope, a new religion, a new conflict to keep us going. We will see threatening faces where there are no threatening faces. We will see unethical job proposals where there are no unethical job proposals. And no matter how sunny our day is, we’ll always find that one cloud in the sky. Therefore, the pursuit of happiness is not only self-defeating but also impossible. It’s like trying to catch a carrot hanging by a string tied to a stick attached to your back. The more you move forward, the more you have to move forward. When you make the carrot your end goal, you inevitably turn yourself into the means to get there. And by pursuing happiness, you paradoxically make it less attainable. The pursuit of happiness is a toxic value that has long defined our culture. It is self-defeating and misleading. Living well does not mean avoiding suffering; it means suffering for the right reasons. Because if we’re going to be forced to suffer by simply existing, we might as well learn how to suffer well.