The sixth great extinction is upon us. For the first time in earth’s history, a mass extinction event is caused by one type of lifeform, homo sapiens. The collective pollution from global human activity is comparable to an eruption of a supervolcano. As a result, the climate is changing rapidly. This bothers me greatly because I believe climate change is the biggest challenge we will face in my lifetime. I discovered how serious it was in high school. In the beginning, I couldn’t wrap my head around this issue. How could human actions affect the climate of the planet? What was the connection? My younger self thought that we were separated from nature a long time ago. We lived in concrete buildings, farmed our own food. There were two worlds on the planet Earth. There was our world, the human world which encompassed the cities, the roads, the villages, the farmlands and the domesticated animals like cows, goats, dogs, cats etc. And then there was the natural world where everything else lived. If so, how is our world affecting the natural world? This question had paused all my current ambitions at the time and drifted me off course. My curiosity on the subject was so great that I even chose to study it in a university for a year. I did not rest until I figured out the true cause of this problem.

First of all, it was a fallacy to think of two worlds on one planet. There was no such thing. The wall between us and nature was an illusion because of the belief in humans’ divine sanctioned superiority. This European religious belief was transported all around the world with imperialism. I grew up in urban areas that were isolated from the natural world. It biased my naïve view. Once I figured that out, I started to investigate climate change from the bottom up using inductive reasoning. First, I mapped all of the primary factors that are contributing to the emission of greenhouse gases on the globe. Second, I traced back the motivators of these factors from the brain perspective. What motivates people to eat meat? What motivates people to drive cars? What motivates people to live in nice houses with consistent power supply? After I have done that, the cause of climate change is obvious.

Let me explain. We construct new cities, new buildings to live and work comfortably no matter the weather. We use electricity to make the interior spaces comfortable, to cook food, to watch TV, to play games, to dry hair, to iron clothes, to charge devices no matter the time of day. We use modern transportation such as trains, planes, cars and ships to go on a comfortable journey no matter how far the destination. We eat meat, fruits and vegetables to experience the pleasure of eating good food no matter the season. We buy beautiful clothes no matter how they are made. All of these activities cost a lot of energy. As a result, multiple energy intensive water hungry industries spring up in the last one hundred years to fulfil the need for comfort. Do you see where I am going with this? I don’t believe humans are the disease that is scourging the planet Earth. We just want to live pleasurable and comfortable lives. Is that too much to ask? Yes! Yes, it is. Due to our current obsession with comfort, we have become weak. Weak in both body and mind. It is literally destroying the planet. There has to be another way. Maybe embracing pain is worth considering. Maybe do things by hand instead of using electricity. Maybe walk instead of driving. Maybe grow your own food instead of buying them from supermarkets. Maybe buy less clothes instead of surrendering to cheap fashion. Pain makes us strong while at the same time solving the fundamental cause of climate change. Pain might even be pleasurable.

Current pain system paradigm in the brain

What is pain? How do we define it? Pain is a perception system as old as the animal kingdom. It is not a mere sensation. And certainly not limited to the sense of touch. We can quantify pain with a machine by measuring the pain receptors that are prevalent all over the skin. But is that all? Just a warning system from a web of nerves? No, it is a lot more than that. Pain is integral to being alive because it serves an immediate function to the homeostasis of the entire being. Therefore, pain is not just physical. It is also mental, emotional, spiritual. Pain tells us that something is wrong. About who we are. About the world. About everything if the pain is great enough. It is a perception that points to the right direction. Well it points towards death if you must know, a place you don’t wanna go. Think of a compass that always points at north. In this case, the north is death. Pain speaks in increasing loudness. First it whispers at you. Then it tugs at you. If you ignore it too long, it will scream at you. Even something as simple as carrying shopping bags can eventually become painful on the fingers. In that moment, pain seizes your attention and doesn’t let go. It imprisons your mind. While you are in pain, you can’t focus on anything else but pain. That is the point. It is a call to action. Pain will not let go of your attention until you figure out what’s wrong with yourself and take the necessary steps to solve the issue that is causing the pain. For example, loneliness is a type of pain. It is a heartache that gnaws away at you in the back of your mind. The pain is compelling you to get out of your bed and start making friends. In the ancient past, loneliness means death. So, the human species has evolved to have an acute pain of loneliness. Solitary animals like tigers don’t feel the same level of loneliness pain as social animals. Because tigers thrive being alone. Their pain compass doesn’t point towards death when they are alone like the human pain compass does.

You intuitively know this already. Unfortunately, it is commonly believed that there is a difference between physical pain and mental pain. The truth is the brain perceives ‘mental’ pain just as much as ‘physical’ pain. Emotional abuse is just as bad as physical abuse. You can see it in the fMRI scans. So, the division doesn’t make sense. I blame Descartes. The current theory of pain insists that an outside pain-stimuli must take place first before feeling pain. In many cases, that is indeed the case. You feel the burn of a hot stove after you touch it which automatically forced you to pull away from the location of contact. If you are angry or afraid at the time, the emotions will increase the pain. Moreover, your memories of past burns come rushing back to give you context. Then you use language to describe how you are feeling. The words you use can affect the secondary wave of pain. Have you figured out why this theory is limiting? It is because pain can occur without the outside touch stimuli. All on its own. How do we account for pain that cannot be located on the body? Sometimes chronic pain can manifest in certain parts of the body with no previous injury. It is a way of expressing emotional or spiritual pain you are feeling in the brain. Remember, pain points towards death. If the body isn’t dying, then something else is. Maybe the love relationship is dying. Maybe the career is dying. Find it! And solve it! Only then the pain will let go.

As much as we want to be free from pain, it is ever present. Can you remember a time in your life when you are totally free from the clutches of pain? You can’t, can you? Since the moment we are born pain has always been with us. My earliest memory was that of pain. I was probably four at the time when I cut my middle finger with scissors while papercutting a cartoon figure. A small cut, nothing major. Yet it was the first time in my life when I saw a rush of blood pouring out. I knew it was my own mistake. As a result, I felt guilty and ashamed which increased the pain. So, I tried to hide the bloody hands from my mother because I was afraid she might scold me. When she eventually found out, she was screaming in panic, thankfully not at me. My point is that we cannot imagine a life without pain no matter how much we wish it to be. Pain is a subjective experience. Pain is always personal. For those unfortunate individuals who don’t feel pain, the compass is broken with disastrous consequences. These are patients suffering from leprosy, nerve disorders, spinal cord injuries or congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP). Without the instinct for self-preservation, unnecessary risks are taken. Small injuries add upon small injuries without proper time to heal. They don’t see their limbs as part of them. Just crude tools to be used and discarded. Worse, people treated them as freaks and shunned them from the community in disgust. Their bodies may be numb but they do suffer from the pain of despair. Only after witnessing first hand the horrible disfigurements on the limbs that are caused by leprosy do I realise what a miracle pain is. It is an overwhelmingly complex perceptual system with one purpose: uniting the body as one individual. Because pain is personal, there is a sense of ownership of the body. This is my body. My hands are not my tools, but MY hands. When I realise this truth, I no longer curse at the unpleasantness of pain. I feel thankful that my body is working as it should to protect me without the need for my conscious input.

Ok, now let us consider the heart of this chapter. How do we induce pleasure with pain? For those who have never considered it, taking pleasure from pain seems like an immoral act. A rare activity that weird BDSM masochists are taking part in the dark corners of the city. It’s actually much more common than that. A good example would be runner’s high. When athletes or dancers train for a purpose, they voluntarily take on pain to progress their skills. It guides them. They have incredible tolerance to pain. Both during and after the training, endorphins are constantly released into the bloodstream. This event transforms into a feeling of euphoria and achievement. Another extraordinary example is a Zen Buddhist practice called Keisaku. The most challenging obstacle to a successful meditation is mind wandering. The so-called monkey brain (the default mode network) is difficult to silence once it gets going. So, the monks use flat wooden sticks to hit themselves on the back to refocus the mind. It’s not because the monks are feeling kinky. The pain wakes up their brain which in turn allows them to live in the moment. Still not convinced? I understand why you feel the pleasure of pain is something dark and doesn’t belong in polite human discourse. Pain is a kind, warm-hearted, loving angel disguised as a cruel, unpleasant, hateful demon. Most people only see the demonic side of pain. By that I mean, pain causes a lot of misery in people’s lives. Taking pleasure from misery feels wrong. In order to discover the pleasure of pain, you have rip off the demonic disguise and see the real angel inside. In order to do that, you need two ingredients: consent and control.

Why consent? To feel pleasure from pain, you have to choose it. I mean choose it consciously. Most of the time when we feel pain, it just happens to us. External factors determine how much we feel pain. As a result, we resent it. The moment we choose it, the feeling changes dramatically. Now pain becomes a barometer of our effort. The cause of pain is internal, within the confines of our mind. The more we take on pain willingly, the more pleasurable it becomes. Trust and consent go hand in hand. You trust yourself that you can handle it. It still hurts don’t get me wrong, but it also feels good. This happens when pain is within our control. Another reason why we hate pain is because it is chaotic. It disrupts our everyday routines. Most of the time, we can’t tell how much pain we would have to feel. Remember, the most fundamental fear is the fear of the unknown. When we don’t know the amount of pain we have to endure, fear activates. It is well known that fear and anxiety multiply the level of pain. As a result, we suffer more. But when pain is within our control, it is no longer chaotic. It becomes order. When you can dial pain up and down according to your needs, it is no longer scary. It becomes pleasurable because it is within your expectation. You become more resilient, more confident of pain.

The best part about the pleasure of pain is that it resets all other sensory pleasures. Too much pleasure causes our mind to go numb. We need more and more to satisfy the baseline experience. When pain is mixed in between, the baseline lowers again so the senses become more sensitive to pleasure. What do I mean by that? For example, I tended to eat food while watching Netflix. I knew it was not a good habit in the long term but it felt good. The more I did it, the more I became numb to the food. Eating felt like a chore. This was not acceptable. Food was meant to be enjoyed. The next day, I chose to go on a long arduous hike on the Lake District National Park. Let me tell you, the views were amazing. At the end of the day, my legs were sore and I was dreadfully tired. I was starving, painfully starving. So, I came back home and ate the same food I felt numb a day before. This time, I could taste every molecule of the food, every flavour within it. It was an amazing meal. Even the water tasted great. The food was nothing special. In fact, it hadn’t changed. What changed was the baseline of the pleasure. Pain allowed me to re-feel the basic pleasures that already existed around me but I had forgotten about it. Pain made me feel grateful for being alive.

I recommend you visit the Lake District at least once.

How do we present the pleasure of pain as a model? Think of it as a container. To become pleasurable, pain intensity has to slowly build over time. Remember this has to be actively participated by yourself or with someone you trust. The immediate physical environment has to be safe as well. At low levels, pain is just a mild discomfort. The anticipation of slow increase of pain produces dopamine in the brain. I will call it the stress of pain. This stress is very important for the release of pleasure. The body sympathetic nervous system automatically protects you by activating the fight or flight response. You would want to stop now but don’t. Keep going. Let the stress build up. Eventually once you reach the top of the container where you can no longer tolerate, cease all activity of pain. Then the body will pump endorphins into the bloodstream to kill the pain. This is the second stage of pleasure called a subspace. It is not the pain itself that is pleasurable but the stopping of it.

The pain threshold at the top of the container can be broken when you become used to the experience. People have different sensitivities to pain. Some are thrilled to go beyond their comfort zone while others only like to dip their toes before they opt out. Of course, the ultimate pain threshold is death. Do you remember what I said about the pain compass always point towards death? Humans can actually die from excessive pain.

This is why I am perplexed by the Shias mourning ritual on the Day of Ashura. Muharram is a special month in the Islamic calendar because it is when Imam Husayn ibn Ali, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad sacrificed his life as a martyr along with his entire family line. Millions of Muslims all over the world mourn his loss every year. But the Shia takes one step further. In a special ritual called Tatbir, they participate in mass self-flagellation. Men line up on the streets, hit themselves on the back with sharp blades attached to chains. There is a predetermined rhythm. Clothes ripped open, blood flowing all over the body. They don’t seem to be in pain but instead feeling joyful and proud. Often, the men are doing it together with their brothers, fathers and other distant relatives. It is an important time for people to bond together. With this communal pain, they can feel a taste of death that Husayn has went through with his family. Not everyone among the Shia agrees with the practice. Still, it is fascinating.

I would like to share with you an important insight I learned recently. Normally, I was not fond of difficult games. When I played, I wanted to win provided there was enough challenge to keep things engaging. When my best friend recommended me to play Bloodborne, I was sceptical. The game had a reputation for being extremely difficult. The stats were not looking good either. A third of the players had never beaten the first boss. Less than a fifth of the players had beaten the game once. This felt like a painful game. Yet I decided to give it a shot due to his insistence. The game was not that bad. It was challenging sure. I died many times but mainly because of my fault. Decades of gaming experience have groomed me to solve problems swiftly. I was having a fun time but it will not last long. Midway through the game I hit the first roadblock, my archnemesis Martyr Logarius. (I am now feeling a little PTSD just hearing his name.) I fought him on the snowy rooftops of a giant castle. The atmosphere of the fight was breathtaking. He used magical explosions left and right. It was almost impossible to get close to him. When I did get close, he attacked me with a scythe on his right hand and a sword on his left. ‘YOU DIED!’ Great! Let’s try again. He summoned a cloud of swords to rain upon me. ‘YOU DIED!’ Damn it! What was I doing wrong? Try again. ‘YOU DIED!’ By this point, I could feel the pain in my brain, the pain of repeated failures. It was not a headache but something else. I knew I could beat him. On the 25th try, I predicted his moves and punished him quickly. I parried his dual wield combo attack with my gun. When his health bar hit 0, I saw ‘PREY SLAUGHTERED!’ Right there and then I understood. A deep primal chill flooded my back and then flowed all the way to my fingers. My heart was beating like 100 times a second. I had never experienced such a high before. The euphoria of conquering insurmountable odds was amazing. Hidetaka Miyazaki, the director of Bloodborne wanted the players to feel this pleasure. He didn’t like dividing the player base by designing multiple difficulty settings. That’s why the game had a bad rep for being hard. 6 months later I received the platinum trophy for beating the game 100%. This was a feat only the best of the best could accomplish. I fell in love with Bloodborne. Since then, my opinion of video games has changed forever. Unlike the good old days of arcade games that are designed to devour your coins, modern games mostly play by themselves. With just a minimum of input, you can become an action superhero, save the world and be showered with more rewards than you know what to do with. It is a shallow power fantasy, nothing more. But games like Bloodborne remind you that you are still human because you can overcome any pain given enough improvement in your skills. I now understand the inexhaustible potential of pain in personal growth.

Bloodborne Martyr Logarius Boss Fight. After I have gotten the platinum trophy, I decided to fight him again. This was the result.

I would like to end this chapter by talking a little about the origin of evil. The concept of evil is one of the hardest human experiences to define. Many intellectuals of the past and the present who are smarter than me have tried. No matter what we do, evil persists. After exploring the pleasure of pain at length, I see evil with more clarity. I would define it as the causing of pain without the recipient’s consent and sense of control. Moreover, the person who causes the pain take pleasure from this suffering. This is different from punishment. If a parent is disciplining a child, the punishment should be proportional to the wrongdoing. The proportion has to make sense in the child’s mind. If a parent is venting his frustration on a child which goes beyond any common sense of punishment, he is causing evil. This kind of displacement triggers untold confusion which later leads to criminal behaviour in adulthood. Evil spawns more evil. My first experience of evil was in primary school. I discovered very quickly that I was a big kid. By using my size, I would bully others into submission. Not to take their stuff or anything like that. I bullied those kids who displayed annoying characteristics like those who laughed in a funny voice, those who jumped constantly instead of walking normally or anyone else who made me annoyed. It felt good to have power. Ironically, I had a friend who was a year younger than the rest of the class. I saw him as my little brother because we always studied together. He was small and delicate. He always cried from the slightest offense. So, I had to protect him by punching the kids who bullied him. I felt a strange feeling then. I didn’t understand what that was. Now I know why. I saw a part of myself in the bullies who picked on my best friend. I saw my evil. The capacity for evil is ingrained in every human heart since even young children express it. Solzhenitsyn realised that in the lies of Gulag Archipelago. By accepting my capacity of evil, I discovered a newfound respect for myself. I can choose to cause pain in others, or I can choose not to do it. There is already so much suffering in this world. I don’t want to add more to it. Regret is a powerful and painful teacher for becoming a better person. I am wise enough to listen to it.

Nociception Pleasure Model

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