Life is Pain - And Yet, We Live
If you’re among an unfortunate crowd, as I am, you spend more time on TikTok than you should.
Recently, a oft-overlooked clip from Fox’s House was making it rounds there recently.
In it, Dr. House, brilliantly portrayed by the legendary Hugh Laurie, screams loudly, “Life is pain!”
This entire clip below provides necessary context, though the viral section occurs starting at 4 minutes and 25 seconds in. If you’ve not yet watched this show, a spoiler alert is not in effect.
If you’re familiar with House, then you know that Hugh Laurie plays a brilliant curmudgeon who also happens to be a doctor. He’s witty, incredibly intelligent, and he saves many lives. He’s also an opioid addict, a cynical atheist obsessively lecturing others on rationalism, and a generally unpleasant person.
He jokes, he chides, he deflects. Even with a gun in his face, he finds room for the humor and mockery.
And yet, in this beautiful moment, House reveals his true state of mind. For a brief moment, when he’s finally forced to reckon with the possibility of losing his only true friend, Dr. Wilson (excellently played by Dead Poet Society’s Robert Sean Leonard), he screams.
Even he can’t find the humor for more than a moment. He cannot help but scream.
In the context of this entire clip, it’s easy to think that House is simply being insensitive. His inability to empathize with or provide comfort to his best friend facing a terminal cancer diagnosis reeks of cruelty. How can House fail his friend like this?
House, on the other hand, feels like he’s the one being let down.
After years living with chronic pain from a leg injury, he’s grown dependent on opioids. His dependence is fueled by the very-real pain of his injury (and maybe a little from his cynicism). As he exclaims loudly, life is pain. He lives in pain every day, quite literally.
And this is the heart of the issue for him. He lives everyday with a level of pain that is foreign to most of the population. Even many of his patients may enter in pain, but they leave healthy and generally free of discomfort. Despite this pain, House gets up every day. He goes to work, every single day. He heals people, every single day. If House can do it, why can’t his friend?
To House, his friend is abandoning him. After years of living in pain, House stuck around. He continued to be present for Wilson. And now, being faced with similar pain, his friend wants to just give up.
Perhaps both House and Wilson are missing something on the nature of pain and suffering. For insight, turn to Viktor E. Frankl.
As a former resident of Auschwitz, he is no stranger to the worst kind of human suffering. His wife, brother, mother, and father were all killed in concentration camps in the 1940s. Despite this, he moved forward with his life once he was freed.
Frankl went on to publish 39 books; his most famous work includes Man’s Search for Meaning, a text that focuses on his experiences in the camps and on the nature of human suffering.
“The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not. ”
House is exactly right when his righteous lamentation bursts forth in a fit of unexpected rage: “Life is pain!” Life is, indeed, pain. There is no escaping the pain and suffering that is present in life. The existence of this pain cannot and should not ever be used as part of a foundational truth to denounce one’s ability to live in spite of it. House is right. Life is pain. And if you want to end it, keep living anyway.
Frankl would agree. The search for meaning is a driving motivation to human existence. This force must continue despite whatever pain and suffering is present. Frankl writes, “If there is meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death, human life cannot be complete.”
On the other hand, Wilson is exactly right, too. It’s okay that he needs to know he’s not alone in his fight. He’s facing existentially harrowing news, as he’s now forced to reconcile with his own mortality in a way that few have to that early in life.
Suffering is subjective. What is little suffering to one is great suffering to another. Keep in mind, this argument comes from a Holocaust survivor; this is a man who knows suffering as very few do. He writes, “To draw an analogy: a man's suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the ‘size’ of human suffering is absolutely relative.”
House is right, life is pain. And Wilson is right, his suffering is just as valid as House’s. House deserves a high level of empathy, and his feelings are just. However, he does not merit a monopoly on pain.
So, what do we do with all this information?
The answer is pretty simple, though extremely difficult. Embrace suffering. Do not believe the cultural lies that espouse virtues of comfort and luxury under the banner of a fulfilling life. On the other hand, believe others when they say that they are in pain. Do not get caught up in your own pain and do not draw comparisons. Every person you meet has experienced pain, grief, suffering.
Embracing suffering as your reality does not mean you should turn a blind eye to the suffering of others.
“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief.”
Suffer, be kind to yourself, and be kind to others.