> “By flooding the consciousness with gnawing unpleasantness, pain provides a temporary relief from the burdens of self-awareness,” write the researchers. “When leaving marks and wounds, pain helps consumers create the story of a fulfilled life. In a context of decreased physicality, [obstacle course races] play a major role in selling pain to the saturated selves of knowledge workers, who use pain as a way to simultaneously escape reflexivity and craft their life narrative.”
Yikes, if generally true :-) I work on reflexivity a lot with coaching clients. However it takes a lot of craft to work around to it for some, and even then it can feel like selling something really dangerous.
Modern culture seems to offer endless options for a breadth-first search for anything. In contrast, depth is seen as risky in a variety of ways, from social risk (never go deep in polite company!) to e.g. intellectual FOMO.
We make it really easy to ignore the self, to ignore "my condition" in favor of pursuing what is "healthy" or "impressive" for "our condition."
Reflexivity is a bit of an overburdened term in sociology, but in this case I think "depth of self-reflection" would be a reasonable stand-in definition.
Essentially, the relatively shallow externality of "pain, suffering" becomes a sort of pornography of self-improvement. In other words, it has all of the outward signs of self-improvement activity with none of the critical inward-turning, truly reflective contextualization.
In my own practice this is frequently seen in prioritization of e.g. income and careerism and socially-prioritized-labeled-experiences. The people who say, "I have circumnavigated the globe, I've climbed the tallest peak on every continent, I drank the mythical Peruvian tea, I am a triathlete, I was at the top of our sales floor so long that they did away with the award." When there's no real "me" and "who I am," in there, just a bunch of externalities that "all of us can honor and appreciate and sit in awe of," in a list.
Yikes, if generally true :-) I work on reflexivity a lot with coaching clients. However it takes a lot of craft to work around to it for some, and even then it can feel like selling something really dangerous.
Modern culture seems to offer endless options for a breadth-first search for anything. In contrast, depth is seen as risky in a variety of ways, from social risk (never go deep in polite company!) to e.g. intellectual FOMO.
We make it really easy to ignore the self, to ignore "my condition" in favor of pursuing what is "healthy" or "impressive" for "our condition."