"...Cognitive scientists have a useful conceit for distinguishing two kinds of pain: clean and dirty. Clean pain is the kind all mammals experience—tissue damage, of course, but also the ache after the death of a mate or a child. Dirty pain is infinitely more common, and it shows up in humans. I’m an idiot for getting this sunburn. Why did my controlling cousin make me go to the beach?
"With blame and indignation come new surges of cortisol that amplify—maybe even cause—physical pain. Shinzen Young, the mindfulness teacher, counsels dying patients to experience pain from annoyance to agony cleanly—with precision. It’s a challenge, but a liberating one: to resolve the pain by removing stories about who did what to you.
"A parable about a sailor in the Zhuangzi, a Taoist text, also emphasizes the dangers of ladling dirty pain onto clean. “If he sees a man in the boat / He will shout at him to steer clear / If the shout is not heard, he will shout again.” But if “an empty boat collides with his own skiff, Even though he be a bad-tempered man / He will not become very angry.”
"Which brings me to vocal fry, which has angered many a man, bad-tempered and otherwise. Vocal fry is a style of uttering words, characterized by a pattern of vibration in the larynx. No actual “fry” is present. A precise designation is “pulse register.” A positive one might be “vibrato.”
"But this sensory experience has turned political. Some NPR listeners, who have complained bitterly about the pulse registers of female reporters, blame their intolerance on an “epidemic” and an “affectation.” In one male listener, the vibrato sound uncorked a torrent bordering on conspiracy. “Listen, I know there’s pressure to hire females—in particular, young females just out of college. And besides, they’re likely to work for less money. But do you have to choose the most irritating voices in the English-speaking world?”
"Listen, as our sexist might say. I’m sure there’s a vibration that, even if made by a hawk, could be registered by certain nervous systems as annoying. I’m also sure that allergens exist. But the reflex to find culprits—women, Jews—is a distinctly human form of insanity. To go from an experience in the eardrums to a charge of hiring women because they’re easier to exploit is not just illogical, it’s malevolent.
"We’re not all Taoists. (I’m still trying to win an argument with an absent person.) But to take up the challenge of separating clean from dirty pain is a small but meaningful step in reducing suffering generally—most of all our own. TL;DR: If it’s you who’s annoyed, stick to the sensations of the body without spinning tales of how Scott Pruitt or feminists caused your mosquito bites."
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