"Hurt" considered harmful
- This is an insight I first got from Julien Smith's short ebook The Flinch, that I've continued to refine.
- This is partly a point about the map, and partially a point about the territory.
- I have a few words I take a second look at when I see them, and one of them is the word "hurt".
- I don't usually use the "considered harmful" format for this sort of thing, but as you'll see it's a pun in this case.
- Most of what I'm saying here I expect to be obvious on one level, and yet people start equivocating when trying to reason about hurt, whether in an ethics context or in the context of personal development.
- "Hurt", structurally, means two things:
- "harm"
- "cause/experience pain"
- ...and these are totally different, even if they happen to correlate/coincide often. However, it doesn't take long to see that there are tons of widely-v
- Here are some examples of harm without pain:
- if you take a bunch of opioids, those are painkillers, so you'll feel great, but it could damage your body or even die
- laying in the sun feels great, causes skin cancer
- listening to music really loudly feels great, causes hearing loss
- if you were in a room filled with nitrogen, you would pass out and die without suffering (because the suffocation response is triggered by too much CO2, not absense of oxygen)
- Here are some examples of pain without harm:
- if you eat a bunch of spicy food, it triggers pain receptors in your mouth, but doesn't actually burn you (some people enjoy this sensation, but that's a separate thing)
- working out can be painful, and also good for you (except if you have poor form and get an injury)
- many (tho not all) BDSM techniques involve causing pain without harming someone
- if you get a hair in your eye, it hurts, but once you get it out you feel fine
- getting surgery or dental work can hurt a lot but ultimately is helping the system
- Why this matters
- Pain, and its milder cousin, discomfort, are a necessary fact of life. They are actually important information. Some people have a weird genetic quirk where they experience no pain and accidentally burn themselves
- Examples of this confusion in the wild
- Recent convo with a friend who said "I seem to have this fear/belief that if I reduce intimacy in a relationship, it will hurt the other person"
- Other stuff
- The body is self-healing, so some things do actually produce "harm" but not in any permanent way
- you
- moreover, the long-term effect may be net positive
- for example
- microtears in muscle fibres rebuild stronger
- (allegedly) microfractures in bones rebuild stronger
- Pain vs Suffering is a much more famous distinction
- This tweet of Lulie's is about that
- Weird stuff
- article about heritable gene (absence) that makes someone unable to feel pain and seems to heal faster, maybe because lack of tensing up around the pain? theguardian.com/science/2019/mar/28/scientists-find-genetic-mutation-t…