Everybody hurts
An investigation
I stumbled across the Substack site of someone I know and saw an orange tick mark in the description. When I clicked on it, this came up.
According to ChatGPT, the average paid Substack subscription is $96 per year. After Substack and Stripe take their cuts, that’s about $82/year. For me, “thousands of paid subscribers” means at least 2,000, but a friend said she thought it could also mean anything over a thousand. Still, even 1001 paid subscribers add up to a lot of income, and if it’s two thousand or three thousand or more, it’s a very good living. For writing a few posts a week!1
A better person would have been happier for this Bestseller whose name I’m not going to tell you. I was not. While they do publish some good stuff, it’s the sort of Substack that largely works by catering to the prejudices of its readers, telling them over and over again how noble and brave they are and how their enemies are morons and assholes. (This is different from the Small Potatoes model, which challenges its readers, dammit.)
Do you detect a little bit of envy?
I’ve written about this sin before, in a post called The Worst of the Deadly Sins. In that post, I share the old Soviet joke, recounted by Steven Pinker in "Enlightenment Now."
Igor and Boris are dirt-poor peasants, barely scratching enough crops from their small plots of land to feed their families. The only difference between them is that Boris owns a scrawny goat. One day a fairy appears to Igor and grants him a wish. Igor says, “I wish that Boris’s goat should die.”
I wouldn’t mind thousands of paid subscribers for Small Potatoes. But failing that, there’s a part of me that wants this Bestseller’s goat to die.
This feeling made me think about ways to address the pain of envy. In The Worst of the Deadly Sins, I make one proposal. Here’s another: We should recognize something important; we should appreciate that …
Everybody hurts
Before getting to whether this really is a cure for envy, we should ask if it’s true. The claim is not, of course, that everyone’s life is equally hard—that would be ridiculous. Rather, the idea is that nobody’s life is as easy as it might appear to be. Everyone has something rough going on, maybe more than one thing. Someone might seem to be entirely blessed—good-looking, respected, loved, thousands of paid Substack subscribers—but almost certainly they’re dealing with some heavy shit. Just like I am and just like you are.
Sometimes people’s struggles are visible to the world, but more often, you only learn about them if you know the person well. I came to be aware of this fact embarrassingly late in life, by becoming close to people I admire and seeing that they, too, have struggles. Maybe they have to deal with illnesses, physical or mental. Or they have money problems. Or legal problems. There are parent problems and child problems. If you know people well, you might learn about their marriage problems; if you know them really well, you might learn about their sexual problems.
Everybody hurts isn’t the product of some Karmic law. It’s just statistics. Suppose the odds of any given bad thing happening to someone are 1 in 1000, and suppose there are 10,000 bad things that can happen to a person. Here’s how this shakes out:
Under these assumptions, the average person has about 10 things going wrong in their life, and most people have between 5 and 15. Almost nobody has more than 20. As for zero, yes, there are some extremely lucky people, but they’re rare—about 4 out of every 100,000. The point here is that even if the odds of something bad happening are low, you’re almost certain to get hit if there are a lot of potential bad things on the table.
Things change if you make this more realistic. What if we consider that some people are more vulnerable than others? Again, there’s no magic here; there are no mystical qualities of good luck and bad luck. It’s just that life circumstances have cascading effects. To take an obvious example, if you are born in severe poverty, you are more likely to suffer from certain illnesses, to be a victim of crime, to be unemployed, and so on. Being born rich has the opposite effect. This is what social scientists call the Matthew effect: “the poor get poorer, and the rich get richer.” It’s named after a passage from the Gospel of Matthew:
“For to everyone who has, more will be given… but from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.”
Let’s calculate the same odds, but this time, we’ll assume that individuals differ in their likelihood of experiencing bad things. The average is still 1/100, but now there is a range from 1/1000 to 19/1000. We get this:
The average remains the same, but now there are more people who are very unlucky and more who are very lucky—we have 2% of the population who are entirely unscathed. Does this suggest that Everybody hurts is wrong?
Yes, but this is due to another unrealistic feature of this model—the assumption that all bad things are equally likely to happen. Of course, this isn’t true. Here are some estimates of awful events (all from ChatGPT, which also did the graphs):
Being struck by lightning in a given year – 1 in 1.2 million
Being diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome in a given year - 1 in 100,000
Experience a house fire that causes injury in a given year— 1 in 1,000
Being audited by the IRS in a given year – 1 in 300
Being a victim of a serious car accident in a given year – 1 in 103
Getting diagnosed with melanoma (skin cancer) at some point in life– 1 in 40
Experiencing a major depressive episode at some point in life – 1 in 6
Getting some form of cancer at some point in life – 1 in 2
Suffering back pain or spinal issues at some point in life – 80%
Getting acne as a teenager — 85%
So let’s break down our 1,000 bad events into (a) 950 low-risk events, where the odds of someone experiencing them range from 1 in 1,000 to 19 in 1,000, and (b) 50 high-risk events, where the odds for everyone are 1 in 5. Now we get this:
Under this modified version, the odds of being unscathed are infinitesimal —roughly 1 in 3 million. Everybody hurts.
Suppose this were true. Is appreciating it really a balm against the pain of envy?
I thought so when I started to write this post. But I went back and read my original discussion in The Worst of the Deadly Sins, and it turns out that I considered this view and argued against it. I find the points made by my Past Self pretty convincing.
First, envy is usually specific. In this previous post, I talked about how Robert Oppenheimer was deeply envious of other men’s romantic and sexual successes. It might have cheered him up to realize that these other men were struggling with problems that were unrelated to romance and sex, but it’s not clear how this would make this particular resentment disappear. The same holds for me and my Substack woes. My envy isn’t about the Bestseller’s life in general, so why should knowing about their difficulties make such a difference?
Second, there is something sordid about the whole thing. When someone is more successful than I am in a certain domain, do I really want to consider how they may suffer in other ways? In her book on the deadly sins, Dorothy Sayers describes envy as
‘the great leveler'—if it cannot level things up, it will level them down … rather than have anyone happier than oneself, it will see us all miserable together.
Even if it worked, I don’t want to be the sort of person who feels better about himself by revelling in the suffering of others. I really don’t want to hope that someone’s goat dies.
I think a better lesson is to be kinder and more forgiving. The relevant quote here is from the Reverend John Watson in the late 19th century:
Be pitiful, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.
I’ve been exploring the claim that Everybody hurts. But a sharp reader will notice that what I actually argued for is something a bit different, which is that Everybody has bad things happen to them.
They’re related but not the same. Suppose someone has severe back pain that makes sleep difficult, an ongoing IRS audit, a teenage son who is bullied at school, and a mother with dementia who requires costly care. For some, these events will lead to anxiety and depression; it’ll make them miserable. Some will hurt less. And some, like Joanne Cameron, a seventy-two-year-old retired teacher in Scotland, won’t be hurt at all.
Cameron is the subject of a fascinating profile in The New Yorker written by Ariel Levy. It is titled “A World Without Pain”. Levy writes:
As a child, she fell and hurt her arm while roller-skating, but had no idea she’d broken it until her mother noticed that it was hanging strangely. Giving birth was no worse. “When I was having Jeremy, it was the height of everyone doing natural childbirths,” she said. “My friends would come up to me and say, ‘Don’t listen—it’s murder. If you’re in pain, take everything they give you.’ I went in thinking, As soon as it gets painful, I’ll ask for the drugs. But it was over before I knew it.”
Remarkably, Cameron didn’t realize that she was any different from other people until she was sixty-five. “Lots of people have high pain thresholds,” she said. “I didn’t think people were silly for crying. I could tell people were upset or hurt and stuff. I went through life and I just thought, I haven’t hurt myself as much as they have.”
More relevant to our discussion here, Cameron doesn’t feel emotional pain either. She doesn’t worry; she’s never anxious; she doesn’t grieve. Levy describes how she heard one day that her teenage son had been severely beaten.
When Cameron got the call, she remembers, “initially, I thought, Oh, God, I hope he doesn’t die—I felt that. Then we got in the car. I wasn’t fretting, I was just thinking, We’ve got to get to him, he needs me.” [Cameron and her husband] drove a hundred and thirty miles on the single-track roads that wind east from their home in Foyers, near the snaky banks of Loch Ness, to Peterhead. “We got to the hospital about four or five in the morning. He looked like an elephant man, my handsome boy did,” Cameron said, laughing. “He looked like nothing on earth!”
It’s not that she’s numb. Contrary to the predictions of many theories of the benefits of suffering (including my own), Cameron’s inability to experience negative feelings doesn’t impair her capacity for pleasure, joy, and kindness.
She is exceedingly loving and affectionate with her husband. When I first came to the door, she greeted me with an embrace, crying, “Ooh, I’m very huggy!” Her seventeen years as a special-education teacher required great reserves of compassion. “I had a Down-syndrome girl—who was actually quite high-functioning—and she would come in every morning and she’d walk up to me and spit in my face, and say, ‘I hate you, Jo Cameron! I hate you!’ And I’d stand there and say, ‘I don’t like being spat on, but I don’t hate you!’ ” Cameron told me, smiling. “Oh, I’ve had some very difficult students. I’ve been bitten; I’ve been spat on; I’ve been kicked!” Over the years, the Camerons have provided short-term foster care for four children. One of them stole all their vacation money from the cookie jar. “She did take things for the sake of taking them,” Cameron said pleasantly. “It took us years to catch up! When eight hundred pounds is gone from your vacation kitty, it takes a long time to recoup.”
Cameron is living proof of the adage that it’s not what happens to you that matters; it’s how you react to it.
Do you want to be more like her? So does everyone else. The Stoics and the Buddhists propose techniques for getting there, such as the exercise of reason and will (Stoicism) and engagement in practices that give rise to mindfulness and detachment (Buddhism). But Cameron didn’t find inner peace by reading Epictetus or practicing daily meditation. It was a lucky accident of birth, and she’s agreed to spend much of her time being studied by scientists who want to understand her unusual genetic and neurological gifts.
So, no, while everybody has bad things happen to them, not everybody hurts.
I find the idea that there are some people who are apparently immune to the pain of life to be fascinating. And inspiring as well. Maybe I should listen to the gurus and sages who say that this sort of attitude can be cultivated. I’ve tried meditation many times and always get bored; I’ve read my Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, but it never seems to stick. Maybe I should give it one more try?
I’ll admit, though, that it’s not just intellectual excitement and inspiration that I feel when I read about the special powers of Joanne Cameron. It’s also the familiar ache of envy.
A Substack maven told me that this $82/year estimate is unrealistically high. Maybe so, but even if the actual number is half of that, we’re still talking about a lot of money.
Relief comes not from the absence of discomfort, but of your relation to it. Boredom in meditation isn’t a sign of failure. It’s an honest glimpse into the noise of the mind, and how resistant it is to seeing itself.
One reason suffering feels so persistent is that it’s always referred back to a self: my pain, my failure, my restlessness. This “self” we defend and try to improve is not a stable entity at all. It’s a process, a shifting collection of memories, habits, sensations, and reactions. When you look closely, there’s no fixed point you can call “I” apart from the contents of experience itself. The sense of a solid self is an illusion created by the mind’s constant narration. And if the self is not what it seems, then neither is the suffering that revolves around it. This doesn’t erase pain, but it puts it in a different frame, as something arising within awareness, not something happening to a permanent subject.
We do not choose to be angry, or elated, or depressed, or in hysterics. These emotions arise naturally. And, given enough time, they evaporate. We don’t have the capacity to feel as sad, happy, or angry, as we organically felt in the moment of whatever surprised us and produced the impassioned sentiment. This means that we didn’t control or choose it to happen either. We simply witnessed our brain produce the sentiment. It produced anger and we mistakenly thought, “I’m angry”.
But you as the witness of your thoughts and sentiments are only a part of the brain that produces them. That shift in understanding is not dramatic, but it can be a radical step in minimizing suffering by grasping your place in the nature of your mind.
>the sort of Substack that largely works by catering to the prejudices of its readers, telling them over and over again how noble and brave they are and how their enemies are morons and assholes.
Well THAT narrows it down to "most things on the Internet."