The Pain We Choose

There is a strange truth I have learned after years of watching people struggle, in their bodies, in their relationships, in their work, and in their politics:

Most people are more comfortable with pain than with effort. Not because pain is pleasant. But because pain is familiar. Pain, at least, is predictable. You know its shape, you know its cost, you know how to carry it. Effort, on the other hand, is an unknown country. Effort asks something unbearable of us: change. And change is frightening.

I have watched people live for years inside discomfort they swear they cannot tolerate, simply because they cannot tolerate the discomfort of beginning. They will endure aching knees, stiff backs, fatigue that dulls the edges of their lives, gut-related issues, brain fog, nutrition-related health issues… rather than face the awkwardness of starting. The first walk. The first workout. The first meal prep. The first dish with unfamiliar vegetables. The first day of learning how to move again.

And in our modern world, this shows up so clearly in the way we eat. Ultra-processed foods are everywhere, engineered for convenience and craving, but often leaving us more inflamed, more sluggish, more disconnected from what real nourishment feels like. We tolerate the slow ache of feeling “off” every day, rather than stepping into the effort of cooking, learning, rebuilding our relationship with food. Yet there is a quiet freedom in feeding yourself well. There is power in standing at your own stove, choosing ingredients with intention, reclaiming your health one meal at a time. That is one of the deepest lessons behind my work in the kitchen: wholesome food is not perfection, it is agency.

Because effort feels like exposure. It feels like stepping into the light and admitting: I want more than this. And wanting more is vulnerable. It is easier, somehow, to stay in pain.

People do this far beyond the body. They stay in jobs that shrink them, year after year, quietly resigning themselves long before they ever resign on paper, because the effort of seeking something better feels too uncertain. A better life might require rejection, a new skill, a leap. So instead, they choose the pain they know.

I understand this intimately, because I have faced that leap myself. In my mid-forties, after years in the contracting and business world, years of competence, responsibility, achievement, I found myself standing at a crossroads I never expected. The pandemic cracked something open. It forced a reckoning. I could stay in the familiar, the stable, the known. Or I could begin again.

My husband and I moved to Georgia, where he grew up. We bought land. We started building something with our own hands, a garden, a gym, a space for wellness, healing and strength. I stepped away from what I had spent decades building on paper and stepped into something far more uncertain: building a life of service and purpose in real time.

Starting over was not painless. It was terrifying. To leave what I had mastered. To risk failure in public. To become a beginner again. It would have been far easier to remain in the quiet discomfort of “fine.”

But I knew something then that I know even more clearly now: The pain of stagnation is its own kind of slow suffocation. Effort is frightening, yes. But it is also the only doorway out.

This is true in our civic life as well. People tell me they are exhausted. They feel powerless. They want things to be different. But powerlessness, too, can become a habit.

It is easier to scroll than to organize, easier to complain than to learn. Easier to endure the consequences of policies passed quietly than to do the uncomfortable work of civic effort loudly, early, together. It is easier to suffer after decisions are made than to show up before they are.

Democracy does not vanish all at once. It erodes the way bodies do when neglected: slowly, quietly, through avoidance. And then one day, the pain is no longer theoretical. It is law. It is loss. It is too late.

Growing up in Romania under a dictatorship, fear was not a metaphor. It lived in the walls. It lived in the sudden appearance of the police. It lived in the way truth had to be whispered. Living under authoritarianism teaches you this early: What you tolerate expands. The pain you accept today becomes the boundary of your life tomorrow.

People do this in love, too. They stay in relationships that erode them, not because it doesn’t hurt, but because leaving hurts differently. Divorce is effort. Loneliness is effort. Rebuilding is effort. So they choose the familiar ache over the unfamiliar freedom.

Again and again, humans choose the suffering they can predict over the effort that might save them.

But here is the hard, bright truth: Discomfort is not the same as harm. Discomfort is often the price of becoming. The first steps toward strength are uncomfortable. The first steps towards a better diet and health are uncomfortable. The first steps toward freedom are uncomfortable. The first steps toward truth are uncomfortable.

Pain says: This is what you know. Effort says: This is what you could be.

And the future, personal, physical, civic, belongs only to those willing to enter the unknown. Not perfectly or all at once. Just willing to begin. Because the pain of effort is temporary. But the pain of avoidance? That one lasts a lifetime. And sooner or later, it comes due.

Freedom is built the same way health is built: not in grand gestures, but in daily choices, made before it is too late.