[Serious] The Purpose of Pain

[The Grand Nudger]

Another problem with pain as a learning tool. The greater the severity or duration, the less likely we are to even register it's existence. We go into shock or we get used to it, and the more we get used to pain the less effective pain is at body control, let alone learning. The idea of a person in shock having learned something or being improved..I would hope, doesn't even have to be addressed.

Thankfully, my pain was something that rubbing dirt on it and walking could help - that's pretty much the only thing - it just took forever. I had my geriatric routine down by my mid twenties. Bench and rail shower, all the furniture against the walls. No hard edges, single level only. ABSOLUTELY NO GLASS...which sucked, cuz I love glass. Sports cars and motorcycles are out of the question - so I'll have to find something else to lose my mind over at midlife. I;m already working on a good gig there, something to perpetrate on my better half.

Leads me into the next thing. In the same way we create distance from pain to promote learning in children, the distance we have as observers to others pain, something that we're in the dark on in important ways - might account for why we think pain is a learning or improvement tool in the first place. It may be more accurate to state that the pain of others helps us to learn - as it provides us a third person view without all of the biological complications that pain in the first person presents. I can't think of anything I learned, but I know two women who learned a hell of alot about me...alot of it, I suspect, they wish they never had, or could forget.

In that sense, the point of the forge is to torture some other guy on our behalf, to kill some other persons kid instead of ours so that we might learn, and this is getting more and more familiar by the second. Sickeningly and disturbingly familiar, when we strip the cultural window dressing. Maybe all the pain that I was feeling and projecting was forging them, because they were somehow dificient before I got around to personally applying my own brand of cruelty. Hell, let's dial it even further back. I was forging the souls of randos in whogivesafuck by shooting their kids down like animals. I bet they're all very much improved for it today. The kids too, presumably. No one could argue with the improvements made and lessons learned by the application of this tool in just my life alone!