On Practicing Discomfort - A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy - Book Club #22

In my last post on this book I reviewed the stoic strategy known as negative visualization, in this post we will explore an extension of this technique that was popularized by the philosopher Seneca. Seneca’s extension of this technique is to not only contemplate bad things happening, but also to periodically “practice” those bad things.

One of the famous things that Seneca utilized this for was “practicing poverty”:

“We should, that is, content ourselves with “the scantiest and cheapest fare” and with “coarse and rough dress.”

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Current Book & Quotes From: A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William Irvine

 
 

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Another philosopher, Musonius, takes this practice a step further. He thinks that we should sometimes actually cause bad things to happen. I’ll preface this by saying that “causing bad things to happen” doesn’t mean causing extreme bad events to happen, it might mean causing a much smaller “bad thing” like allowing yourself to be hungry for a few hours before eating.

“In particular, we should periodically cause ourselves to experience discomfort that we could easily have avoided. We might accomplish this by underdressing for cold weather or going shoeless. Or we might periodically allow ourselves to become thirsty or hungry, even though water and food are at hand, and we might sleep on a hard bed, even though a soft one is available.”

By allowing ourselves to experience little discomfort, we harden ourselves and prepare for that situation to happen for real. Another benefit to practicing discomfort is one that is an immediate reward: as soon as you practice discomfort by say, sleeping on a hard bed, you will immediately appreciate your soft bed. Similarly, if you wait to eat until you have been hungry for a few hours, you will enjoy your next meal much more than if you had eaten it when you were simply getting the urge to eat.

Many people have said that this “practicing discomfort” by inflicting small amounts of pain on yourself is a way of self-punishment and is thus, unhealthy for the mind. The argument of the Stoics is that they do not practice the uncomfortable in order to punish themselves, but rather, they practice it so that they can increase their enjoyment of life and to greater appreciate those small things that many of us take for granted - like food, clean water, or a soft bed to sleep on.

“What the Stoics were advocating, then, is more appropriately described as a program of voluntary discomfort than as a program of self-inflicted discomfort.”

Voluntary Discomfort as a “Vaccine”

“If all we know is comfort, we might be traumatized when we are forced to experience pain or discomfort, as we someday almost surely will. In other words, voluntary discomfort can be thought of as a kind of vaccine: By exposing ourselves to a small amount of a weakened virus now, we create in ourselves an immunity that will protect us from a debilitating illness in the future”

An ever more prevalent issue in our society is comfortability - with technology, medicine, food etc. at rapid availability, our comfort zones have shifted to be extremely high. Many of us no longer experience much discomfort in our daily lives which can make us weak when we inevitably face a little discomfort.

I think a great example of this shift is the saying “First-World Problems.” I hear it a lot, especially when I hear people talking about their children. A child may complain that their phone died and they may say “it’s the end of the world”. They have become so comfortable with their lives that one of the biggest issues they face is their phone dying when just a few hundred years ago people were dying in the streets because they didn’t have any food to eat or clean water to drink.

Who’s to Blame?

Many people like to try and point fingers and push the blame onto children or their parents for how they were raised. I do think that a major source of the issue is that parents themselves don’t know how to teach their children to appreciate what they have. I think another source is that parents inherently want their children to “have it better than they did”.

“Musonius would argue, to the contrary, that someone who tries to avoid all discomfort is less likely to be comfortable than someone who periodically embraces discomfort. The latter individual is likely to have a much wider “comfort zone” than the former and will therefore feel comfortable under circumstances that would cause the former individual considerable distress. It would be one thing if we could take steps to ensure that we will never experience discomfort, but since we can’t, the strategy of avoiding discomfort at all costs is counterproductive.”

And this leads me to the question of the day… If we as a society continually try to make it easier for people to live, then won’t we cause these “first-world dilemmas” to become ever more prevalent? Do you think we should make practicing discomfort a regular occurrence in our lives?

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