How to Live When You’re in Pain
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As we wind down this series, a paradox remains in our pursuit of happiness: Joy comes to those who have known pain. In order to overcome struggle—breakups, illness, even death—we must first accept and acknowledge its inevitability. Exploring the darkness of our suffering may seem counterintuitive, but often it’s the only way to see the light.
In this week’s episode, Arthur C. Brooks sits down with BJ Miller, a palliative-care physician, to uncover how we can face our deepest fears, why we should accept our natural limitations as human beings, and how to make peace with the ebb and flow of joy and suffering in human life—an experience we all share.
This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur C. Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Sound design by Michael Raphael.
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Music by Trevor Kowalski (“Lion’s Drift,” “This Valley of Ours,” “Una Noche De Luces,” “Night Sky Alive”), Stationary Sign (“Loose in the Park”), and Spectacles Wallet and Watch (“Last Pieces”).
Click here to listen to other full-length episodes in the series.
This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Arthur C. Brooks: When you teach happiness, like I do, one of the biggest questions that people have initially: What is it? I mean, we all think we know what happiness is until you think about it. A lot of people, they assume that happiness is a feeling. A better definition of happiness is: It’s like a meal with three macronutrients. Just as a meal has macronutrients—or protein, carbohydrates, and fat—happiness is a feast with three macronutrients, and they are: enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.
I want to focus right now on that third macronutrient, on purpose. I probably don’t have to convince you that finding purpose or meaning in your life is required for you to be a happy person. You may have spent certain times in your life really having a great old time. Lots of pleasure, lots of enjoyment, but kind of aimlessly. And you most likely didn’t find that you were really, really happy.
Almost everybody, it turns out, when they’re asked what actually helped them understand their life’s purpose—which is part of happiness—paradoxically, they talk about periods of unhappiness. Here’s the conundrum within all of these ideas: To be happy, you need purpose. To have purpose, you need unhappiness. You need some pain. You need some sacrifice. You need some difficulty. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Because we need it to get the purpose and thus the happiness that we seek.
BJ Miller: You know, I’m all for happiness. It’s a beautiful thing. But first of all, it’s not always accessible. Second of all, it is deeply related to pain and other trouble. I don’t think happiness is the absence of trouble or absence of problems or the absence of pain. I think happiness and pain are really close bedfellows.
Brooks: BJ Miller is a hospice and palliative-care physician and the co-founder of the online palliative-care company Mettle Health. Dr. Miller’s professional field of palliative care deals directly with the healing of suffering rather than of disease itself—from physical pain to emotional struggles. You might wonder why I’m so interested in his work. I’m interested in anybody who’s a total subversive in their own field, and that’s BJ Miller.
Why is he interested in suffering and death himself? He had a near-death accident in his college years. He dealt with incredible pain and was forced to confront mortality head-on. BJ’s wisdom on pain and suffering, through his professional work and personal experience, helps us come to grips with the inevitable struggles of being human, which means sometimes being in pain and in every life, sooner or later, coming to an end. Why? So that we can be alive today in a more meaningful way.
Miller: We humans are sort of relatively oriented, so we know joy because we’ve known pain. And we need foils. We need points of contrast. And so death can provide us this point of contrast so that things like beauty and joy pop; they have something to push against and to relate to. So that idea of having a foil in life to understand what joy feels like because we know what its absence feels like.
Happiness is not so much just the pursuit of pleasure. It’s somehow the pursuit of
