DEVIL'S ADVOCATE: Don't Be Stoic

So, you fell for the spiel? The one that celebrates fortitude in the face of pain, that advocates gritting your teeth and bearing with silence all the suffering that fate throws at you, just like modern-day social network users endure sheep and, horror of horrors, even a John McCain being thrown at them. How could you believe all that nonsense when the wonderful alternative is to howl and scream in pain and have the world marvel at your agony? I'd been taught that the way to handle illness is to gulp down capsules that kept getting bigger and wait till the body's immune system battled the invaders and perhaps won, sometimes sooner rather than later.Wincing in pain was allowed but anything more was seen as a sign of appalling weakness. Even bloody bruises picked up in the heat of school football were supposed to be treated with disdain, particularly when the tincture iodine burned its healing way into the broken skin.
So, stoicism was injected into my system early on till it became a way of life. And as one came across kindred souls who also subscribed to this point of view, it gained legitimacy and enduring things became the default approach to pretty much everything. Poster messages reinforced this, like 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger'. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. But why doesn't somebody give me a shot of morphine to make sure one could tide over the pain? I've come to realise that platitudes like 'pain is good for the soul' is strictly for the masochists. The fact that it continues to win supporters to its cause is puzzling. Don't these people get that while it may be good for the soul, it's seriously harmful for the body? The bottom line is that stoicism, at least the philosophical branch that preaches enduring pain in silence, is strictly for the unevolved. What we should be doing is checking into five-star hospitals with strict instructions to the medical staff that, at the slightest hint of pain on the horizon, they should shoot us up with painkillers or knock us out with some anaesthesia. Let the stoic sufferers revel in their misery, if they want to. But even they'll come around to the view that it's only when friends reach out to take away the pain, bit by bit, that they'll be really healed.