Why you should run towards pain

Ernst Junger was a German thinker who fought in both the world wars. In his essay On Pain, Junger argues that the sum total of pain doesn’t decrease over time. The effect he hopes to produce with this essay: "a bombshell bursting with delayed action."

Pain is revelatory. Junger writes: "Pain is one of the keys to unlock man’s innermost being." In pain, all pretense and social masks slip away. Pain truly reveals a "man's stature." Therefore, Junger writes: "Tell me your relation to pain, and I will tell you who you are!"

In chaotic times, the human memory remembers archetypal images. Junger writes: “The primordial memory of the lost Atlantis recurs” in the collective consciousness during the chaos of the 20th century.

Junger considers the belief “that reason can conquer pain” naïve - one that is losing “its allure.” Even if pain momentarily disappears, boredom replaces it. Junger has a striking description of boredom: “the dissolution of pain in time.”

One way to co-exist with extraordinary pain: make the body “a distant outpost” of your being. The true “command center” of your being should be a spiritual mission. When the body stops being the end, and becomes the mere means to a higher goal, then pain loses its power over us.

In our sensitive world, we try to marginalize pain and shelter “life from it.” In a heroic age though, the approach to pain is completely different. In a heroic age, "the point is to integrate pain and organize life in such a way that one is always armed against it.

Junger defines discipline as a constant and voluntary contact with pain. Instead of minimizing pain, we must attempt to maximize it and gradually increase how much is bearable to us. The goal is not escape from pain, but indifference to it.

Junger on language and reality: "Words change nothing. They are at best signs of change. Change, however, takes place in reality, and it becomes most clearly visible when we seek to understand this change without prior value judgment."

Junger writes that it is a sign of "superior achievement when life gains distance from itself." He argues that Julius Caesar was fit to be emperor as he had an "inborn noble detached judgment." To be preoccupied with pain, and avoiding it, suggests an inferior nature.

Bottom line. Technology has removed much pain from life. And yet our very ease is "oddly agitated." Pain is reality giving us crucial negative feedback. Pain is also a scale with which to measure genuine growth. Instead of escaping it, we should aim at raising our pain threshold.