I never threw a party until I was in my late 30s. I was always afraid people wouldn’t show up, or, even worse, that they would show up and quickly want to leave.
It felt like this particular fate could not be risked, which meant party-throwing was off the table. Other people could throw parties I guess, but I could not.
“No parties may be held in this lifetime” is quite a high cost to pay, just to protect yourself from a very occasional sort of pain. Yes it feels bad to have a lame party, but does it make sense to station yourself forever outside of the party-having population, solely to avoid having to feel that bad feeling two or three times in your life?
When I did start hosting parties, the usual outcome was that they were tremendously fun. Only one was genuinely disappointing. I had unwittingly scheduled it on the same day as another, more elaborately planned party. Several loyal attendees also got called into work or got sick and/or injured. Still, five or six excellent people showed up, including some who had gone to both parties. We sat around the kitchen table eating snacks and collaborating hilariously on a crossword.
Of course, now that I’ve actually “suffered” this long-avoided type of pain, it barely registers as a meaningful risk anymore. Why did I give up so much to protect against it?
I think this situation is common – to be giving up way too much in an effort to protect against certain kinds of pain. When protecting yourself from a certain unpleasant possibility becomes non-negotiable, you’re liable to suffer in other ways, often to a much greater degree.
For example, I used to dread small talk so much that I avoided meeting new people altogether. As we all know, small talk can be tedious or awkward, especially if you’re not good at it. It can create a kind of pain you might be tempted to avoid. But treating that as an unacceptable risk can result in far more pain, just in different forms.
I lived in fear of being introduced to any new person. My stomach sank when a friend would bring along someone I didn’t know. I especially feared the moment when that friend would excuse themselves to go the restroom, forcing me to make conversation with the stranger. Because I avoided these situations at all costs, I didn’t develop the skills to handle those situations. I declined most invitations to social events to pre-empt the possibility of experiencing this kind of pain.
Avoiding this one occasional type of pain created an entire hell-pattern of its own – the chronic pain of loneliness, alienation, self-esteem issues, and dependence on others. This is a ridiculous price to pay, in genuine suffering, for protection against the first kind. It’s like paying a billion dollars for an extended warranty on your laptop.
This is what happens when you avoid something “at any cost.” It ends up costing you a lot.
Most people wouldn’t get stuck in the same place I did, but there are many ways to fall into a massively lopsided pain-for-pain exchange. I’d guess each of us is caught up in at least a few of them.
Regular exercise is as close we have to a magic bullet for promoting overall health and disease prevention. If you exercise regularly, you feel better almost all the time, you look better, you gain confidence and energy, you sleep better, you live years longer, and those years are easier in many ways. But it requires a modest amount of vigorous manual labor each week, which is not always pleasant. Avoiding this modest amount of discomfort can literally take years off your life and lower its quality. But at least you avoided the displeasure of lifting a dumbbell.
In order to prevent the pain of feeling deprived occasionally, people spend money they don’t have and suffer constant financial stress.
In order not to risk the occasional unpleasant reaction, a person might get the same haircut for 20 years even though they feel stagnant and uncool every day.
In order to avoid the experience of making bad drawings for a few months, a person may never explore their interest in art, and always feel envious of people who do.
They get more subtle than this. The person who gets their friend to print things for them for years, rather than confronting the slightly intimidating task of buying a printer. The guy (me) who lives with a leaky faucet for years because he will not take an afternoon to figure out how to fix it. The person who never goes to the most interesting areas of town because they avoid parallel parking.
There’s also the person (and there are now millions of them) who avoids even a single minute of boredom or non-stimulation, and is utterly addicted to their phone.
Horrible deals abound.
As strong as these needlessly painful habits can be, they are choices, and we can at any moment switch the kind of pain we’re subjecting ourselves to.
It just takes a moment of adventurousness. I will risk embarrassment and do something new with my hair. I will get familiar with feeling of physical exertion, and become fit and strong for the first time in my adult life. I will learn the ins and outs of small talk, confronting its temporary pains, and free myself to socialize normally. Instead of getting annoyed by my sink six times daily, I will locate instructions on installing a faucet and carefully follow them.
Growth often takes exactly that form: choosing a different kind of pain. When you’ve had enough of the pain of loneliness and alienation, you can choose to risk the pain of rejection and awkwardness. And you might find that that’s a much better (and less painful) choice. When you’ve had enough of the pain of financial stress, you can choose the pain of budgeting and self-restraint, and you might discover just how much better it’s possible to feel.
Choosing a different kind of pain can end a long era of chronic suffering in your life, and sometimes the only cost is a few unpleasant minutes here or there. All you have to do is occasionally get curious about the kinds of pain you haven’t been choosing.
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Pool photo by Eric Nopanen
{ 32 Comments }
And, not in a harsh spirit at all, rather something I’ve found helped me is realizing: Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice.
Great read! Getting comfortable and taking the easy way out, the path of lease resistance is the human way. Take the second thought and let your guard down to make the first move (drive to the gym, book that appointment, meet for coffee, schedule that repair man to come over, set your book by your bedside so you read it). This article has exposed me to things I do in my day where I can take a moment to be a little “uncomfy” and take that first step towards something longer lasting. Thanks David!
You could even boil down the “human condition” almost entirely to our tendency to favor impulse / short term considerations over rationality / long term considerations. We have some ability to overcome that reflexive preference but we have so far to go.
I agree! There are some tangible examples in this post. Thank you for sharing!
Sending this pronto to all four of my adult kids/kids-in-law. And sending it TWICE to my own brain.
I think, sometimes that this fear of pain of produced not by a simple abstract fear of a thing in our head, but by repeated minor trauma and reinforcement that surrounds the thing itself.
I suppose the easiest example is math. if you’re not good at math right from the start then school is twelve to fourteen years of mild repetitive trauma. every homework assignment becomes an opportunity to suffer and eventually the suffering cumulates to a whole bunch of nope.
With other things we’re bad at the trauma is also cumulative. Small talk is an easy enough thing for a young kid to learn, but if you’re older and painfully shy you have a history of “I was trapped into small talk” and “I halfheartedly tried small talk and it didn’t go well” and “I was gonna make small talk but I waited too long and they looked at me funny” moments that genuinely hurt. So eventually you have a thousand instances of doing the thing halfheartedly that hurt, and those create the impression that the thing itself is odious.
And when you’re faced with a wall of momentary traumas like that it’s hard to imagine that doing it wholeheartedly is a solution, because that just sounds like “do the thing that hurt you even more.” Worse, still, the pain makes you flinch, turning even the most earnest attempts into half-hearted ones again, perpetuating the cycle of pain.
It’s not an easy thing to work through and I think that’s why so many people don’t do it deliberately. Instead they do it spontaneously and almost accidentally at certain times when they’re feeling adventurous or brave and their guard is down. And then it’s so easy that it feels like they’ve been lying to themselves about how hard it was, all this time. But what’s really going on is they’ve stumbled across a gap in the hedge. They’re able to mentally work themselves into a place where they’re able to bypass the timidity that made all the previous attempts painful, and once they’ve bypassed it once, finding the path through the brambles is easier the second time, and even easier the third, etc…
I’m bringing this up because I think for a lot of people this quest to conquer the old “nopes” doesn’t look like fighting through the brambles. In fact I suspect that, for some things at least, that’s counterproductive for many people. Instead, change looks more like stumbling across a gap in the hedge.
That accounts for some of the changes in my own life, like the time I quit smoking for good–a classic “gap in the hedge” moment when my internal resistance to quitting was low because I wasn’t actually trying to quit, I was trying to do something else (budget) and I basically quit by accident and after three days without a cigarette I realized I had made it past the first big hurdle and decided to ride the wave.
Agreed, and I think the hedge vs field of brambles analogy is perfect.
There have been a number of things where I’ve had such a strong reaction to an objectively innocuous thing (e.g. making a phone call to ask about an apartment rental) that my body was almost shaking. Fear is a very visceral thing. I don’t know if a totally abstract fear would be very effective at “protecting” us.
I started going to the gym last week for the first time in my adult life. “What if I can’t?” is becoming “I will” with the assistance of two hours a week of training and a 24/7 access card.
As long time Raptitude reader I have learned that the first step is always the hardest. I must reach out to the gym owner, get out the door each day, start on the rowing machine for 2 minutes. After that, it’s smooth sailing! Even when doing the thing is hard in the moment, it’s the good and rewarding kind of hard. It turns out, yes, it’s a little uncomfortable, but even in the moment it feels good.
I’m 53. I’m starting now.
Congrats on making this move!
I remember my first few visits to the gym. It felt so weird and I felt so self-conscious. The second time this feeling was noticably diminshed, and by the fifth time I think it was gone for good.
Let us not ask “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit….
Howdy David,
Your old pal Rocky here….
Just checking in. Most of your recent posts have been promoting
Getting Things Done”
Since I have no problem in that area…
I have had no need to comment
Best,
Rocky
Hello Rocky!
Have you an email address that I might use to communicate with you or can you email me to roll the ball ?
david at raptitude dot com
“Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of changing.” Tony Robbins
For sure. It’s possible not to realize when that has happened though.
Thank you for a wonderfully written, timely post.
I can relate to a lot of your scenarios. I started going to the gym around 18 months ago and struggled with almost every session for the first few weeks. It turns out that I now *love* the gym and go 5 or 6 times a week!
Some obstacles, however, seem monumental. Insurmountable, even. The struggle continues.
Ryan Holiday wrote a great book all about this struggle: The Obstacle Is The Way. It has a lot of real-life examples of how people have battled through difficulty.
There is a sort of “gym threshold” you can cross where you really start to like it. In my experience it isn’t that far away, and it is *so* worth pushing to get there. Because then all the effort-math changes. No force is necessary because it becomes genuinely attractive to you.
The Obstacle is the Way is such a great title. I read it years ago but just remember the title is often enough.
Welp, you did it again David..got inside of my head. I’m 60 and am still hung up on throwing parties. I’ve got the space, the time and I even think I could turn out a good one. But the anxiety for all the planning and preparations not to mention expecting judgment, albeit unspoken, keeps me from executing.
Happily, I’m getting better at ‘good enough’ and get that people would be happy just that you invited them for fun and refreshments. The backyard doesn’t have to look good.
Appreciate you talking about these ordinary universal experiences that trip us up.
My advice is just keep it modest, have fun planning it, and invite good people. If the people are high quality the party will party itself.
I’m currently learning Italian and the teacher encourages us often to “embrace the discomfort” (his words) of speaking aloud through frequent oral exercises and short conversations in couples and groups. He notes that he has taught advanced classes where the students can read and write quite well but are incapable of introducing themselves with any detail or conducting even brief off the cuff conversations. No pain no gain really pertains to language learning if the goal is to speak. This teacher is also really good at creating a comfortable environment to try, fail, laugh, and try again.
I really needed to hear this, especially w/r/t exercise. Good reminder that I’m not avoiding pain by not exercising, just forestalling it. Thanks, David.
We’ve all heard “The only fear is the fear of fear itself,” or something similar to that. Regardless, now that I am 76 years old I feel that I am making a shift into a different set of ‘meta’ fears—I have some type of, maybe what could be called ‘fears’ (about what’s soon down the road, i.e, at being 80, 85, and maybe into my 90’s), and yet I don’t have any fears, really. It’s like: As long as it’s legal, and not harmful to me or anyone else, who cares what I do; why be afraid of anything I do. If Trump gets elected and sends this country further down the drain more that it is, I’m too old to feel any of the dire long-term effects (although I do ‘worry’ (fear?) for the younger generations—I really do. But all-in-all, I am experiencing fear in a different way. Heck, when I was young I could have easily merited wearing a t-shirt that sported the message ‘NO FEAR!’, when I think back on the many risks I took (some of which worked to my advantage and financial betterment), as well as some of the fool-hardy things I did. But it’s different now—difficult to verbalize. Anyway, we are all going to be spending a lot more time dead no matter how long we were ever alive in this world, so why worry, really. Life is soooooo short, you eventually come to realize; as if our lives were a dream.
I quit my job of 10 years yesterday, in favour of a new job that will require a steep learning curve and very different day-to-day work. I’ll be cognitively challenged and uncomfortable. But the thought of another 10 years in my comfortable job, brain on autopilot, nagged at me enough to take the leap. Life’s short, and it’s the shots we don’t take that we will regret most. I’d like to have as few of those regrets as possible when I look back someday.
“No pain, No gain!”
“Feel the Fear, and Do it Anyway”
“Focus what’s in my/your control”
A few sayings that enter my head regularly.
Thank you David for another wonderful post.
It is continually fascinating (and tragic) how fear of a minor pain prevents major growth. And the thing is, I have the hunch to try and challenge this apprehension quite frequently, it just gets swallowed up in the rumination swamp. I’ve started a practice of acting on those hunches sooner, either through speaking up then and there or scheduling a block to go deeper into the unknown (hey, it’s only 25 mins lost if it was a terrible idea.) Speed seems to be an ally here. If I move faster, I’m suddenly waist deep in a different place and it’s usually pretty fun and rewarding!
Agreed that speed is crucial. Mel Robbins’ 5-second rule is all about that. Move before the mind starts to kick in and talk you out of it.
Also I like the idea of using blocks for this. It’s just enough time to stay in that new territory.
Have you discovered nonduality yet? That’s what you get to once you get fed up with the pain of being human :)
In this process now
“And, not in a harsh spirit at all, rather something I’ve found helped me is realizing: Pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice.”
How very true, Todd. I guess that’s the foundation of Buddhism, and that approach to thing. Then all good things can spring forth in your heart and mind, as the constant want/don’t want in relation to experiences quietens down.
“Hard choices easy life. Easy choices hard life”.
Hi
This is a first for me, first time to comment!
I don’t always have time to read your blogs but when I do, I can always relate to your topics and this one is right on point!
This was some much needed inspiration and I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Dave!
Plus, I was just telling myself this morning that, if I wanted to move forward in my business venture, I needed to go ahead, breakdown, and buy a printer. This might be my sign!