Sages throughout history have relished the enigma that pleasure is undefined without suffering.

Lent: It’s Not Just for Catholics

International New York Times | 12 March 2015

Credit Walter Gurbo

ARE you a conformist or an individualist? Most Americans believe they are the latter — to be exact, 64 percent of us in 2011, according to the World Values Survey. Perhaps you’re a cage-busting entrepreneur, or a transgressive artist. Or maybe you’re just a freethinking outlier at your Thanksgiving table. My own nonconformity in early adulthood took the form of religious conversion from Protestant to Catholic, bailing out of college to play avant-garde music, and — most schismatic of all to family and friends — voting Republican.

In 1998, I came across a 16-question survey of individualism in the academic journal Cross-Cultural Research. I took the survey, and learned that my score reflected “high individualism” and “low collectivism.” As my late, long-suffering mother would have said, “Duh.”

But all the boundaries listed above are merely social and external, involving the discomfort of others. True nonconformists explore the internal boundaries against their own suffering.

These internal boundaries are immense, as most people spend their lives trying to avoid physical and psychological suffering. That is how we are wired. Indeed, the psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky famously showed in their research that people much prefer to avoid a loss than to acquire a gain of equal value. Further, fear — arguably, the most unpleasant emotion — is learned as a way to avoid all types of pain. Charles Darwin even noted that animals “learn caution by seeing their brethren caught or poisoned.”

We don’t want to suffer — we hate it, in fact. Yet it is suffering that often brings personal improvement. Not all pain is beneficial, obviously. But researchers have consistently found that most survivors of illness and loss experience “post-traumatic growth.” Not only do many people find a greater emotional maturity after suffering; they are even better prepared to help others deal with their pain. That is why after a loss we turn for comfort to those who have endured a similar loss.

Sages throughout history have relished the enigma that pleasure is undefined without suffering. In the words of Carl Jung: “There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” The Tao Te Ching extends the metaphor: “Difficult and easy accomplish each other, long and short form each other, high and low distinguish each other.”

At the extreme, it is the fearsome specter of death that helps us understand life. A dear friend of mine was told he would not survive more than a year after a late-stage cancer diagnosis. This was a fairly morose guy by nature, and this prognosis might logically have sunk him further into his natural melancholia. Instead, he vowed to remember that every day might be his last, and live whatever life he had left to the fullest. By some miracle, he survived a year, then another, and then 18 more. His doctor still says the cancer will ultimately be back at some point — the wolf is always at the door — but he is happy and grateful for waking up when he did, and living for decades as if he was enjoying his last few months.

My friend achieved greater consciousness by staring down his death. He did so by necessity, however, and not by choice. Indeed, most people who find the benefits of fear and pain do so against their will. In contrast, a true individualist — a nonconformist to his or her own natural impulses — consciously accepts suffering for the benefit it brings. How?

I have met Buddhist monks in Thailand who purposely confront the fear of their inevitable deaths through daily contemplation of photos of corpses in various stages of decay. Some young Mormon men and women voluntarily suffer through separation from their beloved families for up to two years during their missions to test their own mettle and cement their commitment to God. And in this season of Lent, hundreds of millions of Catholics are pondering their own inadequacies and inviting discomfort through abstinence and fasting. In a postmodern era, where death is taboo, pain is pointless, and sin is a cultural anachronism, what could be more rebellious?

But the spirit of these practices is open to everyone, religious or not. Think of it as a personal declaration of independence. The objective is not to cause yourself damage, but to accept the pain and fear that are a natural part of life, and to embrace them as a valuable source of lessons to learn and tests to pass.

So to all the nonconformists in business, politics and art: more power to you. But that’s child’s play. To say, “I am dust, and to dust I shall return”: Now that’s rebellion for grown-ups.