Wonderful observation. I really appreciate this perspective.
Recently, I'd taken some time away from my career to focus on my fiction writing. I came to this project with the belief that it had to be full of suffering, modeled after what I'd seen in other artists. But, slowly, I'm learning that difficult balance between pleasure and suffering. With any endeavor, we need to work past the preconceptions that our society fills us with: what should work look like? How should we feel doing it? How should we approach it? How much should we suffer?
When we approach these questions and start to think for ourselves--how we want our lives to look, the texture, the feeling, the amount of suffering, the way we approach our work and setbacks, we can then choose to work in our own unique way. Some suffering is necessary; however, the amount of suffering I have created for myself in the past few months is due to the belief that I had to work a certain way. I believed I needed to struggle hard to create good fiction--but I only did that because THAT'S the way that I'd seen creativity depicted in the our culture.
So, in addition to choosing our own amount of suffering, we must be careful about the narratives that we formulate our lives around. If we admire the starving artist model, the person who suffers severely in order to create, and who is in constant pain when he is not creating--putting himself into a cycle of suffering in which the benefits do not outweigh the drawbacks, then of course we're going to be miserable. Following this model, I was miserable! I was looking up to the WRONG people. I revered the wrong stories. I used the wrong life model.
Thank you for sharing this wonderful article. I hope others find as much value in it as I have!
There's an excellent analogy similar to what you talk about 'finding your pace', I believe James Clear talks about. Each person runs at a different 'rate' and finding the rate that works for us is the only option or we burn out or lose interest
I discovered my Acceptable Suffering Ratio when I started taking a GLP-1 to mitigate diabetes. A day or two every few weeks of nausea and gastrointestinal distress in exchange for living past seventy--worth it.
Participating in life at the age of 20 and one has not calibrated their suffering ratio yet ... hmmmm a first world problem. In general, humans (particularly young humans) don't calibrate their consequence ratio by listening to advice or observing others suffer. The best calibration is to experience a consequence that is at or just past their limit.
These days it is not unusual to meet a young person (to me that is under the age of 40) that has never burned themselves, never fallen off of a bike, never fallen out of a tree, or never pinched their finger in a door. They certainly never have gone hungry or were not sure if they would survive until tomorrow. They were raised in a well-to-do-safe environment.
There are lots of other examples, but this lack of calibration means these folks are very poor at estimating the danger resulting from some action or what people are willing to do to achieve some goal. They can't understand why they can't achieve something because they have no idea that some "effort" is required.
There are all sorts of ramifications: engineers producing an unsafe design because they can't imagine what could go wrong (WCGW); people participating in some on-line challenge because they don't realize the instigators hope it will go wrong; many folks in the first world vastly underestimating what displaced people will do in order to survive.
I was lucky, I grew up in a time when I was generally allowed to hurt myself in small ways in order to learn not to hurt myself in big ways. My engineering mind, even from a young age, was able to extrapolate cause and effect from suffering small consequences. A mentor of mine actually observed and commented on this very thing: he said (I am paraphrasing) "I am glad to see that you are willing and allowed to do some semi dangerous things in order to understand the real dangers in life.
Don't know how to solve this conundrum but it causes real harm in the world.
do u know if there is a causal factor with men online in comment sections who are 100% sure of themselves and them having a goatee? or is it just correlation? thank u
Exactly, the "fragilista" problem. Obsess on removing stressors and friction from your life and, one day, something big happens (for example, Thanksgiving Day for a turkey).
Kids (in the U.S.) nowadays go on playdates with very narrow and specific start and end times, program of activities, etc... what could go wrong?
This is great advice. I'm in the middle of a career transition because I finally figured this lesson out the long hard way. After years of observing people who got to the point I am now in my field, and noticing that they didn't seem happy, I found myself reaching that same point and being -- profoundly unhappy. I think that everything you point out in this piece about our misguided ideas about suffering is true and relevant to my situation, and I would add an additional point that was driving me and I would imagine a lot of people who go through a similar process: the belief that one is special, and will somehow be able to do things differently than all those other people who ended up unfulfilled and unhappy. So in other words, one element of finding one's true "acceptable suffering ratio" involves giving up statistically unsupported beliefs about one's unique ability to make all the suffering worth it.
Isn’t surrogation, in psychology, confusing the metric of the process for the process itself? In the old days, the Soviet Union used “tonnage shipped” as a metric for tractor factory productivity. So they optimized for really, really heavy tractors that got stuck in Ukrainian mud, and were hard to turn, difficult to fix, and expensive to fuel.
Asking folks on the other side of the gauntlet for their metric of satisfaction is confusing that metric for the actual experience of the career; there’s survivor bias, washout bias, and the bias is of those you DIDN’T interview built into that. So the gauntlet test is fishy.
IMO, to some extent, you have to become “attuned to your instrument” and be able to discover and discern “what processes & suck do I actually find fulfilling” rather than “what rewards are worth the suck.” Rewards, enjoyment, and fun are over-rated; feeling alive is what matters.
Here I'm assuming a simplified model where you can observe the outcome for everybody who enters the gauntlet, but you're right that you're going to get a biased sample if you only can see the people who chose to continue, not the people who quit.
Here's something bizarre: you were actually one of several things that together convinced me to try improv, and it's fascinating (thanks!), and I have **never** seen this "I hate my job" phenomenon you describe. We do sometimes get stuck in arguing scenes, or in structureless wacky nonsense, but not this pull towards suffering. I have no interpretation, only this ground fact.
I think arguing/teaching/transaction/"I'm stupid or drunk or useless" scenes are a less obvious version of this, but a similar thing: we're choosing to do the less fun thing rather than the more fun thing. It's funny that "follow the fun" is something that people have to be reminded of. It's like being reminded to eat dessert.
I see where you're coming from, but in my experience the most obvious application of "do the fun things" doesn't work. If you're a wizard or an astronaut, often you don't quite know what to do, or you behave in a clearly make-believe/theatrical way. It feels like a flip between "I'm an actor, playing a character, and thinking about what that character would say/do", versus becoming the character and behaving naturally. Maybe kinda like when you learn a foreign language and at some point you can start thinking in it? And it's easier to do this if you don't have to invent too much all at once, hence you start with something familiar and not too fun (haven't seen much of stupid/drunk either, but a lot of talking-about-what-we're-gonna-do, which is a similar problem I guess).
I think there's a balance -- I don't (yet?) know how to be a teenage monarch, but I know how to be a swimmer afraid to jump from the diving board. Maybe as you get more experience and confidence, you can shift the balance to more adventurous parts and still be convincing (to the audience and to each other).
Wish I would not of read. Now I'm suffering on how to reply.
How did I get signed up for your email anyway? What was I thinking? Given I like it so much shouldn't I become a paying subscriber to you? Why do I read anything on substack anyway? Most of the time it just makes me suffer trying to understand why the author misses the point. But that's more about me than it is about them. Is reading random opinions on the internet worth the suffering? My hubby tells me I'm crazy for reading and commenting. More suffering dealing with his judgements. I'm 65 and I still don't understand how much I should suffer. You would think I would have figured that out by now!
Pain is good! Extreme pain is extremely good! My world view of suffering.
Dan Gilbert was on the Lives Well Lived podcast recently and one of the highlights for me was his astute advice that the experience of others is a better guide to the outcome (of whatever thing you’re considering) than your own imaginings.
interesting. in this framing, i have felt past my Acceptable Suffering Ratio for a long time, and as we all know, there is no glory in that. i'm going to have to think about this for a while. great post ◡̈
I was the pimply guy since I was 15. My condition was so severe that I had a serious skin infection caused by Streptococcus that almost compromised my heart, joints, and kidneys. I spent two months taking daily antibiotics to avoid further complications. When I learned about isotretinoin (Roacutan here in Brazil) at age twenty, already in college, I didn't hesitate. My dermatologist warned me about all the side effects, and I even had tests every two months to check if my liver was okay. Regarding depression and suicide, I never worried because I was much more prone to those problems due to my low self-esteem because of my bad skin. My Acceptable Suffering Ratio was this eight months of skin treatment because I gained everything else in my life afterward. The gains in my self-image, self-confidence, and everything else are intangible. I still don't see very well at night, but I've adapted.
KUDOS Adam for distinguishing between the Sisyphean and the Herculean. People keep saying the former when meaning the latter, and I try to explain that the whole point of Sisyphus is the pointlessness of his task rather than how hard or long it is. I've been harping on about it over and over and over again to no effect, and it's beginning to seem...well... y'know...
Light bulb article - “acceptable suffering ratio” now right up there with “mandatory basking moment” in things I wish I learned earlier but happy using to expanding life now!
Wonderful observation. I really appreciate this perspective.
Recently, I'd taken some time away from my career to focus on my fiction writing. I came to this project with the belief that it had to be full of suffering, modeled after what I'd seen in other artists. But, slowly, I'm learning that difficult balance between pleasure and suffering. With any endeavor, we need to work past the preconceptions that our society fills us with: what should work look like? How should we feel doing it? How should we approach it? How much should we suffer?
When we approach these questions and start to think for ourselves--how we want our lives to look, the texture, the feeling, the amount of suffering, the way we approach our work and setbacks, we can then choose to work in our own unique way. Some suffering is necessary; however, the amount of suffering I have created for myself in the past few months is due to the belief that I had to work a certain way. I believed I needed to struggle hard to create good fiction--but I only did that because THAT'S the way that I'd seen creativity depicted in the our culture.
So, in addition to choosing our own amount of suffering, we must be careful about the narratives that we formulate our lives around. If we admire the starving artist model, the person who suffers severely in order to create, and who is in constant pain when he is not creating--putting himself into a cycle of suffering in which the benefits do not outweigh the drawbacks, then of course we're going to be miserable. Following this model, I was miserable! I was looking up to the WRONG people. I revered the wrong stories. I used the wrong life model.
Thank you for sharing this wonderful article. I hope others find as much value in it as I have!
There's an excellent analogy similar to what you talk about 'finding your pace', I believe James Clear talks about. Each person runs at a different 'rate' and finding the rate that works for us is the only option or we burn out or lose interest
I discovered my Acceptable Suffering Ratio when I started taking a GLP-1 to mitigate diabetes. A day or two every few weeks of nausea and gastrointestinal distress in exchange for living past seventy--worth it.
Participating in life at the age of 20 and one has not calibrated their suffering ratio yet ... hmmmm a first world problem. In general, humans (particularly young humans) don't calibrate their consequence ratio by listening to advice or observing others suffer. The best calibration is to experience a consequence that is at or just past their limit.
These days it is not unusual to meet a young person (to me that is under the age of 40) that has never burned themselves, never fallen off of a bike, never fallen out of a tree, or never pinched their finger in a door. They certainly never have gone hungry or were not sure if they would survive until tomorrow. They were raised in a well-to-do-safe environment.
There are lots of other examples, but this lack of calibration means these folks are very poor at estimating the danger resulting from some action or what people are willing to do to achieve some goal. They can't understand why they can't achieve something because they have no idea that some "effort" is required.
There are all sorts of ramifications: engineers producing an unsafe design because they can't imagine what could go wrong (WCGW); people participating in some on-line challenge because they don't realize the instigators hope it will go wrong; many folks in the first world vastly underestimating what displaced people will do in order to survive.
I was lucky, I grew up in a time when I was generally allowed to hurt myself in small ways in order to learn not to hurt myself in big ways. My engineering mind, even from a young age, was able to extrapolate cause and effect from suffering small consequences. A mentor of mine actually observed and commented on this very thing: he said (I am paraphrasing) "I am glad to see that you are willing and allowed to do some semi dangerous things in order to understand the real dangers in life.
Don't know how to solve this conundrum but it causes real harm in the world.
do u know if there is a causal factor with men online in comment sections who are 100% sure of themselves and them having a goatee? or is it just correlation? thank u
Exactly, the "fragilista" problem. Obsess on removing stressors and friction from your life and, one day, something big happens (for example, Thanksgiving Day for a turkey).
Kids (in the U.S.) nowadays go on playdates with very narrow and specific start and end times, program of activities, etc... what could go wrong?
Just got a message from my e-mail client:
The drug that taught me how much I should
suffer from Adam Mastroianni
as much as it takes 🙂
line breaks have meaning!
facts XD was confused for a sec
This is great advice. I'm in the middle of a career transition because I finally figured this lesson out the long hard way. After years of observing people who got to the point I am now in my field, and noticing that they didn't seem happy, I found myself reaching that same point and being -- profoundly unhappy. I think that everything you point out in this piece about our misguided ideas about suffering is true and relevant to my situation, and I would add an additional point that was driving me and I would imagine a lot of people who go through a similar process: the belief that one is special, and will somehow be able to do things differently than all those other people who ended up unfulfilled and unhappy. So in other words, one element of finding one's true "acceptable suffering ratio" involves giving up statistically unsupported beliefs about one's unique ability to make all the suffering worth it.
The universal belief that "Getting this desirable thing didn't solve anybody else's problems, but I'm sure it will solve mine!"
Isn’t surrogation, in psychology, confusing the metric of the process for the process itself? In the old days, the Soviet Union used “tonnage shipped” as a metric for tractor factory productivity. So they optimized for really, really heavy tractors that got stuck in Ukrainian mud, and were hard to turn, difficult to fix, and expensive to fuel.
Asking folks on the other side of the gauntlet for their metric of satisfaction is confusing that metric for the actual experience of the career; there’s survivor bias, washout bias, and the bias is of those you DIDN’T interview built into that. So the gauntlet test is fishy.
IMO, to some extent, you have to become “attuned to your instrument” and be able to discover and discern “what processes & suck do I actually find fulfilling” rather than “what rewards are worth the suck.” Rewards, enjoyment, and fun are over-rated; feeling alive is what matters.
Here I'm assuming a simplified model where you can observe the outcome for everybody who enters the gauntlet, but you're right that you're going to get a biased sample if you only can see the people who chose to continue, not the people who quit.
Paying rent is also kind of important.
Here's something bizarre: you were actually one of several things that together convinced me to try improv, and it's fascinating (thanks!), and I have **never** seen this "I hate my job" phenomenon you describe. We do sometimes get stuck in arguing scenes, or in structureless wacky nonsense, but not this pull towards suffering. I have no interpretation, only this ground fact.
I think arguing/teaching/transaction/"I'm stupid or drunk or useless" scenes are a less obvious version of this, but a similar thing: we're choosing to do the less fun thing rather than the more fun thing. It's funny that "follow the fun" is something that people have to be reminded of. It's like being reminded to eat dessert.
I see where you're coming from, but in my experience the most obvious application of "do the fun things" doesn't work. If you're a wizard or an astronaut, often you don't quite know what to do, or you behave in a clearly make-believe/theatrical way. It feels like a flip between "I'm an actor, playing a character, and thinking about what that character would say/do", versus becoming the character and behaving naturally. Maybe kinda like when you learn a foreign language and at some point you can start thinking in it? And it's easier to do this if you don't have to invent too much all at once, hence you start with something familiar and not too fun (haven't seen much of stupid/drunk either, but a lot of talking-about-what-we're-gonna-do, which is a similar problem I guess).
I think there's a balance -- I don't (yet?) know how to be a teenage monarch, but I know how to be a swimmer afraid to jump from the diving board. Maybe as you get more experience and confidence, you can shift the balance to more adventurous parts and still be convincing (to the audience and to each other).
Very interesting article.
Wish I would not of read. Now I'm suffering on how to reply.
How did I get signed up for your email anyway? What was I thinking? Given I like it so much shouldn't I become a paying subscriber to you? Why do I read anything on substack anyway? Most of the time it just makes me suffer trying to understand why the author misses the point. But that's more about me than it is about them. Is reading random opinions on the internet worth the suffering? My hubby tells me I'm crazy for reading and commenting. More suffering dealing with his judgements. I'm 65 and I still don't understand how much I should suffer. You would think I would have figured that out by now!
Pain is good! Extreme pain is extremely good! My world view of suffering.
Don't forget to enjoy yourself along the way :)
Your dad is such a great photographer!
Dan Gilbert was on the Lives Well Lived podcast recently and one of the highlights for me was his astute advice that the experience of others is a better guide to the outcome (of whatever thing you’re considering) than your own imaginings.
interesting. in this framing, i have felt past my Acceptable Suffering Ratio for a long time, and as we all know, there is no glory in that. i'm going to have to think about this for a while. great post ◡̈
I was the pimply guy since I was 15. My condition was so severe that I had a serious skin infection caused by Streptococcus that almost compromised my heart, joints, and kidneys. I spent two months taking daily antibiotics to avoid further complications. When I learned about isotretinoin (Roacutan here in Brazil) at age twenty, already in college, I didn't hesitate. My dermatologist warned me about all the side effects, and I even had tests every two months to check if my liver was okay. Regarding depression and suicide, I never worried because I was much more prone to those problems due to my low self-esteem because of my bad skin. My Acceptable Suffering Ratio was this eight months of skin treatment because I gained everything else in my life afterward. The gains in my self-image, self-confidence, and everything else are intangible. I still don't see very well at night, but I've adapted.
KUDOS Adam for distinguishing between the Sisyphean and the Herculean. People keep saying the former when meaning the latter, and I try to explain that the whole point of Sisyphus is the pointlessness of his task rather than how hard or long it is. I've been harping on about it over and over and over again to no effect, and it's beginning to seem...well... y'know...
This essay was exactly what I needed to read this week - very helpful and informative and as always innovative and funny, thank you
Light bulb article - “acceptable suffering ratio” now right up there with “mandatory basking moment” in things I wish I learned earlier but happy using to expanding life now!
Spectacular article!