Pleasure and Pain Are Relative: Another’s Suffering Is a Spectacle is a proposition set under the self, suffering, and motivation. It holds that suffering and joy are badly distorted in the eyes of an outside observer: the one who suffers may not, inwardly, be as wretched as he looks, and the one who shines may not, inwardly, be as happy as he looks—so that, when the books are balanced, it all comes out “more or less the same.” And it is precisely other people’s suffering that supplies the material for what gets watched, admired, and called “a good story”—the films people praise as great almost never spare their protagonist his misery; as the saying goes, “the film you love to watch is someone else’s road of pain.” The proposition takes “suffering,” normally treated as an objective quantity, and splits it into two layers—the sufferer’s actual experience and the onlooker’s projection—and points out that the two routinely diverge.
The Distortion of Pleasure and Pain: The Onlooker’s Misjudgment
The first layer of the proposition addresses the most pervasive cognitive error in everyday life—measuring another person’s inner world with one’s own eyes. Seen through the lens of evolution, a person’s feeling about his circumstances is calibrated over the long run; an outsider who imagines another’s suffering by his own standards tends to overestimate that suffering, and, for those who look enviable, tends to overestimate that joy.
Do you really think they are as miserable inside as you imagine? Not necessarily. And conversely—those who look so dazzling and well-off to outsiders, are they really that happy, that content? Honestly, not necessarily either.
This is a “misplaced frame of reference”: the onlooker transplants his own frame onto the one being observed, and the readings of pleasure and pain that result are, naturally, distorted. The proposition lands on “on balance, more or less the same”—not that everyone’s suffering and joy are equal, but that once the inner experience is fully entered into the ledger, the external ranking of who is glamorous and who is in tatters is far less trustworthy than it appears. This shares a root with Seeing Is Not Believing: Belief Is More Useful Than Truth: the “misery” or “bliss” that is seen is surface; the real pleasure and pain lie beneath that surface, not on the onlooker’s retina.
”More or Less the Same,” Through the Lens of Evolution
Why should pleasure and pain be calibrated down to “more or less the same”? The proposition appeals to evolutionary thinking: feeling is not an absolute scale but a product of relative adaptation. For someone long settled in a given circumstance, both the threshold of pain and the baseline of pleasure drift to match it; and so an enormous gap in external conditions does not map linearly onto an enormous gap in inner experience. Put differently, place a person back inside his own circumstances and his own time, and both suffering and joy get flattened out.
This is exactly the individual-experience extension of Seeing the World Through Evolution: Home Is the Safest Ground, and Seeing Through the Prison of Fame, Wealth, and Power: through evolutionary eyes, a difference in the hand of fame, wealth, and power one is dealt is not the same as a difference in the experience of happiness. It also confirms, and is confirmed by, Unhappiness Springs from Craving, Not from Lack—if suffering arises mainly from craving rather than from objective lack, then those who are objectively “in want” need not be more wretched, and those who are objectively “in plenty” need not be more joyful, and it all returns, at last, to “more or less the same.” The proposition does not deny that suffering exists; it only denies the claim that “from the outside you can tally up who suffers more.”
Another’s Suffering Is a Spectacle
The second layer of the proposition turns the gaze away from “the misjudged sufferer” and toward “the onlooker who consumes suffering.” The stories people agree to call good are almost all built upon the protagonist’s misery.
The films we love to watch, the ones we call great—their protagonists are rarely without some wretched ordeal. The film you love to watch is someone else’s road of pain.
The goodness of a so-called “good film” is, to a large degree, someone else’s suffering processed into something watchable. The audience sits in a safe seat and admires the protagonist’s struggle, his fall, and his turnaround along the road of pain—and here suffering is transmuted into a spectacle, a source of entertainment and of meaning. This connects with The Essence of Desire Is the Hunt for Novelty: the fascination with “someone else’s road of pain” is, in essence, a novelty-seeking exploration of extreme circumstances, of perils one would never wish to live through oneself; suffering is “watchable” precisely because it is scarce, because it is hair-raising.
The Asymmetry Between Suffering and Watching Suffering
Set the two layers side by side, and the proposition exposes an asymmetry: as an onlooker, a person is eager to consume another’s suffering and to take it for a good story; as the one suffering, a person is so often misread by others on the basis of appearances. The very same “suffering” is, in the theater, an admired high point, and, in reality, an experience overestimated or underestimated. When watching another’s pain, a person bestows meaning and value on it without restraint; when it comes to measuring the real other, a person reaches for the crudest external ruler.
This asymmetry is a reminder: the “value” of suffering is, in large part, a valuation assigned after the fact, from the outside, and through narrative—not a property of the suffering itself. It thereby draws a boundary around Suffering Is the Tempering of the Soul—suffering can become a tempering, but “watchable” is not the same as “deserved,” and to romanticize suffering, to treat another’s pain as a plotline he had coming, is the onlooker’s bit of cheapness. It also stands in tension with Growth Need Not Cost You Pain: since the “value” of pain is mostly something the onlooker grants in retrospect, one should not turn it around and treat pain itself as the necessary ticket of admission to growth.
How the Proposition Is Used
This proposition is meant not so much to console as to dispel two illusions. First, it dispels the illusion of “judging suffering by appearances”: do not decide from someone’s exterior who is happy and who is unfortunate; both the outward glamour and the outward shabbiness are untrustworthy, and the true pleasure and pain must be seen by returning to the person’s own circumstances and experience. Second, it dispels the illusion that “suffering carries value in itself”: the suffering in a good story moves us because it has been told, watched, and given meaning—not because the act of suffering is in itself noble; and to make a spectacle of another’s pain, one ought at least to know that this is the onlooker’s seat. The proposition closes, then, on a measured attitude: a little less presumption in measuring another’s suffering, and a little more honest self-awareness about the “good stories” we consume.
Sources
- Manuscript — “The films we love to watch, the ones we call great, their protagonists are rarely without some wretched ordeal. The film you love to watch is someone else’s road of pain.”
- Manuscript —another record of the same assertion
- Manuscript —through the lens of evolution: “the sufferer need not suffer, the one who shines need not be joyful; on balance, more or less the same”