James' World 2

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Health

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Can we live a good life without suffering?

Notice that I used the word “good” and not “happy.” It doesn’t make any sense to ask whether we can suffer and be happy at the same time, but can we live a full and meaningful life without certain kinds of suffering? That’s a much harder question.

I just watched an episode of The Twilight Zone that explores this in a way only that show could. It’s about a gangster who dies and wakes up in a place that has all the markings of heaven — or at least what a guy like that would imagine as heaven. He has all the sex and money and power he wants. He loves it at first. But then he grows bored and aimless and starts to hate it. So he asks his guide if he can go to hell instead, and that’s when he learns he’s already there.

A new book by the psychologist Paul Bloom, called The Sweet Spot, says this story captures the strangeness of human psychology about as well as anything can. It’s a deep dive into the relationship between suffering and meaning, and why living a purposeful life means caring about much more than happiness.

The book isn’t pro-suffering, and Bloom is very careful to distinguish “chosen” suffering from “unchosen” suffering, but it is an attempt to explain why we sometimes seek out hardship and struggle, and why the conventional image of humans as purely pleasure-seeking and pain-avoiding isn’t so much wrong as incomplete.

I reached out to Bloom for the latest episode of Vox Conversations. We talk about the role of suffering in human life, the shortcomings of hedonism, and why he would never plug into the Matrix.

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Getty Images/Malte Mueller

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When my oldest child started preschool, I was thrilled to get reports that she was following the rules, playing nicely with others, and just generally being her best, sparkly self.

Truthfully, I was also sort of surprised because at home — well. Most afternoons she’d tumble through the door in tears and wailing, usually not because of anything in particular. It was just her being out of sorts, annoyed at being denied some small indulgence, peeved at the need to wear a coat/shoes/pants.

This is apparently “after-school restraint collapse,” a term coined by a Canadian psychotherapist and teacher. For my daughter, after holding it all in and together throughout the day — not screaming at the teachers or kids about something minor, staying focused on the various directives coming her way — after school was when she’d run out of gas, and in the presence of her family, she was letting her freak flag fly. She was safe at home and giving us her very worst. It’s a fairly common thing, too, and hardly unexpected given that certain emotional resources aren’t infinite, especially when they’re still in the developmental phase. That said, it may never actually go away for most of us.

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Photo: Camerique/Getty Images

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A few days ago, my 4-year-old lifted up her shirt, pointed to her belly, and said, “Mommy, why is my tummy so big?” My heart skipped a beat, and I thought, This can’t be happening already. A moment later it occurred to me that she was probably (hopefully?) asking an innocent question about why the size of her stomach changes throughout the day, but I was nevertheless mortified. Recently my daughter has been asking me more and more whether she’s pretty and if she looks like a princess. She’s clearly getting the message from our society that looks and body size matter—even at the age of 4.

She’s not alone. Research suggests that preschool- and elementary-age children are more dissatisfied with their bodies now than ever before, that girls as young as 3 already perceive heaviness as “bad” and thinness as “good,” and that more than one-third of 5-year-old girls restrict their eating in order to stay thin.

If the pressure to be thin doesn’t seem like a big deal in itself, consider that kids who are dissatisfied with their bodies are more likely than others to become depressed and develop eating disorders or other dangerous habits. We constantly discuss the need to tackle the crisis of childhood obesity, and rightfully so—but we need to remember that more kids today have eating disorders than Type 2 diabetes. Nearly 1 in 3 high school girls, and nearly 1 in 6 high school boys, have disordered eating patterns serious enough to warrant medical help; one study found that 1 in 8 girls have made herself vomit at least once in the past three months.

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Illustration by Natalie Matthews-Ramo.

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