D09 Pain Principle

Which do you believe is truer?

Happiness is enjoying a trouble-free life with the latest in material amenities.

OR

Life offers more joy when meaningfully contributing to the lives of others.

Anankelogy

The more you settle into a comfort zone of avoiding risk to your security, and allow yourself to grow emotionally attached to every modern convenience, the less you engage the rich depths of life. Life is best enjoyed when facing challenges, and feeling a burst of purposefulness when succeeding.

Discomfort exists to warn you of threats to remove. So embrace it. Others are trying to remove a different set of threats than you, and that can prove uncomfortable—especially it they see you as one of the threats. But embrace the discomfort. Embrace it as a worthy challenge.

Instead of trying to remove the discomfort, listen for what your emotional warnings suggest you must remove in order to fully function. Remove that so you or others can function better. This discomfort is here to serve you so don’t serve it. Let it alert you to what to remove.

At first, your pain may feel urgent. It then typically shouts to you something you can do to react to the pain. It’s just an option. Unless your immediate security is at risk, you can pass on this option. Feel the pain but don’t act upon it. Reflect further.

What can you do about the core threat? Embrace this challenge to feel the pain, even as you remove barriers infringing on you or others wellbeing. Let that remove its cause for pain. Let the process with your noble goal give it the meaning to make it all worthwhile.

Challenges give meaning to life. No pain, no gain? The more you turn uncomfortable obstacles into meaningful challenges and then succeed in solving the problem by resolving the needs, the richer in purpose your life becomes. It typically makes any momentary suffering worth the endurance.

Your grueling season of cultivating these labor-intensive crops pays off in a bountiful harvest of transformed lives. Such joy runs far deeper than the mere pleasure of material things. Those shallow pleasures from winning at a video game or getting a thousand social media likes pales in comparison to the lasting pleasure of contributing something meaning to the lives of others.

You could seek opportunities to turn obstacles into meaningful challenges. And keep yourself oriented to meaningful joy with a ‘lens’ that instantly interprets any problem as an opportunity to unpack the needs not being properly resolved. That’s exactly what need-response is all about.

Need-response

You can either cling to the false promise of material happiness, and deny the undercurrents of misery if offers. Or you can embrace opportunities to create more meaningful paths for your life. Need-response offers you a way to shift from such passive living to a richer more engaged life.

Reactive Problem

The more you settle into the modern myth of materialism, and allow yourself to be lulled into the false securities of material success, the more you risk missing your life’s full potential. The more your wealth or other temporary gains create your meaning to live this life, the more vulnerable you leave yourself to utter despair if a disaster should strike and take it all away.

Here lies another reason why addictions become so emotionally painful. The more consumed by a pain-avoiding habit, the more you intuitively know your life is missing out on reaching its true purpose. The more debilitated by dysfunction, which you cope through with addictive things, the less you can provide meaningfully for others. Surely there is a path out of this vicious trap.

Responsive Solution

If lulled into the modern sleep of comforting complacency or into incapacitating addictions, need-response offers a free course to expand your natural tolerance for discomfort. NR101 walks you through a simple exercise that can restore your lost capacity to endure more discomfort.

The following courses offer you opportunity to create meaning by helping others to resolve their needs. In the process, you gain meaning while addressing sources of pain beyond your personal control. First, you learn to embrace the natural discomfort this path will demand of you.

Your ancestors could tolerate the biting cold of winter without central heating, and endure the scorching heat of summer without air conditioning. They had to. Not only because those technical amenities did not yet exist, but because they relied more on their natural capacity to adjust to wild swings in their immediate environment. There were many. You can get back to enduring more than you likely assume you can tolerate now.

Now you can regain this skill with this free course. It’s time to reacquaint yourself to nature’s least appreciated gift. It’s time to arm yourself with this greater capacity to face just about anything. It’s time to equip yourself to not be as easily pulled into outrage porn or depressed by overwhelming demands on your busy life. Do it now before the next disaster hits. You’ll be grateful you did.

Responding to your needs

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

• I have so many modern amenities that my life would be crushed if I lost them in a disaster.

• One time, I tried not using any social media and let me tell you how it went.

• My life is getting more meaningful after I gave up some creature comforts.

• I find my life has become much richer since losing a lot stuff that really doesn’t matter.

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.