Existential Pain (Eternal Boredom of the Spotty Mind), 2 Nov 2009

Existential Pain (Eternal Boredom of the Spotty Mind), 2 Nov 2009

Returning back to the now-customary ritual of struggling with "keeping patience".

Wait. Why?

Didn't you just get a lovely new shiny buddie (a BMW!)?
Yes, I did. Thank you.

Aren't you happy then?
I was on Saturday. Today is Monday. As it turns out, things have a tendency of getting old quickly (surprise surprise). Greener pastures are always somewhere else. Never here.

So...?
Yes, I am back to the eternal boredom caused by my spotty mind, popularly known as existential pain in the circle of intellectuals/philosophers/thinkers.

What is this 'existential pain'?
ummm...pain caused by existence on this earth...I guess..? I don't know.
But I do know that it exists, because I am experiencing it. It causes extreme boredom. A symptom so severe that even when you have an important report due by end of day today, unbeknownst to yourself, you start typing a fb note vehemently.

Did you google it?
Of course. Do you think I am waiting for a genie in the lamp to tell me about it? I can't believe wiki has not entry for it. My faith in it has dwindled. I did find one interesting paper (abstract copied below). Waise to it seems hollow, but it has sample sizes and p-values that make you want to believe it. HAHA. Imagine a wicked statistician laughing. You suckers for large sample sizes and small p-values!

Can't you do something about it?
If a dose of (Bollywood music + 2 hour seminar on small molecules + a second lunch of burger-dietcoke-fries + a short walk by the bay on a beautiful California day) could not alleviate the pain, I don't know what will. What’s your Rashee, Blue..name it and it has proved to be inadequate. I cannot even click on Chor Bazaari/Tha kar ke..., Bryan Adams/Neeraj/Mohit et al (i.e. anything on my iLike). This is really serious.

Are you okay?
I think I will be when this note stuck in me gets out. Labor pains are never easy.
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Vinodh: Your update is very fitting. Chain ek pal nahin! Aur koi hal nahin!!!

At this stage I am desperate and will do anything to be:
lenient; acquiescent, passive, resigned, unresistant, unresisting, yielding; agreeable, amenable, compliant, complying, conformist, docile, law-abiding, obedient, submissive, subordinate, tractable, willing; slavish, subservient; amiable, obliging; collected, composed; constrained, contained, curbed, inhibited, repressed, restrained; disciplined, self-contained, self-controlled; apathetic, uncaring, unresponsive

Reader, if you have come this far and have a suggestion/remedy/cure that is boiling to get out, BRING IT ON. Invoke your creative Shakti or all-powerful Shiva. Don't just tell me "to hang in there and be patient".
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1. J Pain Symptom Manage. 2004 Mar;27(3):241-50.
Existential pain--an entity, a provocation, or a challenge?
Strang P, Strang S, Hultborn R, Arnér S.

Department of Oncology and Pathology, Karolinska Institutet, SSH, Mariebergsg 22, 112-35 Stockholm, Sweden.

"Existential pain" is a widely used but ill-defined concept. Therefore the aim of this study was to let hospital chaplains (n=173), physicians in palliative care (n=115), and pain specialists (n=113) respond to the question: "How would you define the concept existential pain?" A combined qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the answers was conducted.

In many cases, existential pain was described as suffering with no clear connection to physical pain.
Chaplains stressed significantly more often the guilt issues, as well as various religious questions (P<0.001).

Palliative physicians (actually seeing dying persons) stressed more often existential pain as being related to annihilation and impending separation (P<0.01), while pain specialists (seeing chronic patients) more often emphasized that "living is painful" (P<0.01).

Thirty-two percent (32%) of the physicians stated that existential suffering can be expressed as physical pain and provided many case histories.

Thus,"existential pain" is mostly used as a metaphor for suffering, but also is seen as a clinically important factor that may reinforce existing physical pain or even be the primary cause of pain, in good agreement with the current definition of pain disorder or somatization disorder.

PMID: 15010102 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]

 

 


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