Meaningful Suffering: Why Modern Life Is Making Us Less Able to Endure Pain (opens in new tab)

There is a sentence modern culture keeps repeating to itself with increasing desperation: You should not have to suffer. At first glance this sounds compassionate, enlightened, humane. And to some extent it is. Modern medicine has relieved staggering amounts of human misery. Antibiotics matter. Anesthesia matters. Trauma therapy matters. Nobody sane wants to return to the era where people died from infected teeth while someone quoted philosophy beside a candle. But something psychologically s...