On Unwanted Feelings: Pain
Life is more than one big marshmallow test
All work is method acting
When work went virtual at the onset of the pandemic, I became aware of a peculiar new sensation. Each time I “dropped” from a video call, I also began to have the palpable experience of “dropping” out of character: losing my smile, lowering my vocal pitch, turning down my enthusiasm a notch (or three). This wasn’t an entirely new experience; it’s likely what I used to do upon leaving work in the evening. What was new was how much more frequently this switch was occurring throughout the day — as well as my heightened awareness of the effort it took, which suddenly seemed more taxing than I’d remembered.
Sociologists have long theorized that modern work is rife with “feeling rules” that dictate what we’re expected to feel on the job. Borrowing from theories of theatre acting, Arlie Hochschild famously called the work we do of performing feelings required of us while suppressing others “emotional labor.” In fact, Hochschild observed that over time we tend to reduce the dissonance of our feigned feelings by inducing them for real: we literally fake it till we make it. What seemed to be happening during the pandemic was that piercing the illusion of my own performance multiple times a day was beginning to lay bare the gap between the real and the feigned in ways that made it increasingly difficult to paper over.
Seen a certain way then, all work is method acting. But who are we apart from the characters we’ve learned to play at work? What do we really feel behind the emotional labor we perform for our employers? These are difficult questions to answer if, like me, you’ve never been much in touch with your feelings to begin with. Like many of my colleagues, I’ve always been what you might call “head-centered”: intensely cerebral, logical to a fault, and identified with my intellect. As long as I was performing well and getting rewarded for it, I didn’t care to know what I really felt — if anything, I suspected that I likely owed no small part of my professional success to my ability (and willingness) to override my true feelings about work.
This bargain I’d struck with myself became newly untenable during the pandemic, because I couldn’t stay “in role” long enough to manage away the feelings I didn’t want to have. Worse still, once I began to unravel the thread of these unwanted feelings, it became clear to me just how much it’d cost me over the years to bury them all away like so much radioactive waste. The abusive leaders I bent myself out of shape to learn how to work with, the toxic behaviors I put up with as “the price of admission,” the soul-crushing demands I’d white-knuckled my way through — there seemed to be no limit to the suffering I’d been willing to rationalize by tuning out what my feelings were trying to tell me.
As it turns out, it takes considerable effort and commitment to remain blind to large chunks of our experience. Deeper in the archaeology of my unwanted feelings, I found not only the feelings I’d discarded because they didn’t fit into the part I played at work, but also older bargains I’d struck in order to keep myself safe: the anger I couldn’t afford to have because I wanted to be easy to love, the sadness I’d buried because it would’ve meant acknowledging that this strategy wasn’t working anyway, and the pain I’d learned to numb because there was already too much of it around and no space for mine.
Every week I speak with high achievers who’re considering leaving well-trodden paths and making a change in their careers. If we won’t allow ourselves the grace permitted to even the humblest of creatures who know to recoil from what pains, scares, and aggrieves them, on what grounds could we possibly decide? And no matter what career we choose for ourselves, how can we be trusted to lead and make thousand, million, even billion-dollar decisions that will impact the lives of countless others? The road back to ourselves can feel long and fraught with difficulty, but I’ve come to believe it must be walked. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a series of blog posts that I’ve started to think of as a personal record of my own incomplete journey towards my unwanted feelings (beginning with a reflection on pain, below). I hope it will help you find your way.
Pain: Life is more than one big marshmallow test
It wasn’t so long ago that if you’d asked me what I considered my greatest strength as a management consultant, I would’ve told you that it was my singular ability to do the things that no one else wanted to do. I truly believed that my clients and colleagues kept me around not for my intelligence (plenty of folks smarter than I am) or my expertise (likewise), but rather the knack I had for overriding whatever internal friction I might experience on the way to getting shit done. When junior colleagues asked me for counsel on how to stand out in the workplace, I would advise them that the moment they felt the wish not to do something (writing that email, making that call, creating that slide deck), they should override the impulse, run straight at that unpleasant thing and get it done.
It didn’t bother me that I’d essentially contracted myself out as a glorified trash compactor for corporate America’s detritus. I was under no illusions about the fact that I was being called in to take on tasks that others were perfectly capable of completing on their own but for various reasons preferred not to. If anything, I felt invincible knowing I possessed an unfair advantage in the form of my colossal pain tolerance — because it meant that I would always be needed everywhere that unpleasant things needed doing, and that it no longer mattered whether others were smarter or more capable so long as I could keep going when they would’ve otherwise stopped. The ability to feel the knifepoint of pain and to lean into it rather than pull back — that’s what I considered my superpower.
Lean in, embrace the suck, fuck your feelings — if you’re looking for a stick to beat yourself up with you need never look far, but I have yet to see management advice that suggests it might be helpful for us to more fully feel the pain we experience in our professional lives (you may recognize all of these phrases as titles of celebrated self-help books). To be sure, there’s nothing inherently damaging about capitalizing our pain (in the literal sense of “turning into capital”) for the promise of some future payoff. Humanity’s ability to use our thoughts to mediate our experience of pain (“mind over matter”) has enabled remarkable feats in everything from endurance sports to Stanford’s famous marshmallow test.
The problem is that over time, what begins as an intentional decision to trade off present pain for future reward too easily becomes a numbing and forgetting of what pain feels like entirely. The more I stripped my existence down to the barest of necessities to better accommodate the demands of work, and the fewer things there were outside of work that I allowed myself to enjoy, the less of anything valuable there remained in my life that I would’ve felt the pain of giving up. Far from becoming invincible, all I’d succeeded in doing was so completely hollowing out my present and cheapening my pain that there wasn’t anything left for me to want for myself but the future carrots others dangled in front of me.
There are no doubt things in life worth suffering for — but until we know what good feels like, and until we’re ready to fully feel what it is we’re giving up here and now, how can we know what we value? As any investor knows, if you lower the cost of capital enough and lose sight of your alternatives, the anticipated returns of just about any investment start to look attractive, no matter how distant they are in the future. The better we get at capitalizing our pain for future reward, the worse of a capital allocator we become. The catch? We only have one finite life to invest, and tomorrow is not promised.
