The purpose of pain: An Introduction.

I was lying on my bed one night unable to sleep. I was tossing and turning, my mind working in overdrive with all the racing thoughts and my heart overfilled with emotions at 3 am, an infamously vulnerable and emotionally charged time of the night. I was contemplating life and all its trepidations when a very disturbing yet intriguing question arose in my mind; why am I always in pain? Now, I always try to make the most of things and live life to its fullest. And I do it while being good and considerate of other’s feelings. I try to be a good friend, son, brother and in some cases a role model. Then why do I have this crippling depression and paralyzing anxiety every moment I breathe. Why am I in such agonizing pain in every conscious moment of my existence.

This question perturbed me from then on. I could not find the answer to it. Everywhere I went, all the time, it haunted me. It agitated me like an unreachable itch at the back of my mind. I had to find the answer to it.

It wasn’t only my own personal pain that perturbed me. I looked around the world and saw suffering everywhere. Wars in different parts of the world. Innocent people dying with no particular fault of their own except existing in the wrong place at the wrong time. People dying of hunger while others stuffed themselves till the arteries of hearts clogged with cholesterol, eventually killing them. The people of one ethnicity being discriminated against while others ruled the world. Women deprived of the most basic liberties while we men strutted about as if we owned the world. People being hated on just because of how they looked and who they are.

All this further depressed me. I hated living in a world filled with so much anguish. I cursed the wretched ways of the world and how it operated. It came to a point where I questioned my reason to live. I became ashamed of complacently enjoying the luxuries I was granted by fate while others had it so hard. This conundrum in my mind nearly drove me to insanity. I had to find a purpose to all this suffering to loosen the noose that tightened around my neck every time I thought of why pain exists in this world.

At first, the search for the purpose of pain took me down a nihilistic road. I concluded that there is no God and there was no profound meaning to the notion of living. “It’s all poetry and Hollywood” I said. If there was a God and He was as loving as everybody said He was, why would he put us through such agony? If there was any meaning to life and if life was so beautiful, why do we all suffer so much? All this pulled me into a deeper depression than what I was already suffering from. The only way to keep myself sane seemed to be to believe that life was unfair. Some of us are just born with a cursed fate and have to passively succumb to despair of it. I believed that we come to this world, suffer in silence and die. This is just the cruel reality of life.

But this was not any way to live life, was it? If I kept on believing the things I believed, I would have lived a life cursed with a deep depression and would have probably killed myself the first chance I got. No. There must be something else. There must be a reason. This was the same as giving up. And I never give up. So, I got back up, dusted myself off, and decided to have another go at it. There must be some positive reason for this pain. Maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough.

So, I started researching the purpose of pain from the perspective of three academic disciplines I was most passionate about: psychology, philosophy, and neurobiology. I poured over the literature of all three of these subjects. And you know what? I found it. I found the purpose of pain. All the suffering and pain in the world was not pointless. It had a reason. There was a deeper meaning. And it is necessary.

This article is a sort of introduction to whatever I have deduced to be the purpose of pain. I will be publishing three more articles where I will discuss the topic from philosophical, psychological and neurobiological perspectives. Now, I may not satisfy everyone in my reasoning and analyses. I may not even be able to justify the necessity of pain in the context of the world in instances like war, famine, discrimination etc. But my research and analyses were enough to give me an inkling of hope. Maybe it will be the same for you.