Why It's Painful to Live In A Pain-Free Society
Is it truly beneficial to bubble-wrap our lives and avoid all forms of potential discomfort?
“Of all the corporeal feelings, pain alone is like a navigable river which never dries up and which leads man down to the sea. Pleasure, in contrast, turns out to be a dead end, wherever man tries to follow its lead.” - Walter Benjamin
Pain. We all hate it.
I think pain is one of those things that humans are united in hating, as divided of a species as we are. Pain is uncomfortable, it ruins things, it’s a stark reminder that our lives are finite - why would we not loathe it?
Pain is a universal part of the human experience, but what would happen if we were to completely devoid our lives of it?
According to Byung-Chul Han, the answer is right outside your window.
In today’s post, we’ll be exploring a few ideas from Byung-Chul Han, a South-Korean born philosopher based out of Germany. Specifically, we’ll be diving into why he believes our society has been consumed by algophobia (the fear of pain), and the subsequent negative effects produced by this. According to Han, today’s society is a p…