Best Of: An Epicurean Guide to the Good Life

I'm Rufus Griscomb, and this is the next big idea. Today, the 2,000-year-old case for hedonism. Do you like pain? It's a funny question. Who likes pain?

Most of us, I think, would say that some suffering is part of a good life, and we admire those who suffer well. There was a saying in the 1980s when I was growing up, no pain, no gain, a workout mantra immortalized by Jane Fonda. But some quipster put no pain, no pain, on a bumper sticker, and I remember thinking, that's more like it. Must we be masochists? On the one hand you might say that masochism is a clever adaptation to a world in which suffering is inevitable.

If we're gonna feel pain, we may as well learn to like it. We've also learned that a certain amount of discomfort resets our hedonic set point and makes pleasure more readily available. I learned this from fascinating conversations with Anna Lemke and Paul Bloom in two of my favorite episodes in the last few years. On the other hand, a reasonable case can be made that we celebrate masochism to a degree that's unhealthy.

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