“Chosen suffering can lead to great pleasure, and it is an essential part of experiences that we deem to be meaningful. It can connect us to others and can be a source of community and love. It reflects deep sentiments of the mind and feelings of the heart.”
Have you ever had someone you know say “in the end, it was worth it” or “it was meant to be,” after going through a difficult period in their life?
We all do this. We backward-rationalize our suffering into something meaningful, almost like our monkey-brains NEED the pain to have a purpose. Paul Bloom argues that this is not just a coping mechanism. It is actually baked into how humans experience pleasure itself.
For several years, I was quite envious of my friends for building a successful e-commerce business (selling things online).
They managed to build something that would grow substantially over time. While I was focused primarily on promoting things that only “make money in the moment,” which didn’t involve buying and shipping anything physical.
Thus, in 2018, I started the journey of building an e-commerce brand as well. This only led to failure, after failure, after failure. For whatever reason, I could not get profitable. Hours, days, weeks, and months were spent building out websites, advertising, dealing with customer issues, and spending thousands of dollars on failed attempts within the e-commerce space.
For 2018 and 2019, after all financial calculations, I ended those 2 years in the financial negative. I was in the red for thousands of dollars after all expenses, both life and work.
This wasn’t looking good, and I just didn’t know what to do, other than to keep digging in, deeper and deeper into what wasn’t working for me.
By the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, I tried a new angle, selling T-shirts for various political candidates in the USA for the upcoming elections. But even THIS was just burning through cash.
Yet by January 2020, I simultaneously started to slowly test the waters again from my past “make money in the moment” promotions. After all, these promotions didn’t involve buying or shipping anything physical. My promotions only involved buying and selling phone calls to major companies.
Surprisingly, by February of 2020, I had made back all of the thousands I had lost the previous 2 years. Thus, it was time to give up on the e-commerce business.
And funny enough, by February and March of 2020, the entire global supply chain of e-commerce went into the toilet with the pandemic.
Yet, this had almost zero effect on my business, because I was only selling phone calls to companies.
And while many businesses suffered financially during these times, I had the complete opposite result for the entire year of 2020!
The Bad
If I was to backward rationalize, was the mental anguish of not making any profit for 2 years, and just burning through my savings worth it? I don’t know.
If I kept promoting what I promote now, during those 2 years, maybe it would have turned out even better. Maybe those 2 years were lost because of my failed ambitions.
There wasn’t anything that I learned during those 2 years that was particularly useful in what I do now.
The Good
But, at the same time, I tried extensively on a new idea. Had I not at least tried it, perhaps I would not be satisfied with myself in the long term. The expression “you won’t know unless you try” definitely seems true here.
This is precisely what Bloom describes as “chosen suffering.” We do not accidentally stumble into hardship — we WALK into it, knowingly, because some part of us believes the struggle will make the reward sweeter. The entrepreneur who grinds for years before a breakthrough. The marathon runner who punishes their body for months. We choose the pain because the pain is what makes the payoff feel REAL.
Conclusion
Did my life get an even deeper meaning? No. Life is a roller coaster that feels amazing when you are at the top, and definitely sucks when you are at the bottom, but once you recover to the top again, you appreciate it just a bit more.
Did I begin to value what I have in life just a bit more? Most definitely!
P.S. OR we just tell ourselves stories to make ourselves feel better because humans are amazing at telling stories 😉
Bloom would probably agree with that P.S. — he calls it the “narrative self.” We construct stories about our lives, assigning meaning where there might be none, because having a story feels better than admitting we just got lucky. That might be the most interesting takeaway from The Sweet Spot. The pleasure is not in the outcome — it is in the STORY we tell about the outcome.
How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like
How Pleasure Works is an earlier Bloom work, and it tackles the question from the other direction — not why we seek suffering, but why we enjoy what we enjoy in the first place.
His core argument is that “essentialism” conditions pleasure — the belief that everything has an underlying reality or true nature that we cannot observe directly, and it is this hidden nature that matters.
Think about it. Why does an original painting sell for millions while a perfect copy sells for almost nothing? Why does a guitar owned by a famous musician fetch 10x the price of the same model? The physical object is identical — but the STORY behind it changes the entire experience.
This applies to all realms of pleasure-seeking — why mountain climbing, for example, is a pain in the a&&, yet there is an extreme pleasure to the idea of doing it. You are not just climbing a rock. You are conquering something. The narrative you build around the experience is what delivers the pleasure, not the blisters on your feet.
When you combine both books, the picture becomes clear. How Pleasure Works explains why we enjoy what we enjoy — we are wired to care about hidden essences and stories. And The Sweet Spot adds the counterintuitive layer — that suffering, when chosen, AMPLIFIES that pleasure because it enriches the story we tell ourselves.
Both are great reads. If you are interested in psychology, behavioral science, or understanding why humans are the weird creatures that we are — pick these up. 4/5 for each.
Thanks for reading.
— Leonidas
