On Harms

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Quick Summary: In this Substack I try to argue the question ‘what is the best amount of harm to have in a life?’. I argue that the value of harms comes from knowledge but knowledge is disproportionately weighted towards our first experience of harm, when we learn most of the lessons available. I suggest the idea that suffering is valuable often neglects the fact that the amount of knowledge significantly diminishes after the first serious experience of harm. This can mean people choose to experience second or third harms when they shouldn’t. (Please read the caveats at the bottom for this one. They’re important)

Plato describes how, though purple is the most beautiful colour, the most beautiful statue is not purple alone. It is only ‘by assigning what is proper to each we render the whole beautiful’ (Republic, 420d). Similarly, though joy, pleasure, happiness are the ‘best’ emotions, the best life is not one of unadulterated or constant joy, pleasure or happiness. We need the chiaroscuro. The contrast from knowing grief, sadness and anger properly.

It’s something my mum understood. Losing her own mother very young, I think she learnt that there are some forms of knowledge that you can only learn through experiencing painful, difficult periods. It was that knowledge, and the importance of it that led her to be in the strange position - of not wanting me to live a life where nothing ever went wrong, even as she did not want any single harm to come to me. Even as she did everything she could to stop them.

There’s a similar thought in John Roberts ‘I Wish You Bad Luck’, where he writes how

‘From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer betrayal because that will teach you the importance of loyalty. Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time so that you don’t take friends for granted.

I wish you bad luck, again, from time to time so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved and that the failure of others is not completely deserved either… I hope you’ll be ignored so you know the importance of listening to others, and I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion.’

However, this thought - that pains have value because they teach us something - is a thought to be careful with. Just because there’s a value to some pains, that does not mean all pains are valuable. And it’s worth thinking about what makes the valuable pains valuable and why.

The value from these pains seems to derive from knowledge. Knowing what it is like to be in a difficult situation, knowing what it is like to have weathered it, that you can weather it - that knowledge is valuable. My mum knew this. She spoke about another boy at school who’d also lost a parent, how they both shared this secret understanding, this other space that the rest of her classmates, in their ignorance, did not know.

But given that this knowledge comes from pain, it’s not a lesson to want to learn twice.

I learnt this a few years ago. I’d had, objectively, a pretty idyllic childhood. My primary worries were A*’s, BBM names, trips to the Eden Centre and my secondary school nemesis. That was until university which involved… (deep breath): losing my grandfather, a rape, living in the same accommodation as the man who’d raped me, a pandemic, a rocky relationship, Oxford Finals, two months of an undiagnosed illness (with constant low-level allergic reactions), culminating in (Grand Finale!) something approaching an eating disorder (what a fun rollercoaster ride that is!) So I got my lesson. It was a pretty big shock to the system. A big smacking hello, here, have some real problems sweetie. **

Looking back, naively, after that I’d sort of hoped for a narrative arc. That the world would reward me with Adult Life falling into place. That getting through the crap period would lead to the entire world rearranging itself around me to form sunlit uplands and allow me to receive my karmic deserts or whatever else the Universe had in store. (Yes I am, or rather was, both that spiritual and that entitled).

Instead, I crash-landed into corporate London, worked gazillion bajillion hour weeks and generally failed to do any sort of processing, recovery or growth. I was stuck. That November, the hand tremor that I’d developed over Finals returned, my wrist rotating back and forth, the muscle in my thumb gibbering. And I remember thinking ‘Really? Seriously?’ Last time I’d had this tremor was because the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse had dropped the Twelve Plagues at my door wrapped in a Cacophonous Pile of Shit. Now it was back because of an annuity reinsurance project in the gilts market. In a job I had chosen to do. That I could leave.

I think I stuck at the job because we’re conditioned to think that there’s an automatic value in tough times. That going through something difficult necessarily brings with it learning or knowledge. I’d learnt something before from going through a difficult period, and maybe the same thing would happen here. But I’d already had a tough time, a properly tough time, and I already had that knowledge. I knew what it was like to be so stressed you fill up your fridge with 24 Covent Garden Soups, because they’re the only things you can eat, because anything else will waste time. I didn’t need to relearn that lesson, or anything close to it. Particularly over a PowerPoint. I already had the bulk of the knowledge.*

So here is a big piece of Levine Wisdom (TM): When you’re thinking about how to live a life - you only need to be sad once, and anything more is gratuitous***. The lessons, the learning, the value comes from knowledge. But beyond that, I think the idea that there is some intrinsic value to suffering - the cliches that ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ or that ‘everything happens for a reason’ or that ‘life’s greatest lessons come from pain’ - well… fuck that to be honest. It trades off this idea that the value from pain comes from the knowledge gained, without paying attention to the fact that different types of pains (particularly the first experience of proper pain vs. subsequent ones) vary wildly in how much information they give.

Of course there’s a lot of different harms. And many of them you can’t avoid. Bad things will happen. Life’s insults are many and varied. And there is something to be said from learning what you can from them - they’re going to happen anyway, and it’s better to try and make something out of that suffering. But too many people choose to stick out at second, third, fourth harms because they think they’ll learn something. That in the same way harms in the past taught them something, so too will this particular indignity. That suffering automatically leads to knowledge. And I think that’s a tragedy - because most of the learning has already been done.

There are still lots of things I don’t know, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to be a sommelier of sadness. I’m lucky that my family and siblings are healthy and generally happy. I’m lucky that I’ve never experienced a serious illness, or prolonged physical pain, or enforced hunger. I haven’t struggled to have a child, or lost one. I don’t need to get acquainted with life’s many and varied insults, and I hope that I won’t. Those years, the bursting of my sunshine-roses-meringue bubble was enough to allow me to appreciate what I’d been ignorant of before, to generalise and to know that I am still so ignorant of so many other things - and to hope that I remain so.

But it is still the case that a purple life is not a good one, I would not want my child to live a purple life. So I think I could hope for a harm for my child in the abstract. For the right kind of harm, even if I would fight against any particular instance.

And if there has to be a harm, I hope that it is generative. That it teaches them they are stronger, and they have the capacity to be tough. That it teaches them to appreciate the periods where nothing has gone wrong, because they aren’t guaranteed, because this wasn’t something I learnt until after I’d left university, marvelling because I’d had six months, a year, two where nothing had gone wrong, and I was so, so grateful for this.

I hope that the harm they face is limited - that it is a harm they are able to contain and move on from, that it teaches them but does not dog them. I hope that it is evidenced. That it is something that they know they have gone through, and that they can return to if they want to remind themselves that they can. I hope that they learn from it, that they hold onto the lesson, learn it as quickly as possible with the smallest possible harms.

And that it is not, that it is never gratuitous.

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* I recognise that this involved an enormous amount of privilege to be able to do this. My family don’t rely on me financially, I’m not worrying about their rent, I could take the decision to prioritise my own wellbeing - and not everyone can.

** Just because these are all in a list together, I certainly don’t want to imply they all have the same level of importance. They really, really don’t. But they all contributed to what was, by the end, my becoming a bit of a puddle because there wasn’t enough time between them to recover.
Some of these problems were of my own making. But deserved harms, or harms you play a role in bringing about still hurt. I also recognise that, in the grand scheme of things, I’m still pretty lucky - as I mention below. Relative to my pretty charmed life before, it was a tough period - but relative to what many other people have gone through, it could have been much, much worse. It was enough to give me the knowledge of step changes or degrees of suffering - but from my white, wealthy, Oxford Bubble, I’m also not going to pretend I know anything close to the whole scale.

*** And maybe you don’t. Maybe you can achieve this through empathy, and through really stellar parenting. But I don’t think you can.