The Endorphin Philosophy rejects the dopamine-driven capitalism that constantly demands new and stronger stimuli. Instead, it seeks inner achievement and comfort through immersion in 1 percent of voluntary pain.
But this does not mean romanticizing pain itself. It is a philosophy that urges us not to artificially separate pain from pleasure, but to realize that the very process of sublimating pain is the meaning of life. Modern content, however, often does the opposite. It aestheticizes pain. It turns suffering into something to be consumed. This “aestheticization of suffering” leads to two outcomes. First, decadent resignation. Second, a kind of sacred framing that silences other voices.
As this repeats, the public grows tired. Slowly, people withdraw from literature and art. These works offer brief empathy, but no real way out. So the modern mind drifts—trapped in a fog of meaninglessness.
In this article, we’ll ask two questions: Why did pain become aestheticized? And what does that do to our mental state? Then, in the next part, I’ll suggest Endorphin-based content models that restore both mental health and a sense of being alive.
1. Why Does Modern Art Portray Pain as Beautiful?
(1) “The World is Beautiful Because It’s Cruel”?
You might be familiar with the popular Japanese anime Attack on Titan. To me, it presents one of the most carefully constructed worldviews since The Matrix in the early 2000s. Through a relentless cycle of invasion, slaughter, and betrayal, the main characters eventually arrive at a single conclusion: the world is beautiful because it is cruel. The strong devour the weak, and the weak fight not to be eaten. The creators frame this endless struggle as life’s primordial energy—what philosophers once called the vital impetus, or élan vital.
Originally, the philosopher Henri Bergson used that term very differently. He meant the creative leap unique to living beings, not a brutal biological survival contest. Yet modern creators look at a school of fish fleeing a shark and declare that panic and escape are life itself. Desperation becomes beauty, weakness becomes sacred, and suddenly, our own exhausting daily routines are reframed as romantically tragic. We begin to look at our own pain as if it were a kind of grace, turning suffering into the artwork itself.
So, where did this deep impulse to turn cruelty into beauty actually come from?
(2) The Philosophical Origin: Nietzsche’s Ecstasy
In Western philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche was the thinker who permanently elevated pain into an aesthetic and sublime experience. He wrote his entire life under the weight of relentless torment. Physically, he suffered from chronic migraines, severe stomach illnesses, and failing eyesight that left him nearly blind. Personally, he was socially isolated and raised without a father. Romantically, he was rejected by Lou Salomé, who used him for her own intellectual experiments. Finally, he felt utterly betrayed when his spiritual father, the composer Richard Wagner, turned toward traditional Christian moralism.
The cold rationalism of the Enlightenment could not explain this suffering, and Christian morality could not justify it. So, Nietzsche turned to the irrational worldview of the Greek god Dionysus. To oppose a millennium of established Western thought, he needed a worldview just as vast and mythic. After his rejection by Lou Salomé, he conceived his most radical idea: the Eternal Recurrence. He asked if you could genuinely affirm your life—with all its exact pain and joy—if you had to live it over and over again for eternity.
The one who can say yes to that endless loop is what he called the Übermensch—someone who loves the tragedy of existence enough to endure its endless return. At this point, pain had to be reframed as beautiful. If suffering is to be affirmed eternally, it cannot remain merely ugly. Through this Dionysian lens, Nietzsche transformed his own agony into something purposeful. In Greek myth, Dionysus is the god of wine and festivals who helps humans forget their individual suffering through ecstasy. Nietzsche recognized that all discerning, slave-like self-consciousness, morality, and religion are the very roots of suffering, and envisioned Dionysus as the archetype to overcome them.
(3) The Limits of the Theory and the Rise of Fashion Leftism
For Nietzsche himself, the aestheticization of suffering was an existential choice for his own survival. Furthermore, it was entirely understandable that literature and art followed his path after the genuine horrors of the World Wars; back then, creators possessed the raw material of a concrete, painful life.
Today, however, that real life has vanished from contemporary literature and art because that level of existential pain simply does not exist for the comfortable class. As most people lead safe lives within the safety nets of democratic welfare states, creators who truly grind through genuine suffering have become extremely rare.
Modern creators now copy only the surface of Nietzsche’s agony, consuming it like a fashion trend. They project their own minor frustrations as if they were the grand, collective suffering of an entire era. Because they have turned pain into a cheap lifestyle commodity, those living in genuine suffering have distanced themselves from this hollow art. Meanwhile, those who do cry out in real-world pain are mocked by the public and dismissed as people merely looking for a financial payout.
(4) Eastern Contrasts: A Different View of Pain
To show that the modern aestheticization of suffering is not inevitable, let’s look at how Eastern philosophy approached pain. Without glorifying it. Without fetishizing it. For Western readers, this contrast may feel refreshing. Early Chinese thinkers did not treat pain as an independent substance, nor as something beautiful. Instead, they tried to resolve pain. Ethically. Politically. Existentially. Mencius, Confucius, and Zisi focused on ethical order and governance.
Let’s look at them one by one.
Mencius — Ending Pain Through Ethical Governance
In The Mencius, we read:
“Those who harm benevolence are thieves. Those who destroy righteousness are tyrants. Such men are not kings, but commoners.”
Mencius even argued that a ruler who destroys moral order deserves to be overthrown—or killed. For him, the source of suffering was clear. Not fate. Not metaphysics. But immoral rule.
When ren (benevolence) and yi (righteousness) collapse, people suffer. So ethics and politics are inseparable. Pain is a political problem. And it must be solved through moral governance by virtuous leaders—junzi. Unlike Nietzsche, Mencius did not sublimate suffering into beauty. He wanted to eliminate it. Through ethical action. Through better institutions.
Zisi — Moral Life as Cosmic Harmony
This ethical view goes back even earlier, to Zisi—Confucius’s grandson, and author of The Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong). Zisi expanded Confucian ethics into a cosmic worldview. For him, nature itself contains both: aesthetic harmony and moral order. He called this ever-generating vitality “sincerity” (cheng, 誠).
In Zhongyong, the hawk soaring into the sky, and the fish leaping from the pond, are expressions of this sincerity. Likewise, when humans live morally(The king must set an example as the first gentleman)— practicing benevolence, doing honest work, maintaining family harmony, showing filial piety— they resonate with this same cosmic rhythm.
Confucius had taught: even when life is harsh, one must still act with benevolence and propriety. Zisi universalized this into cosmic level. If everyone lives as a moral junzi, society naturally moves toward harmony—and suffering declines.
In the Confucian worldview, human suffering is never glorified; rather, it is understood that suffering will cease to exist if one fulfills their human duties and aligns themselves with the cosmic order.
Why Modern Politics Commodities Suffering
Having been trained in Eastern classics, I find the Western framework of aestheticizing suffering somewhat alien. I am more accustomed to viewing suffering as a subject for ethical and political resolution. Since global readers might have the opposite perspective, I briefly introduced the views of Mencius and Zisi, who criticized political systems that cause life’s hardships. Many Eastern classics—including Han Feizi, Laozi, and Zhuangzi—saw the root of human suffering in politics.
However, unlike ancient thinkers who sought to eliminate suffering by correcting immoral politics, modern populists and leftists are not interested in erasing pain. Instead, they commodify suffering, using it to wield power and justify the redistribution of resources. By sanctifying victimhood into an untouchable moral shield, these modern archons engineer a trap designed to siphon off stakes via taxes and subsidies. While the Eastern classics weaponized ethics to dismantle the machinery of pain, modern political merchants institutionalize the wound, ensuring its eternal preservation to secure their own rent-seeking.
Anyway the goal is simple: The aestheticization of suffering is not universal. It is cultural. Historical. Philosophical. Specifically, it is a legacy of Nietzsche—later absorbed into modern commercial art. So when pain is treated as sacred or beautiful, we have every right to question it.
(5) Aestheticized Pain in Contemporary Literature
Now let’s look at how this appears in modern fiction. Take Korean novelist Han Kang, especially her novel Human Acts (소년이 온다). Set during the 1980 Gwangju Democratization Movement, the story follows the wandering soul of a dead boy, hovering among the living, layering trauma upon trauma.
“Think of my rotting side. Think of the bullet that pierced through it— cold as an iron rod, then turning into a ball of fire swirling inside my belly. Think of the hole it tore open on the other side, the hole through which all my warm blood drained out. Think of the muzzle that fired it. Think of the cold trigger. Think of the warm finger that pulled it. Think of the eyes that aimed at me. Think of the eyes of the man who ordered him to shoot.”
“The blood-soaked clothes that clung to our bodies were the first to burn into ash. Then the hair and fine body hair, the skin, the muscles followed … Inside the soldiers’ terrified black pupils, I saw our bodies burning. Our organs boiled and shrank … Let’s go to those who killed me.”
[Source: Human Acts , Han Kang, translated by me]
Han Kang operates not as a historian, but as a visceral poet of trauma. Her aesthetic strength lies in translating agonizing history into synesthetic bodily language. However, when sensory intensity saturates the text, it eviscerates any productive, causal narrative. In fact, this reflects a Korea’s national atmosphere where any questioning of the democratization movement is constitutionally prohibited.
The reader is not invited to critically interrogate the architecture of violence; instead, they are forced into passive awe before a monument of grief. This aesthetic strategy seals the suffering off from rational discourse, transforming a historical trauma into a closed emotional prison. Ultimately, it leaves the modern audience inside a ‘Theme Park of Misery’—emotionally depleted, burdened with moral guilt, yet stripped of any sovereign agency to transcend the pain.
Religious or sacrificial narratives that attempt to burden humans with original sin and guilt are only justified when they actually deliver salvation. However, the Gwangju Democratization Movement offers no such salvation to the vast majority of taxpayers. The fact that participants and their families receive benefits—spanning welfare, taxation, healthcare, and employment—is their own privilege and reward. It has very little to do with the actual hardships ordinary citizens face in their daily lives.
When there is zero shared reality or connection, why should the entire nation be forced to empathize with Han Kang’s aestheticization of this suffering? Why should everyone feel heartbroken over it? Those who benefited from democratization are the only ones reaping the rewards, so there is no reason for the younger generation to be burdened with understanding their pain.
The side effects don’t stop there. Under the pretext of providing compensation and support for the democratization movement, taxes are being squandered on unproductive and underdeveloped regions, yet legitimate criticism is silenced simply because those areas endured suffering during the democratization movement. It has become difficult to even raise issues about local power brokers and construction companies colluding with regional politicians to siphon off taxes—even when their spending efficiency is the lowest in the country. This is the fundamental problem with the sanctification of suffering. The responsibility for making genuine victims the target of public mockery, while allowing ‘tax thieves’ and ‘merchants of pain’ to thrive, lies squarely with the ‘fashion leftists’ and the cultural and artistic circles that collaborated in creating the rhetoric for them.
If art begins to serve the aestheticization of suffering, people refuse to view pain as a social problem and reject finding any actual resolution for it. People feel a sense of discomfort when suffering is aestheticized and turned into a sanctuary that no one is allowed to touch. They instinctively sense that there is no real ‘life’ in it, and they feel it is a space where the freedom of expression is suppressed. It is tragic that, because of this, even the stories of those crying out in genuine pain are buried by society. It is ironic that only after those who truly suffered fade away in neglect do writers, artists, and politicians step into the spotlight.
(6) Why Is the Aestheticization of Pain Considered Sophisticated?
Why is the aestheticization of pain perceived as something so profound and intellectual? The answer lies in the ambition of cultural and artistic circles to secure an authority that is both morally irreproachable and distinct from mass culture. There are two main reasons for this shift.
First, Pain is universal; anyone with a physical body can feel it. When content centers on suffering, empathy and social solidarity follow naturally. Furthermore, few people would dare look at someone in pain and suggest analyzing their situation or discussing economic causes and systems. Nobody wants to be that person.
As a result, suffering becomes a perfect shield. Once pain is presented on the page or screen, any criticism feels morally inappropriate. Critics praise the work, audiences resonate with the emotion, and a highly reliable cultural market is born. Many modern creators now build their entire narratives around victimhood, focusing on how they were hurt, how they were oppressed, and why collective sympathy is required. This formula has quietly become the new definition of artistic authenticity.
Second, the domain of joy, thrill, and excitement has long been monopolized by capitalist entertainment like Hollywood blockbusters, pop music, and streaming platforms. Because of this corporate dominance, academia and the literary world needed a counter-position—something morally elevated and intellectually refined that felt resistant to cheap commercial pleasure.
They found their answer in pain. Loss, alienation, and trauma were reframed as elite aesthetic experiences, especially when wrapped in dense theoretical language and symbolic complexity. The more elegantly suffering is described, the more serious the art appears, and the more society is blamed, the more morally advanced the work seems.
But this strategy comes with a significant cost. The more beautifully pain is described, the harder it becomes to question it. As criticism is silenced, the space for actual, practical solutions shrinks. While this aestheticization of suffering may be celebrated as high art, it leaves deep scars on the modern psyche. It leaves people feeling seen, but not healed; moved, but not strengthened.
2. Negative consequences of aestheticizing pain
(1) The Theme Park of Pain — and the Erosion of the Modern Mind
Mainstream culture is addicted to dopamine, while economic life is ruled by efficiency, prices, and objective metrics. Modern people are already exhausted, and their sense of subjective meaning keeps shrinking. Naturally, they look for an escape from this animal-level stimulation, hoping to find reflection and healing.
Instead, the literary and art worlds have built a theme park of suffering. Once inside, audiences simply watch others endure hardship. Paradoxically, this makes their own lives feel even heavier. General calls for social solidarity stop feeling like comfort; they start to feel like pressure, guilt, and emotional debt.
This happens because pain is consumed separated from its real social context. Consider a real example. During the years of lockdowns and vaccine mandates, many small business owners in Korea lost everything. Shops collapsed, debt exploded, and families fell apart. Yet the public reaction was often layered with cold sarcasm, asking who told them to run a business in the first place.
Hundreds of these owners took their own lives, but media coverage was almost nonexistent. Meanwhile, the pain written into novels is consumed as something sacred and noble. Writers win prestigious awards for describing hardships they have never actually lived.
This creates a strange imbalance where real suffering is ignored while fictional suffering becomes a luxury commodity. That is not empathy; it is a beautiful hypocrisy. At least dopamine-heavy entertainment provides straightforward pleasure. The aestheticization of suffering yields only exhaustion.
Those who truly know the weight of suffering do not turn it into an art form. They have no appetite for literature that turns pain into a spectacle. Instead, the public discourse on suffering is dominated by a comfortable class who perform empathy and curate grief. What remains is a hollow, sympathetic noise. The actual problem—what it is, where it comes from, and how to dismantle it—is never seriously discussed.
(2) The Exhaustion of Productive Discourse
When art treats pain as valuable in itself, questioning that pain becomes a taboo. Instead of asking why violence happens or how suffering can be transformed, we are left with nothing but raw sensation, shock, and trauma.
Compare this to a work like A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. The story shows brutal violence, but it also asks hard questions about whether individual violence is worse than state violence, and whether a government can truly control free will. Because the pain was not romanticized but depicted realistically, it remained touchable. Real debate became possible, and viewers argued over its meaning for decades.
Today, many contemporary works do the opposite by presenting pain as an overwhelming sensation that leaves the reader with only two choices: agree or stay silent. Open discussion disappears, and over time, cynicism grows. People begin to feel there is no point in talking about problems with no answers, which eventually causes them to mock real-world suffering, telling others to just get tougher or emigrate.
Instead of packaging resignation as high art, we need content that rebuilds meaning, resilience, and personal agency. This is what I call Endorphin Content. It does not need to be flashy or poetic. What matters is storytelling rooted in lived experience, an awareness of daily life, and a posture of hope even inside pain.
3. Conditions for Endorphin-Based Content
(1) Grounded in Real Experience
True content must come from lived experience because secondhand emotion can only impress an audience briefly. Without an experiential grounding, a creator’s worldview remains fragile. Sooner or later, followers sense the gap and wonder if the creator actually lives the life they write about, or if they are just repeating what they read from somewhere. Once the audience realizes they are just visiting another manufactured theme park, they quietly leave.
Content without real experience lacks an aura and cannot mirror the reader’s own life. Even in speculative fiction, audiences care deeply about how ideas were born through personal essays and interviews, because lived experience provides a narrative and immersion.
Contemporary art’s habit of turning suffering into something sacred leaves the audience with exactly two options: passive admiration for the beautiful render of pain, or an exhaustion that drives them away entirely. Those who want to interrogate the causes of suffering are effectively crowded out of the public square. This approach is how authenticity dies.
(2) Shifting Everyday Perception
Good content changes how we see, allowing us to look at ordinary life through a new lens and find meaning even inside pain. Figures like Nietzsche reframed their physical agony through art and philosophy, while tea masters like Sen no Rikyū transformed luxury aesthetics into humble Zen tea bowls.
Both acts were forms of perceptual transition. They did not deny the reality of pain; they reinterpreted it. We need that same kind of perceptual renewal today—not louder emotions or more stimulation, but new ways of seeing what is already right in front of us.
(For a deeper dive for perception change, see:
- [Japanese Wabi-Sabi and Participatory Perception: A Phenomenological Management Theory for B2C, Part 1 (History & Concept)]
- [Japanese Wabi-Sabi and Participatory Perception: A Phenomenological Management Theory for B2C Business, Part 2 (Michelangelo & Steve Jobs)]
- [Japanese Wabi-Sabi and Participatory Perception, Part 3 — Can We Apply Wabi-Sabi to Our Own Lives?])
(3) Expressed in Rhythmic Aphorisms
Finally, the message must stick. It should sound like a sharp aphorism or a rhythmic chant—something that physically stays in your mouth. The rhythm itself can become a form of medicine. When people encounter strong content, their thinking does not change through analytical argument alone. It changes through resonance, when a phrase makes them realize they have never looked at a situation quite that way before.
Real transformation is recursive; it comes from repeating a phrase and letting it live in your body until it reshapes how you interpret reality. This is why rhythm and brevity matter so much.
4. Recommendations for Endorphin-Based Content
Now let’s look at real examples. Works that restore mental balance. Works that rebuild meaning. Even in an age saturated with aestheticized pain.
(1) Content Rooted in Real Experience
My first recommendation is simple. Let’s go back to Hemingway. No one can call Hemingway hypocritical. Because every sentence came from a life he actually lived. Three books are perfect starting points.
- A Farewell to Arms (Henry): Based on his service in WWI Italy. Love, injury, escape, and a quiet tragedy. Pain is there—but never staged.
- The Old Man and the Sea (Santiago): Born from his fishing days in Cuba. He loses the fish. But he does not surrender dignity.
- For Whom the Bell Tolls (Robert Jordan): From his time as a war correspondent in Spain. He sees ideology collapse. But still finds meaning in friendship and love.
Other examples:
- The Diary of Anne Frank
- Man’s Search for Meaning — Viktor Frankl
- Eichmann in Jerusalem — Hannah Arendt
All born from the reality of Nazi Germany. They remind us of one core truth: Humans can endure. And still choose how to live.
(2) Content That Transforms Everyday Perception
Next are works that make you say: “I never thought about it like that.” Texts that reshape daily perception.
- The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)
- Zhuangzi (the Butterfly Dream)
- Death Note (Tsugumi Ohba)
Let’s take them one by one.
The Metamorphosis – When the Body Becomes Alien
I first read Kafka in high school. Life felt like a treadmill. Wake up. Wash. Commute. Study. Repeat. Then Kafka shattered that routine. Gregor wakes up as a giant insect. Family pity turns into disgust. Existence becomes pure burden. It made me wonder: If I became a bug tomorrow, would crawling away and dying be easier than another exam?
If you want to see family, work, and self with completely new eyes, this book will do it.
Zhuangzi – Am I a Butterfly Dreaming I’m a Man?
Zhuangzi dreams he is a butterfly. Free. Light. Joyful. Then he wakes up as Zhuangzi. And asks:
Was I Zhuangzi dreaming of a butterfly? Or a butterfly dreaming of Zhuangzi?
Suddenly, self and world blur. It forces us to step outside the illusion that “I” sit at the center of the universe.
Death Note – Can “I” Be Justice Itself?
Light Yagami finds a notebook. Write a name, and that person dies. He decides to kill all criminals. To build a peaceful world. As his power grows, and detective L hunts him, we start rooting for the murderer. That’s the scary part. In a world where money buys innocence, Light’s logic feels disturbingly reasonable. The question shifts: “If society’s justice fails, can my own become absolute?” It’s on Netflix. Highly recommended.
It’s not events that change the world. It’s how we perceive them.
(3) Lyric-Centered Music — The Endorphin of Rhythm and Word
Now let’s move to music. Historically, genres like: soul, blues, hip-hop, jazz were born from pain and resistance. They share one principle: The mouth came before the instrument.
I listen to hip-hop albums, especially artists like Nas, Biggie, the Wu-Tang Clan, and Sean Price. The true appeal of hip-hop is not that it aestheticizes suffering; rather, it captures how these artists transcend daily hardships through their lyrics. Because they all use their own lived experiences as raw material, there is no hypocrisy. Hip-hop is a genre that values authenticity and keeping it real just as much as it values technical skill. It is defined by a distinct confidence—a sort of bravado that treats massive struggles as if they are nothing. A sharp line or two from a track can easily end up functioning like a mantra.
Some of Nas’s most famous verses illustrate this:
- “I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death.”
- “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”
- “The world is yours.”
- “One more dance with you, Momma…”
5. Conclusion – Toward a New Kind of Content
In this essay, we traced where modern art’s obsession with pain comes from. The idea that “the world is beautiful because it is cruel.” Nietzsche was the first to raise pain and cruelty to the level of Dionysian beauty. He chose to affirm life even if it meant eternal suffering. For him, this was a survival strategy. A way to transform agony into creative force.
But from an Eastern perspective, pain has never been an aesthetic object. In Confucian and Daoist thought, suffering is understood ethically and politically. Not as something to be admired. Not as something to be beautified.
Turning pain into beauty is a cultural reflex. An aesthetic stereotype. And because of that stereotype, pain has become both: a theme park, and a grand hypocrisy. Consumed lightly. Stripped of context. Blocking any serious structural discussion. People are exhausted by it. Even real suffering— the kind that deserves real solidarity— is now met with sarcasm:
“If you don’t like it, just leave the country.”
As a counterpoint, I proposed the idea of Endorphin Content. A form of creation necessary for restoring modern mental health. It must meet three conditions:
- Rooted in real experience.
- Transforming everyday perception and worldview.
- Expressed in short, rhythmic phrases that stay with you.
Works that embody this spirit include: Hemingway’s novels. Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Zhuangzi’s writings. Death Note. And the music of Nas.
The era of consuming pain as art must end. That is no longer beauty. It is avoidance. What once carried existential weight now slowly poisons the modern mind. What literature and art need today is an endorphin turn. A shift from glorifying pain to rearranging it into meaning.
Not the aesthetics of despair, but the rhythm of survival. Not the worship of wounds, but the craft of transcendence. Back to Hemingway. And forward—to Endorphin Art.
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