Living the anesthetized life
Sunday night I woke up late with a throbbing toothache; the kind that makes you think your heart and nervous system have migrated to one small point in your mouth.
After taking a few Aleve, I lay in bed, bemoaning my fate of having generally terrible teeth, and the amount of money it would cost to get my latest problem fixed. Just when it looked like I had enough money saved to buy a snowboard, a rotten tooth has shattered my dream.
In the meantime,more than 55,000 people had just been killed in south Asia during horrendous earthquake and typhoon, and many more had lost their homes and were bearing much more radical shifts in the state of their health and fortune than I.
Thinking about this didn't made my tooth feel any better, nor did it do anything for all those suffering people. And, as usual, my own pain quickly became the most important thing in the world, eclipsing all other headlines in my mind.
As far as I can tell, I'm not alone in this. Everyone still showed up to work Monday morning, and, after briefly touching on the world's tragedies, began worrying about immediate deadline pressures.
And, even after taking pain relievers and finishing my work, successfully avoiding all pain, I probably still won't let myself feel much of the suffering around the world, either.
That seems to be one of the most basic aspects of human nature: to avoid pain and seek pleasure. There does seem to be a part of us that hates to see others in pain also, it just has a lot less sway over our immediate actions than our concern for ourselves.
Should we feel guilty for living the anesthetized life? A life focused on alleviating our own pain and shutting down at the thought of that of other's?
It's something I suspect we all wrestle with. Usually I can convince myself that an army of weekly newspaper reporters couldn't do much for the people of south Asia. Leave it to philanthropic doctors or civil engineers to rebuild their water systems and treat their injured.
But if I somehow managed to save enough money and fly to south Asia to do manual labor helping the people there, would it even scratch the surface of world suffering? Or would I just be finding another way to make myself feel better? I suppose to actually take that action I would have to be feeling a lot of pain.
Of course, pain is inevitable in this lifetime, but it just seems so imbalanced. Some of us are doomed to helplessly watch our lives, families and towns destroyed, while others spend $55,000 cloning a cat, apparently relieving the grief associated with lost domestic animals.
People living in Thailand or Indonesia would probably trade their problems for feline death trauma in a heartbeat. But if the anesthetized life is the solution we're all working toward, it somehow doesn't seem a whole lot better to me.
Honestly, I can't imagine what the solution is for the world. I'm not even sure there is one, and I suspect anyone that says they hold the key to ending all suffering is guilty of being a little too hopeful.
Maybe the problem is that I'm asking myself to find a solution, knowing that it is likely beyond the ability of a single human, and, therefore, giving up before I start. It could be that I just need to narrow my focus, do what I can and not philosophize about the big picture too much.
Maybe I just need to shut-up and start. Maybe it's time to feel some pain.
Paul Peters is a reporter at the Whitefish Pilot