Not a direct response to the post, but on the same broad topic:

It seems to me that many people (e.g., me and several people I've discussed this with) have not so much an intrinsic aversion to pain as a fear of how we'll act if in pain. (As the main effect. I do also simply like not being in pain, but the fear of how the pain will impact my actions is/was often the larger of these two.) So, for example, a person will avoid seeking out bad news about their project not so much because they mind the pain as such, but because they aren't sure whether they'll act funny or have trouble working or similar if they're suddenly sad. Or a person will try to manage their moods not so much to avoid the mood as such, as to avoid being grouchy toward those near them, or to avoid being a downer at the party.

In my experience, increases in my ability to try in deep/effective ways have several times come via decreases in how afraid I was of being sad/upset (and/or increases in my ability to act well despite being sad/upset). Acquiring less of a need to manage my own mood was important and useful for me. When trying to put up a pretense of "everything is okay and I'm fine," I couldn't think proper... (read more)

My problem is less internal confusion about pain equaling effort and more of a need to credibly perform painful effort to others. I fear that if I’m happy and relaxed and don’t perform well, it will seem as though I didn’t care about my collaborators or that I cavalierly stole my employer’s money. On the flip side, I seem to think that I can purchase the right to be lazy/not expose myself to criticism by making myself suffer— conspicuously, so those to whom I am responsible see it.

I don’t think my fears of not suffering when I’m “supposed to” are entirely baseless. When your boss thinks pain is the unit of effort, it’s at the very least your unit of evaluation. But I think most of that is in my head, and that I superstitiously believe the pain of effort and self-flagellation can protect me from the pain of judgment.

I very recently realized something was wrong with my mental stance when I realized I was responding to work agenda items with some variation of the phrase, "Sure, that shouldn't be too painful." Clearly the first thing that came to mind when contemplating a task wasn't how long it would take, what resources would be needed, or how to do it, but rather how much suffering I would have to go through to accomplish it. This actually motivated some deeper changes in my lifestyle. Seeing this post here was extremely useful and timely for me.

If you want to achieve a goal, you usually need to do many things. Some of them are unpleasant. Avoiding unpleasant parts means you will get the work half-done, and then give up.

Even if you do the right thing, being too comfortable probably means you are not doing as much as you could have.

This would suggest that the right way involves a lot of pain: you do the unpleasant thing, and you do a lot of it. So people will interpret your lack of pain as a signal of failure (either to do the right thing, or to do enough).

Unfortunately, per Goodhart's Law, you cannot find the right way by simply trying to maximize pain. Some useless or harmful things are painful, too. Also, after a difficult exercise, muscles need some rest to recover.

Unfortunately again, from outside "understanding that you cannot find the right way simply by increasing pain" seems very similar to "avoiding the unpleasant parts, and rationalizing it". If your reward depends on other people's judgment, you better include some useless pain, too.

Personal experience:

I used to be good at math. But I never studied hard. I mean, I was reading math books in my free time, I thought about math a lot, and I participated in many... (read more)

Curated. The anecdotes and antidotes shed light on what seems to me to be a pretty prevalent error mode, and I appreciate the clarity the post brought to discussing it and helping see past it.

I like this.  A lot to chew on for me. Especially the "optimize for the appearance of suffering" part.

A corollary of this is that when things are too easy (low pain) they are "cheating", "don't count", or somehow "illegitimate".  I may have been making things too hard on myself for just that reason. 

There are different kinds of pains. Different pains provide different signals. Some of those are useful while others aren't. 

If you do sports and stretch yourself, it comes with a specific kind of pain that's part of stretching. On the other hand there's pain that's a sign of doing things wrong. 

One of the key Radical Honesty teachings is being able to distinguish when having a touch conversation is good pain and when it's just needless suffering. The same goes for other domains. Striving to feel no pain is a bad plan as is striving to feel as much pain as possible. It's about being open for the right kind of pain in the right context. 

It seemed to me that "actually trying" - aiming the full force of your being at the solution of a problem you care about - is self-evidently motivating and requires zero extra justification if you care about the problem.

This is basically my mindset as well. In situations where I would ask "Why is nobody actually trying?" it would mean something like "I wish everyone else would care about this outcome as much as I do." If people aren't optimizing for results, they could be optimizing for appearance of effort (which would in some circumstances look like optimizing for pain), or they could be optimizing for something else entirely, such as enjoying themselves, personal growth, or impressing a particular person or group.

The specific "happiness means you're not trying hard enough" mentally is not one I remember encountering, though I also haven't had that concept available as a hypothesis, and my prior was against it since it seemed so obviously confused, so maybe I just didn't recognize it when I saw it.

This is one of those posts, like "when money is abundant, knowledge is the real wealth," that combines a memorable and informative and very useful and important slogan with a bunch of argumentation and examples to back up that slogan. I think this type of post is great for the LW review.

I haven't found this advice super applicable to my own life (because I already generally didn't do things that were painful...) but it has found application in my thinking and conversation with friends. I think it gets at an important phenomenon/problem for many people and provides a useful antidote.

I think this post does a good job of focusing on a stumbling block that many people encounter when trying to do something difficult. Since the stumbling block is about explicitly causing yourself pain, to the extent that this is a common problem and that the post can help avoid it, that's a very high return prospect.

I appreciate the list of quotes and anecdotes early in the post; it's hard for me to imagine what sort of empirical references someone could make to verify whether or not this is a problem. Well known quotes and a long list of anecdotes is a su... (read more)

Love much of this post.

Related realisations for me:

1. Making my work more pleasant and cosy is not an inherently bad thing, to the contrary. If I feel vulnerable and need to get some stressful work done at home, lighting some fairy lights, putting on noise cancelling headphones with rain sounds, snuggling into a warm blanket, with a hot cup of cocoa and a bowl of berries, will make the whole experience far, far more cosy. That makes me want to happily do it longer, and feel less tense, less stressed, less overwhelmed. This makes me more effective. I could tak

For me, the main point of the post is that the role of pain is often misunderstood. Compared to the article my perception was actually kind of the opposite: That the people I knew avoided pain more than needed. They saw it as an indication of a lack of success. But the result is the same: The role of pain is often seen either as highly correlated (positively or negatively) with effort or success. 

But the pain-space is large and non-uniform. People don't always mean the same thing with pain. It can be physical harm, exhaustion, stress, mental fatigue o... (read more)

Related: George on Seinfeld acting angry at work to make it look like he's busy.

This is a wonderful point made well. I know who have fallen into the trap of taking the path of most resistance for reasons like those you lay out.

My own (less clear) version of a similar concept was a strong dislike of the saying "work ethic". What is ethical about working?

Some comments:

(1) I have noticed some cultural correlations in this area. In my limited experience Danes approach this issue in a more healthy way that the English. A colleague who used to work in Japan complained bitterly about his Japanese colleagues making themselves (and him) misera... (read more)

Like how tears is not the unit of care

I agree pretty much with everything you said, and most of this stuff applied to me at some point in my life.

In high school and for years afterwards I was really big on powerlifting. I had a friend who I trained with, and this guy was very very hard on himself. He always seemed to push himself 100% and beyond. I was by nature more lenient to myself, but the idea of trying and going really hard got stuck to me. I did get pretty strong, sure. But also at some point I started dreading the gym. But I was afraid to quit, because I didn't want to lose my gains. I... (read more)

Thank you! I needed to read this.

Also, A lot of stuff written about here are worse in communities where prosperity is recent or yet to come.

I personaly only put 20% effort into 80% of everything. Getting in the Pain region of "how hard you try" should only be done when you know the effort is worth it.

It seems that getting into pain is not the problem. Rather contrary, i think knowing that the pain was worth it and one has achieved something incredible is fundametaly positive. At least for me. 

The problem seem, that people are constantly in pain for things they shouldnt be. Family, kids, jobs, hobbies, looking attractive, studying for best grades,... they want to reach 100% in all areas. W... (read more)

I find your first anecdote quite interesting. It speaks of a much larger fallacy: the convention of using rewards to make ourselves feel better in an emotional trough. I watched Eric Edmeades once speak on this topic. If our go-to behavior when we feel bad is to do the things we enjoy, in an understandably naive attempt to feel better, are we not reinforcing the same behavior that got us there in the first place? Although far from a full-fledged behavioral theory, I think this idea is worth contemplating.

On a different note, something my yoga teacher once ... (read more)

I think there's another aspect that you haven't mentioned.

I've found that when I've overburdened myself with work, I tend to cope through copious amounts of caffeine. Over time, this habit limits my overall productivity, and forces me to undergo painful withdrawal symptoms to return to normal. When someone turns to alcoholism to escape the stress in their life, they limit the amount of productive time they can spend solving the problems that lead to their stress. The same goes for many ultimately destructive habits: binge eating, gambling, smoking, memes (... (read more)

relevant meme https://www.reddit.com/r/wholesomememes/comments/k3u4z9/never_give_up/

Wow, this post describes 100% of my life.

I may add, from experience, that this condition is quite complex to cure. I understand that there are tasks that either can't be cheated through or maybe you just need to be very-very lucky to do them without much effort, because all the tasks with that property have been automated and the world is not heaven yet. Therefore all the things that tell me "you shouldn't experience pain to make an effort towards a task" make me not believe in them, because pain IS effort, and such allegations propose to cheat the way thr... (read more)

Chinese webnovels are addictive. 

On a more serious note, in between seeing face slaps and beatdowns, I do sometime read about the overarching themes behind these novels. 

If you prefer urban novels in modern China, the focus on 'success' is lots of face slapping on people who looked down on you. Lots of "Junior, do you dare" and Jade beauties falling in love. Climbing up by stepping on others and having conspicuous signs of wealth. I take it as a sign of an ultra competitive society.

The protagonists of Chinese webnovels are sometime murder hobos a... (read more)

At one point, IIRC, I thought pain, or at least exhaustion, was meritorious. My mother and grandmother sure did. They'd have contests!

Later, I saw thru that. Play is more productive than work for the same task. Go for the joy. That sort of thing.

But think about it from the perspective of someone with chronic illness, or severely overworked, or in a great deal of emotional pain (death of a spouse or child, or other reasons). You'll have heard the analogy of spoons (https://www.healthline.com/health/spoon-theory-chronic-illness-explained-like-never-before). ... (read more)

I have heard the idea that some people especially regard having children as a feat, that you are a good (not frivolous) parent only if you don’t get enough sleep all the time, spend all the time cooking for the child, you can’t go to the movies, go on vacation and so on.

Shuzan held out his short staff and said: "If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now what do you wish to call this?"

I think the dichotomy you are proposing is one of many paradoxes where it just depends. Yes, if you break your wrists trying to bench press too much, you’re doing it wrong. If you try to bench press just under too much, you will achieve maximal strength gains overt time. You will also be very sore and experience some joint pain.

Absolutely agree we live in a culture of... (read more)

Answering emails at midnight and appearing fatigued at meetings are somehow taken to be more credible signals of effort than actual results.

I suppose this is not the point of the post, but I find this to be good advice in competitive settings with this belief. 

Not actually getting close to burn out, but just appearing like you are about to, while pretending to be trying not to show it...

Psychology has good evidence that there is an "optimal level of effort" you need to reach to improve optimally at something. If you find something to be ea... (read more)

While you make a nice argument for pain not being a unit of effort, I think a subtlety is ignored -- pain at the threshold of current capability is not differentiated from pain derived by trying to perform well beyond capability. The 20th rep of a 30 lb dumbbell curl hurts. But the pain doesn't endure. You have a meal, get some rest and recover. However, you risk injuring yourself if you attempt the same with a 100 lb dumbbell. While the former contributes to muscle growth, the latter causes injury. Both are painful, but the pain is different. Pain is cruc... (read more)

Hello - I am new to less wrong and I thoroughly enjoyed this short essay.  Comments:

I agree with you that many people, unfortunately, equate pain with work.  The viewpoint is actually absurd given that work is an objective measure of output and pain is an internal state.  

According to Buddhism, pain is the inevitable result of expectations and desires, because anyone who has these is bound to be disappointed at least once or (more likely) many times.  In the case of work or student life, pain is caused by the expectation of happiness be... (read more)

Rule of Power 30 from Robert Greene " Make your Accomplishments seem effortless". The people who truly do succeed in building a successful life pursue a path were any unproductive pain is avoided if not all pain. 

Pain, like money, is a measurable metric compared to skill level which is a much more abstract set of metrics to be measured on. We generally use tests and competitions to measure skill level, but during the personal growth period where those options aren't accessible, people tend to equate suffering as a result of learning to measure progress. Like you said, it's not very reliable since there is really no correlation between pain and skill level. Also your speed of learning can change how much time/enjoyment/suffering you go through as you learn, but ulti... (read more)

Pain is the unit of change. Effort, including of others, can be applied to minimize the necessary pain.

Unwanted or forced change is an injury, a wound, or trauma

Wanted, natural, and needed change (including healing) might hurt as much but your actions, medicine, and technology can minimize pain.