The Relief Fallacy

I'm an inveterate hacker. A yogi. A persistent mo-fo. I plug away at mysteries, impasses, and issues, propelled by titanic curiosity. But there's one issue I've given up on. It's the only human problem I know that can't be solved or worked around or reframed.

If you're in great pain and manage to find relief - a 25% or 30% or 50% or 75% improvement - you will feel all better. You will not sense the remaining pain; at least not right away. It will be invisible to you, your perceptions overwhelmed by the relief. Ecstacy accompanies alleviation of great pain, and nothing can cut through it. It's like an opium cloud.

The first joke I learned as a very small child:

Q: Why do you keep hitting yourself in the head with a hammer? 

A: Because it feels so good when I stop!

This is dangerous. Unaware that you're still bad - even maybe excruciating! - you will stop treating yourself gently/carefully. You'll resume larding on stress and exertion, until made aware that you were skating far closer to the threshold than you’d imagined. It's a horrifying discovery. 

Note that I'm talking here about real trauma. Not garden-variety pain. And it can be physical or emotional.

A 50% improvement can still leave brutal pain. Ugly pain. Killer pain. No one - not even an experienced yogi - can register, much less gauge, that remainder.


My posting, "Don’t Stuff a Rising Threshold", makes the related point that there are levels of pain no quantity of morphine can touch. It's another warning to avoid letting pain stack up, or packing stress into every available gap. Don’t be John Henry!