In the 1st century AD, the Greek orator and philosopher Dion Chrysostom wrote that luxury makes pain seem even worse, while dulling and weakening pleasures. He argued that someone who constantly lives in luxury and avoids hardship will eventually become unable to bear any pain and, paradoxically, unable to truly experience even the strongest pleasures. In the modern world, we have access to a level of pleasure, comfort, and entertainment that kings of old could not even dream of. Yet, despite all this luxury, many people chronically experience stress, anxiety, depression, or suffer from physical ailments.

This exploration delves into the close connection between pleasure and pain, seeking to understand why the widest range of amenities and pleasures might contribute to mental and physical ailments.

The Crisis of Modern Comfort

In his book "The Comfort Crisis," journalist Michael Easter writes about our modern predicament: we often lack sufficient physical exertion and challenge. We use various means—comfort food, cigarettes, alcohol, pills, smartphones, and television—to buffer ourselves from discomfort and reality. Unlike our ancestors, we don't typically face the daily necessity of hunting for food over long distances or enduring severe hunger and harsh weather. However, Easter argues, we now deal with the side effects of our comfort: long-term physical and mental health problems.

To understand how uniquely comfortable and pleasure-filled our life is, we can compare it with the realities faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors for most of human history. Almost every day, they walked kilometers searching for water and food. They expended enormous amounts of energy hunting large mammals, often engaging in persistence hunting—pursuing prey until the animal collapsed from exhaustion. After a successful hunt, they would butcher the animal and carry large, heavy pieces of meat back to camp over considerable distances. As Easter describes, before animal husbandry and agriculture, primitive humans were essentially professional athletes whose way of life demanded constant physical activity.

Our ancestors didn't "play sports" because nearly all their waking hours involved activities we would now classify as physical exercise. Studies suggest it wasn't unusual for hunters to run and walk more than 40 kilometers per day. Some research indicates that our ancestors could log more activity in just three days than most of us do in a week or two today. Furthermore, people in ancient times often maintained this level of activity until death.

Mental Fortitude and the Drive for Comfort

Alongside intense physical activity, our ancestors endured significant mental stress without the modern soothing panaceas of technology, readily available drugs, processed foods, alcohol, or constant entertainment distractions. They endured the elements without climate-controlled homes and dealt with illnesses and infections without modern medicine. Because their lives were difficult, often uncomfortable, and sometimes downright painful, our ancestors developed an instinctive drive to seek and take full advantage of available comforts and pleasures. This drive was critical for survival.

They rested and relaxed whenever possible. Through this drive for comfort, their minds and bodies found respite and restoration from life's harsh realities. When highly nutritious foods like fatty meats, fruits, or honey were available, they indulged to replenish energy reserves, never knowing when their next meal might come. As Easter writes, their original comforts were "paltry and short-lived at best." In an uncomfortable world, the constant pursuit of comfort helped us stay alive.

While we inherited this desire for pleasure and comfort, it evolved in conditions of scarcity. Today, we live in conditions of abundance. Modern comforts and conveniences that profoundly shape our daily lives—cars, computers, television, climate control, smartphones, processed foods, and much more—have been widespread for roughly 100 years or less. This represents a tiny fraction of the time Homo sapiens has existed (perhaps less than 0.1%), and an even smaller percentage (the source text mentions figures like ~0.004%, though calculation details vary) if considering the entire multi-million-year timeline of hominid evolution including species like *Homo habilis* and *Homo erectus*. Thus, constant comfort is a radically new condition for humans.

The Trap of Creeping Comfort

While few would wish to return to the harsh conditions of our ancestors, the modern world presents new challenges. A key issue is that our inherited drive for pleasure and comfort often lacks an "off switch"; it is practically insatiable. Our ancestors didn't face the risk of overindulging to ruinous degrees. But in our "brave new world" of abundance, over-indulgence is an ever-present threat. As Dr. Tom Ficke (cited by Easter) metaphorically puts it, "we are cacti in a rainforest"—biologically adapted for scarcity but living in overwhelming abundance.

One danger arising from this clash is what Michael Easter terms "creeping comfort." He explains that when a new comfort appears, we adapt to it, and soon our old level of comfort becomes unacceptable. Today's luxury becomes tomorrow's necessity, and perceived discomfort. This process continually raises the bar for what we consider comfortable. Furthermore, new comforts push the boundary of what we deem an acceptable level of discomfort further away. Each advance subtly narrows our tolerance for hardship, shrinking our comfort zone. Crucially, Easter notes, this often happens unconsciously. We are largely unaware of how deeply ingrained the pursuit of comfort becomes and what it does to us.

This "creeping comfort" is especially pronounced with physical comforts like cars and delivery services, enabling a life with minimal physical effort. Increasingly, people adopt lifestyles with almost no physical activity. Easter notes statistics suggesting a significant percentage (e.g., 27% in some studies) engage in literally no leisure-time physical activity. Their lives become a pattern of moving from bed to car seat to office chair to couch and back to bed. This pervasive desire for physical ease is a major driver of the obesity epidemic in developed countries and contributes significantly to chronic diseases linked to inactivity. Our bodies evolved requiring a higher level of activity to maintain health; as Mayo Clinic researchers explain, humans were simply not designed to sit all day.

Easter warns, "In our desire for a better life, we have allowed comfort to become habitual and are no longer willing to exert physical effort." Without conscious effort to embrace discomfort and engage in purposeful exercise—a decisive pushback against creeping comfort—we risk becoming progressively weaker and sicker.

The Neuroscience of Pleasure and Pain

Beyond physical decline, modern pleasure-seeking can also harm our minds. Pain often follows pleasure like its shadow. In her book "Dopamine Nation," American psychiatrist Dr. Anna Lembke explains one of the most remarkable neuroscience discoveries of the last 75 years: pleasure and pain are processed in overlapping brain regions and function like opposite sides of a single scale or balance.

Our brain constantly strives to maintain homeostasis—a level balance between pleasure and pain, ensuring neither dominates for too long. When this balance is significantly shifted towards either pleasure or pain, powerful self-regulatory mechanisms engage, trying to restore equilibrium by tipping the scales in the opposite direction. For instance, when we indulge excessively in something pleasurable, our brain counteracts this by generating an experience of pain (a comedown, craving, or mental/emotional torment) afterward.

Lembke vividly illustrates this with an analogy: "I picture [this balance] in my mind’s eye as a teeter-totter in a children’s playground... When we experience pleasure, the balance tips to the side of pleasure... But here’s the important part: That balance wants to remain level... It will work very hard to restore a level balance [homeostasis]. It does this by tipping an equal and opposite amount to the side of pain... I imagine little gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance..." These "gremlins" represent the brain's homeostatic response.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche pondered this connection in a passage questioning the scientific goal of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain: "How is it? Might pleasure and pain be so closely linked that whoever want[s] to have as much as possible of one must also have as much as possible of the other...?".

The Downside of Overindulgence: Neuroadaptation and Addiction

When we habitually indulge in the same pleasure, a process called neuroadaptation occurs. We become less sensitive to the pleasure and more sensitive to the subsequent pain. This means we need more of the substance or stimulus (or more intense versions) to achieve the same initial pleasurable effect (tolerance), and the "pain" that follows (the comedown, craving, anxiety) becomes more intense and lasts longer.

If we overuse a potent source of pleasure—be it drugs, alcohol, pornography, social media, or even sugary foods—for so long and to such an extreme degree, we tip the pleasure-pain balance persistently. Eventually, the baseline itself shifts towards the side of pain (a state sometimes called anhedonia or chronic dysphoria). When this happens, the "drug" of our choice may no longer bring much, if any, actual pleasure. We then continue using it primarily to get temporary relief from the chronic emotional or physical pain of this altered state, just to feel "normal" or level again.

A stark example is opioid-induced hyperalgesia. Patients taking opioid painkillers daily for extended periods (e.g., a month) can paradoxically develop a more intense and widespread pain syndrome than the one they were originally treating. This occurs because chronic opioid exposure has re-calibrated their brain's pleasure-pain balance heavily towards pain sensitivity.

Lembke summarizes the effects of habitual overindulgence in any highly rewarding activity or substance: "The paradox is that hedonism, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake, leads to anhedonia, the inability to enjoy pleasure of any kind." The relentless pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain ultimately leads to more pain.

Reclaiming Balance: Abstinence and Self-Binding

The good news is that this state is often reversible. We can reset the pleasure-pain balance, which has been tipped towards pain by overindulgence, through a period of abstinence. Dr. Lembke notes that in her clinical experience, about four weeks of complete abstinence from the specific substance or behavior is typically sufficient for the brain's reward pathways to begin resetting.

After such a period, people often regain their ability to experience pleasure from simpler, more modest rewards—things that don't overwhelm the pleasure-pain balance and trigger a strong painful backlash. Recovery begins with abstinence. Abstaining rewires the brain's reward circuitry and restores our capacity to enjoy everyday joys.

To aid the difficult path of abstinence, Lembke recommends employing "self-binding" strategies. This involves intentionally creating barriers between oneself and the substance or behavior of choice to mitigate compulsive overuse. A classic mythological example is found in Homer's "Odyssey": Odysseus, knowing no mortal could resist the fatally alluring song of the Sirens, ordered his crew to fill their ears with beeswax and to tie him securely to the ship's mast. Odysseus understood that when overcome by intense craving or desire, our ability to make conscious, wise choices can evaporate. Therefore, if struggling with alcohol, drugs, sweets, or other temptations, it is wise not to keep them readily accessible and, where possible, to create practical obstacles to acquiring them.

For "digital drugs," like excessive social media use, self-binding might involve setting strict time limits using app blockers, deleting apps from phones, or designating specific times or days for usage. Nietzsche also recommended similar methods of self-restraint as effective ways to curb compulsive behaviors. In passages on self-control and moderation, he suggested strategies such as:

• Avoiding triggers and observing intervals where the passion is not indulged, allowing it to weaken over time.
• Imposing strict order and limits on indulgence, confining it to specific times, thereby creating intervals free from its influence.

Harnessing Healthy Pain for Greater Pleasure

Once we manage to reduce excessive indulgence, we can further improve our lives by voluntarily embracing healthy forms of pain or discomfort. Just as excessive pleasure leads to pain via homeostasis, engaging in activities associated with temporary discomfort or effort can actually reset the pleasure-pain balance towards the side of pleasure, leading to a more enduring sense of well-being.

As Lembke explains, intentionally engaging with manageable "pain" triggers the body's own regulatory mechanisms to counteract it with pleasure. With periodic, controlled exposure to discomfort, our natural baseline can shift towards greater resilience to pain and an enhanced capacity for pleasure. "Pain leads to pleasure by triggering the body’s own regulating homeostatic mechanisms," she writes.

An obvious example is physical exercise. The temporary discomfort, exertion, and even muscle soreness associated with a good workout are often followed by a positive mood ("runner's high") that can last for hours. Studies show this positive effect can even reduce cravings for unhealthy pleasures. Research cited by Lembke suggests that regular exercise is protective against developing substance use disorders and can significantly help those already struggling with addiction to reduce or stop drug use.

Other examples include practices like immersion in cold water (cold showers, ice baths), which studies show can trigger the release of mood-boosting neurotransmitters like dopamine, with effects lasting for hours. Furthermore, pursuing meaningful goals, engaging in the daily struggle to achieve them, or tackling complex problems involves mental and emotional stress (a form of "pain"). This effort, however, ultimately tips the scales towards satisfaction, accomplishment, and a deeper, more sustainable form of happiness and well-being.

Lessons from the Cynics: Embracing Discomfort

The idea that deliberately embracing hardship leads to a better life is ancient. The 4th-century BC Greek philosopher Diogenes the Cynic was so convinced of this that he dedicated his life to seeking out discomfort. In summer, he reportedly rolled in hot sand; in winter, he walked barefoot on snow and hugged icy statues. He famously lived in a large ceramic jar (often called a "barrel"), ate the simplest food, sometimes fasted for long periods (a practice echoing modern intermittent fasting), and deliberately provoked ridicule to build emotional resilience.

Diogenes claimed to "disdain pleasure as the greatest pleasure," asserting that by voluntarily choosing discomfort, he could enjoy sleeping in his jar more than the Persian king Xerxes enjoyed his luxurious palace. While many contemporaries and later historians called him mad, modern neuroscience suggests Diogenes was onto something profound about the pleasure-pain connection. "I am not mad," he is quoted as saying, "it is only that my head is different from yours."

In our modern world overflowing with abundance, where the unbridled pursuit of pleasure and comfort often weakens minds, bodies, and makes people hypersensitive to pain, we might do well to heed Diogenes's example—not necessarily to live in a barrel, but to intentionally make our lives a little more difficult, a little more uncomfortable. Paradoxically, this can increase our strength, resilience, and our capacity for deep pleasure and joy.

Nietzsche perhaps alluded to this when suggesting we might need "a little cynicism, a little tub" (referencing Diogenes's dwelling). The philosopher William Desmond echoes this sentiment, writing that "True pleasure is often claimed by cynics to be obtained only by despising it and welcoming its opposite, pain... Pain paradoxically becomes the cause of pleasure for cynics... their hedonism is the hedonism of nature itself." The implication is that accepting pain and struggle as inevitable parts of life, even embracing them strategically, prepares us for deeper, more meaningful satisfaction.

References

• Dion Chrysostom: Discourses (relevant passages on luxury and hardship).
• Michael Easter: The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self.
• Anna Lembke: Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.
• Friedrich Nietzsche: Various works, including The Gay Science and writings on self-mastery.
• Homer: The Odyssey (specifically the Sirens episode).
• Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and anecdotes recorded by various ancient authors (e.g., Diogenes Laërtius in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers).
• William Desmond: Philosophical works discussing ethics, metaphysics, and potentially Cynicism (specific citation for the quote would require further research)