Pain as a Unit of Effort

I read this post on LessWrong a while ago and my perspective on what hard work means to me has been radically changed.

“I noticed recently that, at least in my social bubble, pain is the unit of effort. In other words, how hard you are trying is explicitly measured by how much suffering you put yourself through.”

I think the main reason for this is that we’re conditioned to believe that, if we’re not in pain while attempting to achieve a task, that’s a signal that the task isn’t worth doing. This narrative tells us that real success comes, not from relishing your work, but from a Herculean tolerance for pain. This rings true for a lot of people I know and, in particular, Year 12/13-Rishane. In hindsight, some of the most fulfilling moments I had during my last couple of years in high school involved working really hard at difficult maths problems or thinking deeply about complicated, abstract literary pieces and enjoying every second of it. It’s a shame I didn’t give these moments the credit they were due. A further problem with this mentality is that it forces people into two camps. Those in Camp 1 work themselves to breaking point and either burn out or eventually realise they’re stuck doing something that they hate. Those in Camp 2 shut down and don’t try at all. Overall, that’s a pretty sad state of affairs. After reading this post, the ‘no pain, no gain’ mentality seems so much more unappealing to me. This is primarily because I’ve come to realise how much more productive being happy makes me. I seemed to think that the natural sequence of events went something like:

• Grind it out and do really painful, difficult, unappealing things → reap the benefits of your work → be happy

This doesn’t work because, more often than not, I don’t actually end up doing the painful things and that makes me even unhappier which creates a vicious cycle. So I’m trying to think about doing life like this instead:

• Do things that make you happy → get motivated to do difficult but rewarding and intrinsically enjoyable things → become even happier

Boom. Virtuous cycle.

I recognise that no one has complete liberty to only do the things that excite them and they find intrinsically rewarding. Sometimes, you just need to grit your teeth and (finally) do the damn dishes. But I also think it’s the case that we have more liberty to pick the work we enjoy doing for its own sake than we think we do and that the signal for valuable work isn’t how much we suffer while doing it.