HBM139: Acceptable Pains

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters Podcast

Science, Society & Culture, Social Sciences, Personal Journals, Documentary

4.6 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 June 2020

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Hedonism seems pretty appealing right now—seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. On HBM137: Superhappiness, the hedonist philosopher, David Pearce imagined a future free of the systemic harms we currently experience: poverty, oppression, violence, and disease.

But David thinks that even an idyllic, egalitarian society wouldn’t ensure universal happiness. He thinks that the only way to make everyone blissfully happy is to use technology and genetic engineering to make physical and emotional pain obsolete

HBM producer Bethany Denton doesn’t fully agree. She thinks that heartbreak, homesickness, grief can all be good pain, pains that can make us better and kinder people in the long run. So what should the role of pain be in society? And further, what about the pains that we opt into, the pains we volunteer for? On this episode of Here Be Monsters, Bethany interviews people about long distance running, unmedicated childbirth, and voluntary crucifixion in the Philippines.

Will James is a reporter for KNKX Public Radio. Ashlynn Owen-Kachikis is a special education teacher. Carlo Nakar is a social worker and recurring guest on HBM.

Producer: Bethany Denton

Editor: Jeff Emtman

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	From KCRW, this is Here Be Monsters. Oh, So, I don't know, man.
0:37.0	I kind of wake up with the pain of existence every day.
0:45.4	And life is pain.
0:49.0	And dealing with the pain causes beauty,
0:54.0	dealing with the pain causes the best parts of us. Being able to assert control in a very uncertain world, that's very compelling.
1:11.0	I think that's why people do things. Here be monsters, the podcast about. Going so fast, just flying on your feet.
1:35.0	The podcast about the unknown. Wow. I'm going to go. The pain is a show. The pain could be a show for yourself and nobody else. There's this aspect of running, this badge of like you have endured all of this pain and you've survived and it's something you do for fun.
2:57.0	And that was really, really appealing to me.
3:01.0	I just kept running and running and pushing myself harder and harder and
3:06.3	harder. It just felt good. One thing I noticed was that a lot of the really elite competitive runners I would hang out with would also like drink a lot.
3:24.0	They were the sort of people who like the point of drinking was to black out,
3:28.0	you know what I mean?
3:30.0	For a while I thought that those were diametrically opposed to each other, the idea of like running
3:37.8	long distances and like binge drinking.
3:41.8	But... but there's like a thread there
3:48.3	of socially acceptable self-destruction or socially acceptable harm, right?
3:58.4	The Boston Marathon of 2018 was, by some accounts, the worst weather in the more than 120 year history of the Boston
4:06.7	Marathon. I remember thinking relatively early on in the race, like, I'm in trouble. This shouldn't feel this bad this soon.
4:18.6	Like, the rain just kept coming down. And it just got worse and worse. And that was like the first race or the first
4:30.2	run. I remember finishing and just feeling no satisfaction whatsoever.
4:37.0	Just feeling awful, just feeling like pure misery and just wanting to forget it.
4:44.0	Like the only joy that came out of that race was just it being over.
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -1755 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Here Be Monsters Podcast, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Here Be Monsters Podcast and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.