“Those great wars which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected.”

Virginia Woolf, On Being Ill

Pain is something we cannot escape, yet we try to avoid it. We often talk of the seeking of pain as masochistic, the wallowing in pain as melancholic, but is there a term for society’s pathological neglect of pain? Pain is as a proxy for suffering, illness, vulnerability and ultimately death. As such, it is clear that pain and its manifestations in our experience are perennial aspects of human existence, yet our culture seems struggles to engage with this fact.

Virginia Woolf, writing in 1930, discusses the neglect of illness in literature, noting our preference for discourse on love, jealously and war, despite illness intersecting with all facets of experience and leaving dynamic contours in our being. Woolf diagnoses much of our cultural malaise on the topics of pain and illness as stemming from the dualistic conceptual islands of Mind and Body. The Mind as a civilising force; Mind over matter; the Mind’s ability to transcend the trappings of the body; the succumbing of the Mind to the travails of the body as a failure of will. These deep-set dualistic tendencies, enshrined in Western language and metaphor, inform attitudes to this day.

In the 21st century, what can we learn from our societies’ perspective on illness and pain? As someone from, what Joseph Henrich terms, a WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic) culture, what themes and threads are of note? For one, we live in a culture that assigns enormous value to perfection and beauty as realised through the creation of consumable goods and services. Does the availability of beautiful things and experiences help to distract us from the barren landscape of bare existence? Are we living in a moment where our primary moral stance is as a ‘consumer’? An ethic where salvation from suffering is through spending. Replace Sunday service with weekend worship at the altar of capital: the shopping centre. Beautiful shops, selling pristine items for our beautiful homes. Is a lack of appreciation for imperfection a reflection on a desire to transcend pain and suffering? How much of our cultural values with respect to commodities are an extension of a deeply enshrined Christian ethic? In tandem, to what extent is the movement to improve goods and services inevitable given the logic of the market? The competitive drive towards providing better things. Most of the time, in our WEIRD societies, this makes sense – in fact it is very difficult to look past. Of course, we want the best, most beautiful products and services. After all what else justifies the spending of our hard-earned money? However, does the most beautiful equal the best? What happens if everything is beautiful? Is the Christian ethic that seems to inform much of our consumer ethic diluted and missing the balancing force of suffering?

At times, notably around Christmas, where the high street ramps up its efforts to sell us commodified tokens of appreciation and love (beautifully displayed), I become more cynical. Occasionally during these times, exercising my disenchantment, I desire to seek out the most disgusting and ugly items I can lay my hands on to offer as gifts to individuals whom I know see through the beautiful veneer and appreciate the absurd and contrarian gesture.

A few years back, these grotesque, but charming drawings, stood out like a beacon in a sea of airbrushed, repeatable banality on an average English high street. Here is somebody that is not afraid to explore the pain and bizarreness in human existence. To me there is something in beauty, at least in its cultural fetishisation, that is embarrassing. I most often feel this disconnect while walking through a perfume section of a department store, or worse while traipsing through an airport. A potent and abrasive concoction of once delicate bouquets, lights that dazzle and shine an unflattering light on the overly made up ‘people of the counter’ present ‘Beauty’ in its hyper-realised consumer form. Beauty in this guise is embarrassing and a dishonest interpretation of existence. How many times have I passed through these glittering, scented orbs of consumer space, hurried, stressed and all too conscious of bodily discomfort? What solace did these encounters bring and, if the answer is none, what else might I expect and why would I expect more from a perfume stall? My perverse desire to crack through the shiny exterior of consumer culture’s mores, to see what depths lay beneath and to expect more is where we circle back to pain.

Pain and illness cannot be airbrushed from existence. To gloss over salient aspects of humanity feels like a disservice, in fact an injustice, perhaps a sort of culturally enshrined naivety. Of course, we cannot expect, and would not wish, for the sinews of pain and illness to be present on every corner. Nor would we want to malign beauty. The truth is though; we do not have to look far before the facade of our culture’s obsession with beauty is cracked. One year what I thought was a light-hearted poke at society turned out to be a social faux pas, at least in the company of somebody invested so heartily in these beautiful artifices. Should we just walk past, or is there something worth noting in a homeless person’s existence outside of one of London’s most expensive chocolate-based-shops-come-paradise?

Would life feel more authentic if we welcome pain and illness back into our lives and appreciate beauty and transcendence as counterpoints to their much-maligned experiential cousins? We have a lot to learn from illness and pain, not least through their humbling force in an age of overconfidence. As Woolf suggests, to whitewash illness from literature is to remove a range of colours from the phenomenologist’s pallet. This is perhaps why most consumer space feels one-dimensional, brash and, at times, embarrassing. We should not shy away from the exploration and discussion of pain and illness. Our denial of death confronts us at a certain point.

Perhaps everything has a dose of pain, suffering and beauty within. As individuals, if we focus on one of these dimensions we may become masochistic, melancholic or naive. If a culture overly focusses on the dimension of beauty, does it have something painful to hide?