Live Immediately:
Pursue Pain Not Comfort
“Those who cling to life die, and those who defy death live.” ~Kenshin
In a world of abundance, in which the pursuit of pleasure and comfort is crippling minds, weakening bodies, and making people highly susceptible to pain, you would be wise to make your life a little more difficult, a little more uncomfortable, a little more painful, so that paradoxically, you may maximize your strength, pleasure, and joy.
Take the demon of your pain and pressurize it into the diamond of your providence. Pain is a whetstone. You are a blade. Sharpen yourself.
Get comfortable with being uncomfortable:
“We are cacti in the rain forest.” ~Dr. Tom Finucane
There’s a profound mismatch between humans (the “cacti”) and the modern world (the “rain forest”).
Cacti are desert plants, evolved to thrive in harsh, arid conditions with minimal resources. They are resilient, self-sufficient, and adapted to scarcity. A rain forest, by contrast, is lush, abundant, and overwhelming in its resources—conditions that can paradoxically harm a cactus, causing it to rot from excess water or struggle to compete with fast-growing, resource-hungry plants.
Humans, like cacti, are biologically and psychologically wired for survival in challenging, resource-scarce environments. Our evolutionary history shaped us to endure hardship, conserve energy, and adapt to scarcity. Yet, modern society, especially in affluent, technologically advanced settings, bombards us with abundance, comfort, and overstimulation. This “rain forest” of overabundance, consumerism, and societal pressures can overwhelm our natural resilience, leading to physical, emotional, and even existential distress.
The secret is to elevate yourself above the battlefield of cultural conditioning and overabundance. See the bigger picture. Leave your comfort zone. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Here are ways to do that…
Seek physical stress for maximum strength:
“Luxury makes pains seem even harder and dulls and weakens one’s pleasures. For the person who is always luxuriating and never touches pain will end up unable to endure any pain at all, and also not able to feel any pleasure.” ~Dio Chrysostom
Exercise, fast, practice cold water immersion which will trigger the release of neurotransmitters that will improve your mood for hours after.
Fasting is a healthy transcendent practice overlooked by most people. It helps sharpen the edge of our awareness by launching us out of the instant gratification of our hyperreal consumerist lifestyles. It is a potent act of cleansing. It empties the body of food so that the mind and soul can feed.
The absence of food, the loss of rigid mealtimes and the upset cycle of feeding is painful, but it leaves our mind and soul in search of sustenance elsewhere. We become open to next-level consumption, to higher forms of nourishment. Lacking food, we hunger for a panacea, a magic elixir, a liquid ambrosia to quench our soul’s thirst.
As Martin Seligman said, “The problem with psychology today is that we focus too much on neck up, whereas most of what happens to us is neck down.”
Health comes from a state of pre-established harmony between the body and the world. Running, swimming, meditation, martial arts, yoga, HIIT, weightlifting, backpacking, parkour, hiking, fasting, cold water emersion, these are all forms of pre-established harmony creating health in the body. Sure, there is pain involved, but the pain is a mighty precursor to greater pleasure and even greater power.
As Colin Wilson said, “The comfortable life lowers man’s resistance, so that he sinks into an unheroic sloth.”
Don’t sink into an unheroic sloth. Engage the pain. Establish harmony between you and the world. Become a force to be reckoned with. Use the pain to sharpen yourself into a fine instrument. Then cut! There is life to be lived.
Seek out hard problems that involve mental and emotional stress:
“The self-controlled lover of pain lives a life that is far more pleasurable than his opposite. One’s pleasures are both greater and less harmful whenever they occur with pain.” ~Dio Chrysostom
Set lofty goals and struggle each day to achieve them. Gain mental and spiritual resilience through struggle. Much like physical exercise strengthens muscles, the mental and emotional struggle of deep philosophical inquiry will strengthen your ability to think critically, remain open-minded, and persist through intellectual and existential challenges.
Ask yourself belief-wrecking questions. Interrogate your soul. Force your head over the abyss. Reconcile your inner demons. Integrate your shadow. Force yourself into your very own Hero’s Journey.
Utilize the pain you discover. Become a spearhead for a new way of being human in the world.
Build a bridge from you to the Overman. Do as Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggested, “Transform fear into prudence, pain into information, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.”
Learn how to rearrange the nightmare. Transform chaos into catharsis, wounds into wisdom, death into rebirth, and pain into purpose. Channel the pain into self-discipline. Reroute it through routine. Let the routine tear you down and build you back up again. Manifest resilience despite resistance.
Pain is merely kindling for a greater fire. Gather the kindling. Become your own crucible, your own dojo, your own whetstone. Practice death in favor of life. Practice life despite the inevitability of death.
Keep the cycle going. Iterate through the pain. Destroy your delusions. Break your own heart. Tear yourself down and then build yourself back up again. This is how mettle is sharpened, how character is forged, how antifragility is carved out of fragility.
As Elias Canetti said, “I want to keep smashing myself until I am whole.”
Seek temporary madness over permanent sanity:
“Despising pleasures is the greatest of pleasures.” ~Diogenes
By tipping the scales toward pain—through deliberate hardship, or what the Cynics called Ponos (Greek for “toil,” “labor,” or “effort”)—one can achieve a deeper, more resilient form of happiness, health, and capacity for pleasure. Diogenes’ embrace of “temporary madness” over “permanent sanity” offers a radical lens through which to reimagine well-being in a world obsessed with comfort.
Overindulgence tethers people to endless cycles of craving and dissatisfaction, what Buddhists call dukkha. By contrast, embracing pain through Ponos—whether fasting, enduring cold, or facing social scorn—trains the body and mind to need less, fostering resilience and contentment.
This idea aligns with modern psychological concepts like antifragility, where controlled exposure to stress strengthens systems, whether biological or mental. Diogenes’ Ponos was a form of voluntary stress, akin to fasting, cold plunges, or intense exercise today. By “tipping the scales toward pain,” he conditioned himself to find joy in simplicity—a sip of water, a sunny day, or the freedom to speak the truth. This wasn’t masochism but a strategic recalibration of pleasure, making it more accessible and less dependent on external conditions.
Temporary madness is a rejection of the permanent sanity of collective delusion. To be “sane” is to chase wealth, honor, and comfort, only to live in fear of losing them. This sanity was permanent in its rigidity, chaining people to social roles and material needs. Diogenes, by contrast, chose a transient madness—living as a “dog”—to break free. His jar, his rags, his unabashed behavior were tools to shock himself and others into questioning what truly matters.
This madness was temporary because it was a means, not an end. Each act of Ponos—sleeping outdoors, eating plainly, or defying convention—was a training ground for resilience. By enduring pain, Diogenes became healthier, both physically (through a lean, hardy lifestyle) and mentally (through detachment from fear and desire). He was happier because his joy didn’t rely on fickle circumstances. And he was more capable of feeling pleasure because his baseline needs were so minimal that small joys—a crust of bread, a kind word—felt profound.
You might not want to go as extreme as Diogenes did. But tipping the scales towards pain in a way that makes you happier, healthier, and more capable of feeling pleasure is a must.
Seek the eudaimonia of pain over the anhedonia of pain avoidance:
“The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, which is the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind. The relentless pursuit of pleasure (and avoidance of pain) leads to pain. When our balance is tilted to the pain side, we crave our drug just to feel normal.” ~Anne Lembke
Pain is inevitable. It’s a part of life. Avoiding pain just causes more pain. Ignoring or repressing pain just causes unnecessary suffering. But if you’re able to learn from that pain, it can become a steppingstone rather than a setback. Seen in this way, pain can be an initiation into wisdom (a sacred wound), and a flourishing into Eudaimonia. Which can be quite pleasurable.
Human flourishing, Eudaimonia, doesn’t just happen. It takes work. It takes perseverance. It takes blood, sweat, and tears. And even then, sometimes it won’t be enough.
When we lean into our pain we are seizing our destiny. We are open to the call of Kairos ‘the right time’. Kairos is begging us to seize the day. Kairos is calling us to adventure. It foreshadows shadow integration. It’s a wolf howling in the moonlight, a wave crashing down on our all-too-comfortable shoreline. Kairos is a wakeup call. It is the cataclysmic confrontation between the all-too-comfortable ego and the realization that “The cure for the pain is in the pain” (Rumi).
As Paul Tillich said, “There are moments in which Kairos ‘the right time’ is united with logos, ‘the eternal truth’, and in which the fate of philosophy is decided for a special period.” When we transform our pain into purpose, we are allowing a higher probability for this sacred alignment to occur.
There is no fixed self. Who you are today must overcome who you were yesterday. Pain over pleasure keeps you ahead of the curve. It’s self-improvement through the medium of discipline and existential masochism. It’s the determination to become healthier and more robust than you were before. So that Eudaimonia, antifragility, and the Overman always remain possibilities.
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About the Author:
Gary Z McGee, a former Navy Intelligence Specialist turned philosopher, is the author of Birthday Suit of God and The Looking Glass Man. His works are inspired by the great philosophers of the ages and his wide-awake view of the modern world.
This article (Live Immediately: Seek Pain Not Comfort) was originally created and published by Self-inflicted Philosophy and is printed here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Gary Z McGee and self-inflictedphilosophy.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this statement of copyright.
