I recently ordered Saint Paisios’ With Pain and Love for Contemporary Man Volume I on interlibrary loan so I could check the quotes I shared earlier on simple living in order accurately to cite them in my upcoming book Submit to the Pause. The third printing of Volume I in 2016 seems to be a more accurate translation from the Greek, so I’m glad I obtained it (not that I know Greek, but the English is slightly different and seems clarified).
In dipping back into the book I remain impressed by the saint’s insights—at once both simple and profound—on the contemporary malaise. His reflections, taken from dialogues in the 80s, are just as trenchant (if not more) 40 years later. Here is Saint Paisios on the necessity of struggle.
— Geronda, why are so many people suffering today?
—It’s simple: they do not like to exert themselves. There is too much comfort, and it’s making people sick and miserable. Modern convenience have stupefied people. Sloth is the cause of many modern diseases. p. 167
From there he goes on to talk about the laborious process of just making bread in the past, and how this led people to value bread (and consequently, not to waste it) in a way that is rare within modern industrialized societies. Then he circles back to the theme of how deprivation is linked to spiritual joy, and raises the interesting prospect (more common in Roman Catholic thinking than Orthodox) that you can voluntarily take on a suffering on behalf of someone else.
Deprivation is most helpful. When people are deprived of something, they come to appreciate it more. When we reduce our needs voluntarily, with discernment and humility, for the love of Christ, we feel spiritual joy. If, for example, someone says, ‘O God, I cannot help in any other way, but I will not drink water today as a sacrifice because so and so is sick,’ and actually does it, God will refresh him with spiritual ‘lemonade’, with divine consolation! People who have suffered show great gratitude for even the smallest help. But take a rich, spoiled child, He does not feel any joy even after his parents have satisfied all his whims and desires. He may have everything and still suffer. So he throws a tantrum and breaks and destroys whatever he finds. By contrast, a poor child will feel great gratitude for every little thing that you give him. p. 168
The “rich child” he refers to would include most children growing up in the abundance of the modern west – children who do not have to work, have access to computer games, three meals a day, etc. He adds that “They feel a void inside because they can easily get whatever they want.” He tells of “a young man from a good family” who “had everything” yet still could not find joy. “So he left home secretly and slept in trains in order to experience hardship. But if he had a job and lived by his sweat and toil, his life would have meaning, and he would be peaceful and give praise to God all the time.” (pp. 168-169).
Isn’t it interesting that today because life is so easy, and we don’t have to work by sweat and toil, we pay money for gym memberships so that we can experience physical hardship? Again from the saint:
Today most people are not deprived of anything; and for this reason, they do not have philotimo. Anyone who has not worked hard cannot appreciate the hard work of others. What is the point of choosing a comfortable profession in order to make money, and then start looking for hardship? The Swedes, who receive state allowances for almost everything and have nothing to worry about, end up wandering the streets. They get tired doing nothing, so they feel stressed because they are spiritually derailed, like a wheel that, when it leaves its axle, rolls aimlessly and runs off a cliff… (p. 169)
When conveniences become excessive, we are rendered useless and lazy. Even though we can do something manually, we think, “No, I’d rather press a button and it will turn by itself.” When we get used to doing things the easy way, it is natural that we want to have it easy all the time. Today people want to work a little and get paid a lot. If they could get away with not working at all, that would be even better! The same spirit has entered spiritual life. We want to become saints without exerting ourselves.
People who live easy lives and are spoilt usually have bad health. They are so spoiled that, if a war were to break out, they would not be able to survive it. In the old days, even children were tough and could endure a lot. (p. 170)
His observation that excessive conveniences render us useless and lazy applies to intellectual conveniences no less than manual ones. In chapter 27 of our book Are We All Cyborgs Now, we discuss the growing apathy toward the language arts that has emerged in the wake of large language models: as AI increasingly “thinks” for us, there is growing apathy about needing to learn to write and speak well.
The saint’s larger point, that our comforts are making us sick and miserable, is now well understood now in the mental health community, though it likely seemed counter-intuitive in the 80s.
In Anna Lembke’s book Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, she shows that the current addiction crisis is not merely because of the ready availability of chemical and behavioral drugs (though that is a huge part of it) but because we live in a society that pathologizes any type of discomfort. Believing we need to run from all pain, the result is not resilience but fragility, weakness, and ultimately addiction. (Read my response to Lembke’s book in my earlier post, “How We Are Raising Fragile Children…and Why Pain isn’t Always Bad.”)
Lembke, like many mental health professionals now, recommends the therapeutic application of pain and discomfort. Many people have recently learned about this approach from Dr. Andrew Huberman, who has curated research suggesting that painful struggle is a healthy way to raise our baseline levels of dopamine. (I’ve set the videos below to go straight to the sections where Dr. Huberman discusses this.)
What does this mean for parents? Well, one application for parents is to assess whether our parenting is aimed to produce children who are comfortable or children who are sturdy.
In his talk with Brian Phillips for the Circe Institute podcast, Keith McCurdy shared that he continually encounters parents who believe their calling is not to produce sturdy children but happy children. McCurdy, who is President and CEO of Total Life Counseling in Roanoke, Virginia, shared how parents will go to great lengths to try to keep their children perpetually comfortable, even though this results in various pathologies. McCurdy believes that trying to make children happy by keeping them comfortable is actually self-defeating since it leads to low levels of life satisfaction. Children who have not learned to embrace struggle will more likely be ruled by their emotions and will thus lack the durability that enables them to weather difficulties with sturdiness and competence. Moreover, children who have not been trained to embrace struggle will be more likely to go to pieces at the slightest difficulty. From McCurdy:
I ask groups of parents all the time at the beginning of a talk (and I say this is a question to be thinking about as we talk tonight): “would you rather have a child that’s sturdy and capable, or a child that’s happy and successful?” And that really frames it because the two really go in two different directions if that’s your target, because the way we target happiness and satisfaction today is not through struggle – it’s through clearing the path. But if we really target “sturdy and capable” then our children… experience more happiness through life, they experience more peace through life, more joy through life. And parents really struggle with that. But what I tell parents is this: unless we introduce struggle into the lives of their children, they will be run by their emotions.
In the same podcast, McCurdy gives a lot of practical tips on what this means in practice. Don’t give your children pain by being rough with them or excessive punishments, but you can introduce age-appropriate struggle into their life through having them help with the household responsibilities, and through framing their struggles—including homework—in positive terms. (This is something that Asian parents do intuitively, by the way). And children should witness parents not only struggling, but framing their struggle in positive terms. Listen to the entire interview McCurdy did for the Circe Institute podcast.
To McCurdy’s observations I would add that we can share movies with our children from the Golden Age of Hollywood that portray struggle as glorious, and I have recommended and analyzed two such movies in my Salvo post, “What ‘High Noon’ and ‘Casablanca’ Can Teach Us About Struggle.” Of course, above all, we can embrace the struggles that the Church provides, not only during Lent but throughout the year. As children see their parents struggling through everything from long church services to fasting regimens, they will learn the lesson that St. Paisios was keen to teach: that deprivation is a necessary and healthy part of spiritual growth and mental health.
All that said, it’s important to discern when struggle is productive and when it is not. St. Paisios explains that the devil tries to tempt us into meaningless struggle that merely amplifies weaknesses or defects in our personality, resulting in anxiety.
Where there is anxiety and despair, the demons are at work in one’s spiritual life. You should not feel anxiety about anything. Anxiety is the work of the devil. Wherever you see anxiety, be certain that the devil is involved…. If there is already a certain tendency in us, he will push us in that direction in order to cause us trouble and deceive us. For example, he makes a sensitive person hypersensitive. When you feel like making prostrations, the devil pushes you to make more than you can endure. If you are not very strong, you feel nervous and guilty because you cannot do enough. You feel anxious, and desperation sets in at first and then worse… When we feel anxiety in our spiritual struggle, we must know that we are not moving within the realm of God. God is not a stifling tyrant… In other words, we should not be pedantic (rigidly stressing minor things) in our struggle and suffocate from anxiety, struggling with various thoughts. We should simplify our efforts and put all our hope in Christ rather than in ourselves. Christ is full of love, kindness and consolation. He will never stifle us. He gives us abundant oxygen and divine comfort. There is a clear difference between the kind of spiritual work that is prudent and deep, and the kind that is characterized by an unhealthy fastidiousness and over-scrupulousness. Being full of internal anxiety, this second kind of spiritual work suffocates and represses us. Its external and indiscriminate pressure is like a migraine beating inside our heads.