The Polar Nature of Life: Why You Need Pain to Feel Pleasure

I used to believe that a good life meant maximizing pleasure and eliminating pain. If I could just get the balance right — more good days, fewer bad ones — I would eventually land in a stable place where everything felt okay.

I tried for years. It never worked. Every time I removed one source of discomfort, another one appeared. Every peak was followed by a valley. The closer I got to what I thought was a perfect life, the more I noticed what was still wrong.

Alan Watts saw this pattern clearly. In his book Just So, he lays out why the game of opposites is not something to escape. It is the whole point.

The fundamental trick

Westerners like me grew up with a certain way of thinking. We see the world as a collection of separate things bouncing into each other like billiard balls. Good things happen. Bad things happen. We try to get more of the first and less of the second.

Watts said this whole approach is based on a mistake. You cannot isolate pleasure from pain any more than you can find a wave without a trough. As he put it, half waves do not appear in nature.

This sounds like philosophy until you actually test it. Try to imagine a pleasure that lasts forever without ever changing. It becomes boring. Try to imagine a world where everything is positive all the time. It becomes flat. The contrast is what makes the experience possible in the first place.

Watts used an image that stuck with me. If you stare at a completely black wall, you see nothing. If you stare at a completely white wall, you also see nothing. You need the mark on the wall — the contrast — to see anything at all. Black and white do not cancel each other. They make each other visible.

This is not a metaphor for life. It is how life works at every level.

The chess game nobody wants to admit

Watts asked a simple question. Could we invent a game where nobody loses and everybody wins?

We could try. But not much would happen, and we could not really call it a game. The whole point of chess is that one side wins and the other loses. If you remove that tension, you remove the game.

Most of us want to win without anyone losing. We want the promotion without the coworker who does not get it. We want the relationship without the risk of rejection. We want the success without the failure that came before it.

But this is like wanting sunshine every day without ever having rain. You think you want it. You might even tell yourself you ought to want it. But you do not really want to live in a world where everything is positive all the time. It would be flat. Mechanical. Dead.

Watts said that being a good sport means being a good loser. You play the losing game with the same enthusiasm as the winning one. A good opponent pushes you. They win every so often, which forces you to try harder. If you always win, even that gets boring after a while.

The opposite of pleasure is not the enemy of pleasure. It is the condition that makes pleasure possible. Read more about this idea in our article on the universe playing hide-and-seek with itself, where Watts explains that the forgetting is as necessary as the finding.

Short rays and long rays

People want to live to be ninety or a hundred. We treat a long life as a measure of success. Everybody wants to be a long ray.

But Watts pointed to a Zen teaching from Ryokan: “In the scenery of spring, there is nothing superior, nothing inferior. Flowering branches grow naturally — some short, some long.”

If you draw a star, it is only interesting if its rays have different lengths. If every ray were the same, the star would look flat and mechanical. The unevenness gives it character.

Apply this to your own life. The short rays — the setbacks, the disappointments, the pain — are not mistakes. They are what make the long rays visible. If everything were a long ray, you would stop noticing what long even means.

A star lasts for what seems like a long time as a burst of fire. Then it fades. Every star does this. If the radiance never gave up, there would be no way for it to realize itself. You can only experience light by the contrast of darkness.

You are not the ray, Watts said. You are the source of the ray. The source is always there. It does not vanish when the ray fizzles out.

The bed that is always comfortable

Here is another image Watts used. Life is like sleeping on a hard bed. You lie on your left side until you cannot stand it, so you turn over on your right. That gets uncomfortable, so you turn onto your back. Then your stomach. Then back to your left.

That is what we are all doing. We keep shifting positions, trying to find the one that finally feels right. But a bed that is always comfortable would be meaningless because you would never know what comfortable is.

You need the discomfort to recognize comfort. You need the hunger to taste satisfaction. You need the loneliness to feel connection.

Most spiritual and self-help systems promise that if you do the right things, you can stop shifting. You can find the one position that finally works. But Watts said this is a misunderstanding. The shifting is not a bug. It is the design.

If I served you nothing but chocolate eclairs with honey and champagne every morning, you would quickly get sick of them. The whole nature of wanting involves contrast. You cannot get rid of that without getting rid of wanting itself.

This connects to what we wrote about accepting the inner conflict instead of trying to eliminate it. The conflict is not a mistake. It is how life becomes conscious of itself.

Polarization is actually harmony

We use the word “polarization” to mean conflict. Two sides fighting. But Watts pointed out that polarization is actually a form of harmony.

The North Pole and the South Pole are as different as two things can be. But they are also the same. They are different aspects of the same planet. The earth itself is the common ground between them.

In the same way, good and evil are different aspects of the same field. You cannot have one without the other. The esoteric view — the secret that every religion keeps for people who can handle it — is that black and white, though explicitly different, are implicitly one.

Watts said that the function of evil is to give you something to chew on. You will never get rid of it completely. But part of the joy of life comes from the process of trying. The devil is always losing the battle, but the battle is never fully lost. The good side is always winning, but it never fully wins.

This is why the Buddhists say emptiness is form and form is emptiness. It is not poetry. It is a description of how things actually work. One implies the other. They go together.

What you actually want

Here is the puzzle Watts left us.

Side one: you can never beat the game of opposites. You can never have more positive than negative.

Side two: you would not want it any other way. You cannot imagine how to improve the game.

If you really go into the problem of life, you will find it is precisely the way you want it to be. Superficially, things might not look the way you want them to look. But when you examine what you actually want — not what you think you should want — you keep coming back to contrast.

We want the thrill of discovery. That requires the unknown. We want the satisfaction of achievement. That requires the effort. We want the depth of love. That requires the risk of loss.

You cannot have one side of the wave without the other. And when you stop trying to, something shifts. You stop treating pain as a mistake and start seeing it as part of the pattern. You stop trying to escape the dance and start dancing.

This is what Watts meant when he said the meaning of the dance is the dance itself. There is no hidden purpose beyond the movement. You are not supposed to get anywhere. You are supposed to be here.

Practical takeaways for everyday life

Stop treating discomfort as a problem

When you feel pain — physical, emotional, or psychological — your first instinct is to fix it. But sometimes the fix is worse than the feeling. You turn to distraction, avoidance, or control. Instead, try noticing the discomfort without immediately trying to eliminate it. It is not evidence that something is wrong. It is evidence that contrast exists, which is what makes pleasure possible.

Let the shift happen

You will change positions. Again and again. That is not failure. It is what life does. When you find yourself unhappy with a situation you thought would make you happy, do not beat yourself up. You just shifted positions on the bed. It is okay.

Notice what you actually want

Next time you catch yourself wishing for a life without problems, stop and think. What would that actually look like? A life with no challenges, no tension, no difficulty? It sounds nice in theory. In practice, it would be the most boring thing imaginable. You want contrast. You just want it on your terms.

Play the game fully

The point of being a good sport is not to win. It is to play well. If you lose, lose well. If you win, win well. The outcome is temporary. The quality of your engagement is what matters.

This is related to the idea that you already have what you are looking for. You do not need to eliminate pain to find peace. The peace is available in the middle of the contrast, not after it ends.

Stop trying to beat the game

The game of opposites cannot be won. You cannot have pleasure without pain, good without evil, yes without no. Once you accept this, a certain kind of striving drops away. You stop fighting reality and start participating in it.

FAQ

Does this mean I should accept suffering and not try to improve my life?

No. It means you stop adding a second layer of suffering by resisting the first layer. You can improve your circumstances without pretending that your discomfort is a mistake. You can want things to get better without believing that wanting is a sign of failure.

Is Watts saying good and evil are the same thing?

No. He is saying they are different aspects of the same field. The distinction is real and important on one level. But on a deeper level, the field itself is neither. The distinction is not absolute. As Chuang Tzu said, only knaves and fools believe you can have the positive without the negative.

What about real suffering, like abuse or tragedy?

Watts is not saying all pain is good or that you should not try to prevent harm. He is describing the structure of experience, not prescribing what you should tolerate. You can fight against injustice and still understand that contrast is built into the fabric of existence. Both things can be true.

Does this make life meaningless?

It depends on what you mean by meaning. If meaning requires a final destination where everything is resolved, then yes, that kind of meaning does not exist. But if meaning is found in the movement itself — in the dancing, the playing, the shifting — then life is full of it. The meaning of the dance is the dance itself.

How do I apply this when I am actually in pain?

Start small. Notice your breath. Notice that even in pain, there are moments of relief. Notice that the pain changes. It is not static. You do not have to like it. You just have to see that it is part of the wave, not separate from it. The contrast is what makes the return to ease meaningful.