Sometime in the last two generations, Americans decided that it’s never okay to be uncomfortable. Any hunger should be sated immediately. Any pain should be assuaged post haste.
Instant gratification not only became a staple of modern life, it became expected. If you’re hungry, why wouldn’t you eat? If you’re tired, why wouldn’t you rest? To do anything but satisfy your immediate needs is viewed as strange or unhealthy.
But, it’s okay to be hungry. It’s okay to be tired. Enduring it for a bit will make you stronger, more appreciative when you do scratch that itch, and able to subsist on less.
P.S. As with most things, when we react immediately, we often make poor decisions. For example, sometimes remedying your pain as quickly as possible isn’t the solution at all. In the early 20th century, we discovered that extended bed rest cured 90% of all back pain. Simple, slow, but effective. Then MRIs were widely adopted by the medical community. Now, detailed pictures made it clear that disk abnormalities were what caused people’s back pain. Injections, surgical removal of the disk tissue, and fusion of the bones was the solution. Only, disk abnormalities weren’t the root cause. These “abnormalities” are exceedingly common, even in those with no pain at all. In our hurried effort to immediately alleviate the symptoms, doctors often made our problems much worse.
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As someone who grew up in the that pejorative, ‘third world’, and has had the opportunity to travel and live all across the globe, I’m often surprised by the queasiness and avoidance of discomfort among so many in the developed world. When I studied for an year in the US, I was a bit taken aback to see my flatmate’s ‘medicine cabinet’ (that’s a term you’ll never hear in the third world) stocked with medicines for every ailment imaginable. Where I grew up, ‘man up’ was the remedy for minor ailments, not medicines. It was deemed okay to be uncomfortable for a little while. If you were depressed, you weren’t immediately prescribed prozac; you were given time to effect a natural recovery. You never heard of allergies because you were exposed to every allergen imaginable from a young age.
Of course, there are more than a few downsides to the hands-off approach adopted in the third world, and I need not recount them here. But I do believe that being uncomfortable is good. I can’t help but not quote Nietzsche here – what doesn’t kill you, only makes you stronger.
Great, great points. As to Nietzsche, Christopher Hitchens wrote an interesting piece about that quote just before his death: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/01/hitchens-201201