A World Without Pain | The New Yorker
I know the word pain, and I know people are in pain, because you can see it, Joanne Cameron, a seventy-two-year-old retired teacher, told me, in the cluttered kitchen of her century-old stone cottage in the Scottish Highlands. Cameron has never experienced the extremes of rage, dread, grief, anxiety, or fear. She handed a cup of tea to Jim, her husband of twenty-five years, with whom she s never had a fight. I see stress, she continued, and I ve seen pain, what it does, but I m talking about an abstract thing.
Because of a combination of genetic quirks, Cameron s negative emotional range is limited to the kinds of bearable suffering one sees in a Nora Ephron movie. If someone tells Cameron a sad story, she cries easily! Oh, I m such a softie. When she reads about the latest transgression by Boris Johnson or Donald Trump, she feels righteous indignation. But then you just go to a protest march, don t you? And that s all you can do. When something bad happens, Cameron s brain immediately searches for a way to ameliorate the situation, but it does not dwell on unhappiness. She inadvertently follows the creed of the Stoics (and of every twelve-step recovery program): Accept the things you cannot change.
Where do they find these people? I suspect it’s a Scottish mutation.