Men's glorification of pain

I wanted to write something about the trend of productivity advice that’s becoming more and more prevalent today. Lots of content creators, some of which are just dudes, but some also neuroscientists or MDs or psychologists, telling us how to get more stuff done, be more motivated — and most of them, male.

So they tell us about dopamine and the human reward system and how you can “hack” it to your advantage, using all these terms from evolutionary biology, citing Stanford studies, making it all sound very sensible and pragmatic. And some of it is genuinely useful. Sure, as a society we’re at a place where it’s just too easy to get sucked into overindulgence, and we can all use tips and strategies to deal with those necessary discomforts of life that we need to endure to get ahead. Meditation, focus exercises, smart planning, chunking, breaking down tasks, deriving pride from effort as opposed to results, implementing rituals that signal to your brain that it’s time to work — all fine and good. But there’s another aspect I’ve noticed that only men seem to stress a lot in their content: falling in love with pain. Learning to thrive in discomfort.

I can’t help but feel that’s a very biased view geared towards males. I bet many of the psychology studies they’re referencing were performed on male college students, as a lot of the body of work is, lol. I wouldn’t be surprised if a part of men’s biology is wired to perform best under duress and also lose motivation when things are just too comfortable. Men are more optimized for high-risk situations. (Edited to add: since so many men love inflicting pain on others, it also doesn't surprise me that they like telling others they should suffer and that there's no other way. They seem to derive a sick sort of satisfaction from that)

Women, on the other hand, strive towards safety. We get our fair share of pain just by virtue of being women. Often we don’t have the luxury of choosing pain because it just gets inflicted on us, so we tend to seek refuge from it. We tend to look for ways to ease suffering and make things easier and more accessible (for others, too), whereas men love gatekeeping. This idea that all good things in life lie on the other side of pain and suffering just seems extremely male to me. Yeah, maybe the things men tend to want can only be achieved through lots of suffering. Men are usually more competetive, they want to be the best at something just for the sake of being the best, they idolize “peak performers”. Of course, women are ambitious too, but I notice a marked difference between men’s goals and women’s goals, the former being much more obsessed with rising to the very top (because we all know, only the top few percent of men really win in the patriarchy).

If that’s what they want, though, I’m not stopping them. I just feel that the advice tailored to this specific mindset doesn’t really serve women all too well. There’s little room for gentleness. Pleasure is coded as evil and the thing that keeps us away from achieving our true dreams. Life sucks and we just need to accept it, grit our teeth and move on. There is some merit to this line of thinking, but it’s just not a way to live life as women, in my opinion. When we seek out pain, we’re rarely rewarded, and likely (re-)traumatized.

We are raised to be incredibly hard on ourselves and need to develop self-compassion instead of self-flagellation. We tend to be way too anxious about making mistakes as it is, it doesn’t help us to worry about having the “wrong” morning routine, worry about optimizing every gram of food we eat, worry about a perfect scheduling system that saves us 10 minutes a day — worry about catching up to those who have had an advantage all their lives because they were born with a penis.

The illusion we’re sold is that we can all become hyper-performing beasts if we emulate these apparently successful YouTubers, and if we don’t, we’re just too weak-willed. If there was a simple hack to achieving anything we wanted, we would all be doing it by now (and then it would cease to work). That’s just how humans are, any goal we achieve becomes our new baseline. And we can’t beat ourselves up over and over again just so we can squeeze out an additional 2% of productivity.

There’s little advice out there on how to be content with what you have and move from there, to take a step back in order to be able to take one forward later, to stop expecting outstanding results from yourself every day of the year. There’s nothing wrong with striving for excellence, if we stay humble about our capacity to actually achieve it. And if one path is just too damn painful, maybe it’s okay to abandon it and take another.

Maybe it’s okay to be “distracted” by the beauties and pleasures of life and forget about your addiction to being busy for a little while. Maybe we aren’t designed to suffer through life. Maybe pain is sometimes just boring and meaningless and doesn’t lead us to a better version of ourselves. It’s a very privileged idea that all pain is good pain, because it’s usually coming from a person who can choose what pain they want to go through. They chose the fast-paced job for the benefits it offers, they chose the brutal workout regimen because they want to be ripped. Of course you can apply a completely different mindset to those things as opposed to shit that just needs to be done because you don’t actually have a choice — the kind of things women (and more generally, poor people) are usually saddled with.

So, for 2023, I am embracing gentleness and slowness. I’m not attaching meaning to pain when there is none, just to keep myself in situations that don’t serve me. I’m looking to attract peace and beauty in my life. I can't stand yet another man with a superior half-smirk telling me that I can't be happy, because I have to go suffer some more first. Maybe I won’t be a top performer that way. But maybe it’s time to reject the goals patriarchy and capitalism have defined for me, and focus on my own.