To Be Calm in the Face of Pain and Death
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Stoicism
15 min read
The article's central thesis about cultivating calm in the face of pain and death directly echoes Stoic philosophy, particularly the teachings of Marcus Aurelius and Seneca on accepting mortality and maintaining equanimity. This provides the philosophical framework the author is articulating intuitively.
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United States Navy SEAL selection and training
14 min read
The drown-proofing anecdote is central to the article's argument. Understanding the full BUD/S training pipeline, its psychology, and its historical development would give readers deeper context for why this particular test exists and what it reveals about human capability under extreme stress.
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Memento mori
16 min read
The article argues that willingness to accept death paradoxically enables better living and action. Memento mori is the ancient practice and artistic tradition of reflecting on mortality to live more fully—directly relevant to the author's thesis about modern society losing this capacity.
I have many thoughts, many of them increasingly schizophrenic upon the creation of a first draft, but I’ll start with this one:
The courage to be calm in the face of pain and death is of vital importance to all human flourishing.
Here’s a clip from the depths of the Content Pit, served up by the Algorithm Demons on YouTube, about a Navy Seal failing drown-proofing. Drown-proofing is when your Navy Seal instructors throw you into a swimming pool in scuba gear and then repeatedly tamper with said scuba gear so you can’t breathe. The job of the candidate is to calmy repair his scuba equipment even when he’s about to black out. Three times the instructors threw this man into the water and three times he had the very human reaction of involuntarily fighting for air when he started to pass out. Three times, his basic survival instinct led to failure.
On the fourth attempt, this man understands if he doesn’t immediately conquer his fear of death that his dreams of being a Navy Seal will be over. This is his biggest goal in life and not something he can walk away from. He describes a switch flipping in his brain. He makes the powerful determination that he is willing to die rather than fail. The only way he’s coming out of that swimming pool is as a Navy Seal or a corpse.
Paradoxically, this willingness to die leads him to have a much easier time completing the course. It’s barely even hard now that his fear is gone. He succeeds and becomes a Navy Seal. As far as motivational content slop goes that I’ve seen while using the private facilities in my home, this one was pretty good.
If society was arrayed with a bunch of meters and gauges, I would say that that “Willingness to be Calm in the Face of Pain and Death” is running low. If there were such a gauge, it would be flashing all kinds of emergency lights. The gears of the nation would be grinding against themselves without this vital lubricant. Pain and death would be higher than ever because of the willingness to be calm in the face of pain and death being low.
I have no fear of pain or death, but the calm part escapes me. The older I get the more I find myself stuck in furious reveries.
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.