The Porcupine’s Dilemma, Social Pain, & Direct Experience
Wednesday Wisdoms for September 4, 2024
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living with 3 quotes, 3 observations, and 3 questions.
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The Porcupine’s Dilemma
🤨 Quote
“Man is at bottom a dreadful wild animal. We know this wild animal only in the tamed state called civilization and we are therefore shocked by occasional outbreaks of its true nature: but if and when the bolts and bars of the legal order once fall apart and anarchy supervenes it reveals itself for what it is.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
Source: The Essential Schopenhauer
Observation 🧐
Schopenhauer, perhaps the only philosopher to be born with a silver spoon and still look upon the world with pure pessimism, struggled to connect with individuals outside of himself.
He once described living as a “scene of tormented and agonized beings, who only continue to exist by devouring each other, in which, therefore, every ravenous beast is the living grave of thousands of others, and its self-maintenance is a chain of painful deaths.”
It is no wonder his poodle Atman, named after the Sanskrit word for soul, was his best friend.
But looking beneath this dark outlook on life Schopenhauer managed to nail our simultaneous need, and rejection, of intimacy from others.
Imagine a group of porcupines in the dead of winter, he instructs, attempting to huddle for warmth. They approach each other but quickly discover a dilemma: the closer they get to one another, the more they each get stabbed by each others’ quills. The porcupines are therefore forced to continually perform a dance of inward and outward movement toward each other, poking and stabbing, until they can find a sufficient distance to both keep warm and avoid hurting each other.
Schopenhauer reveals what we all inevitably experience in life: relationships are a game of continuous struggle, one that entails pain and joy, one that is filled with good intentions and unintended consequences.
And yet to survive, we all must learn to work together for a mutually beneficial existence.
🤔 Question
Imagining the porcupine’s dilemma, how do you think differently about your own relationships?
Social Pain
🤨 Quote
“Physical pain protects the individual from physical dangers. Social pain, also known as loneliness, evolved for a similar reason: because it protected the individual from the danger of remaining isolated.”
William Patrick and John T. Cacioppo
Source: Loneliness
Observation 🧐
Life requires interactions with others, and in today’s day-and-age, we have every reason to avoid these interactions.
We can communicate via devices instead of face-to-face
We can easily ghost people
We can hide behind usernames and say whatever we want
All this does is create distance between ourselves and our fellow citizens. It provides us scapegoats from intimacy, from human connection, a way to hide from the pain of not being liked, of being rejected, of feelings of inadequacy.
This starts the doom cycle for intimacy by both isolating ourselves from others while at the same time desiring closer relations to them.
Counterintuitively, we break this by being vulnerable.
By meeting people in real life
By having real discussions
By being rejected and seeing it is not the end of the world
We overcome social pains by being more social.
🤔 Question
Think of one social interaction you had this week done over a device rather than in-person. Next time you interact with the individual, try and do in-person. What change could this bring to your life?
Beneath the paywall this week we explore the wisdom of Malcolm Gladwell. Click below to support and get access.