D08 Pain Principle

Which do you think is more likely?

You pick the low hanging fruit of an easier path in life because of your moral failings.

OR

You would pursue the challenging path of resolving needs no matter how difficult at first, if this option was more open to you.

Anankelogy

Anankelogy introduces you to various need-experience orientations. These are relatively fixed ways you experience your familiar needs. This principle speaks to your “easement orientation”.

You’re either oriented to resolve your needs over relieving their pain. You take the hard course first. Or you’re oriented to relieve your pain over resolving the needs causing your pain. You take the easy path first.

The less you can fully resolve your needs, the less you can function. Every unresolved need emotionally warns you of its threat to your ability to function. The less you can function over time, the more your pain builds up. The longer you must adjust to this mounting pain, the more you get used to coping with this manageable level of discomfort.

If you cannot consistently access what would restore you to full functioning, but must settle on some alternative or substitute to get you by, you naturally become oriented to seek relief over resolving your pounding needs.

In other words, it is not always simple to merely choose the challenging path upfront, to decide to endure the difficulties inherent when fully resolving your needs. Your life situation shapes your orientation to your needs. Options to live optimally may remain beyond your reach.

Need-response exists to give you optimal choices. So you can accept, with little risk of falling flat, the difficult path upfront to fully resolve needs.

Need-response

Here is where we apply this principle to improve our need-responding skills. We contrast popular norms creating a feel-reactive problem with our preferable need-responsive solution.

Reactive Problem

Game theory and rational choice theory provide a helpful framework for understanding the specific choices we make in life. But this approach can offer only part of the picture. Need-response recognizes the role of needs as they actually occur, with empirical evidence.

No matter how much you aspire to take the high road of nobly suffering to resolve needs, you likely find yourself having to settle for less. You needless feel guilty if you repeatedly take the law road of self-indulgence to cope somehow with your load of pain of unresolved needs.

Responsive Solution

Western culture biases us to primarily think of our individual choices. This lens can blind us from how our choices are limited by our social environments. Those able to access more resources to more fully resolve their needs often assume others enjoy about the same level of access.

Need-response incentivizes those with greater access to resources to improve accessibility to others less fortunate. Instead of relying on political generalizations or impersonal policies to spread wealth, need-response personally connects the advantaged with the relatively less advantaged.

Need-response offers the potential for all to take the challenging path to more fully resolve needs. And offers opportunity for the more advantaged to take the challenging path to support the full resolution of needs of others with a mutually beneficial conciliatory process. Because outrage is never as potent as the powerful incentive of love to mutually resolve each other’s affected needs.

Responding to your needs

How does this principle speak to your experience of needs? Post in our Engagement forum your thoughtful response to one of these:

• I’ve tried to take this nobler path of accepting difficulties upfront, but find myself repeatedly pulled back to ease my unrelenting pain.

• I’ve tried this approach of taking the hard road first, but I can’t say it helped me much.

• I once took the more challenging route of hitting a problem head on and it turned out great.

• I already orient my life to take the challenging road first, and let me tell you how it really is.

Instead of selecting one of these, post your own engagement feedback about your experience with the subject of this principle. Remember the aim is to improve our responsiveness to each other’s needs, toward their full resolution. If you’re new at posting here, first check the guide below.