Pain Is Not the Right Unit of Effort
The Concealed Evolutionary Game Destroying Modern Work
"I would go further and argue that this general orientation toward work does immense harm to many people who are simply not wired to be putting work and achievement at the center of their lives. It causes the things that the grinders theoretically are afraid of: acedia, cynicism, nihilism, depression, health issues, dysfunctional relationships, and even death. But these are often dismissed as 'normal,' because they are simply common. I suspect that for every 1 person crushing it in their personal hustle olympics, another 5 are stressed or beating themselves up for not keeping up." — Paul Millerd.
When I read Paul Millerd's latest Substack post, "No, Everything Doesn't Have To Suck," something clicked. His pushback against Sahil Bloom's viral "Every single thing you want is on the other side of hard work" triggered a wave of defensiveness from the grinder coalition. People called his perspective "dangerous" and worried it needed a "warning label."
Why such visceral reactions to the simple suggestion that work doesn't have to suck?
Because Paul wasn't just challenging a productivity tip—he was threatening a sophisticated status game that has hijacked our evolved psychology. The "hard work = good" ideology is a brilliant evolutionary status hack.
So here is an evolutionary deep dive into why pain has become our default metric for effort and why this represents one of the most destructive collective delusions in modern work.
1. The Grinding Contradiction
Every morning, millions of ambitious professionals wake up to perform a strange ritual: they deliberately make their work harder than it needs to be—and then brag about it.
"Pulled another all-nighter to finish that deck."
"Haven't taken a vacation in three years."
"Still answering emails at 2 AM."
These declarations of suffering echo across offices, Slack channels, and LinkedIn feeds. They're delivered not with regret but with a peculiar pride—as if the pain itself were the achievement rather than whatever output it produced.
This is the incongruity at the heart of modern work culture: we simultaneously claim to value efficiency and productivity while celebrating behaviors that undermine both. We've created a strange new status game where visible suffering has become its own currency.
What explains this paradox? Why do bright, ambitious people deliberately choose inefficient approaches to work? And why do organizations that claim to prize outcomes continue to reward input-focused behaviors?
The answer lies not in management theory but in evolutionary psychology: "Pain is not the right unit of effort" is a profound insight into a hidden status game that's hijacking our evolved psychology and destroying modern work from the inside out.
2. The Evolutionary Mismatch
To understand why pain has become such a powerful status currency, we must examine how our evolutionary psychology interacts with modern work environments.
Our brains evolved over hundreds of thousands of years in small hunter-gatherer bands where survival depended on group acceptance. In these ancestral environments, status was about access to resources, mates, and protection. Those who lost status often lost everything, including their lives.
This created robust neurological circuits dedicated to status monitoring and acquisition. Our ancestors who were highly attuned to their social position and skilled at status games passed their genes on more successfully than those who weren't.
The critical insight is this: Our evolved psychology isn't primarily optimized to avoid discomfort—it's optimized to gain status within social hierarchies.
Throughout human evolutionary history, those who endured tremendous pain for status gains (hunting dangerous prey, engaging in warfare, participating in grueling initiation rituals) routinely outcompeted those who prioritized comfort. Pain avoidance is a proximate mechanism, while status acquisition is the ultimate driver.
Modern work environments create a dangerous mismatch with these evolved drives. In ancestral contexts, pain was typically endured for direct survival value and visible community benefit. The hunter who pushed through exhaustion to track an animal did so to bring back food that directly benefited the group. The pain had a clear purpose and visible outcomes.
In contrast, modern knowledge work creates conditions where:
Outcomes are often invisible or delayed
The connection between effort and results is frequently unclear
Pain displays are highly visible, while actual contribution may not be
Feedback cycles are long and ambiguous
This creates the perfect conditions for a status system based on visible inputs (hours worked, suffering endured) rather than outputs (value created). Our evolved psychology, primed to seek status through whatever means are most effective in our current environment, latches onto these visible pain signals.
The result? A bizarre evolutionary mismatch where we've created work cultures that select for the wrong adaptive traits—pain tolerance and pain signaling rather than effective value creation.
3. The Status Coalition Game
What appears on the surface as a cultural pathology is something far more sophisticated: a strategic status game being played at multiple levels.
We're witnessing a status competition about what should count as status.
From an evolutionary game theory perspective, the "grinding culture" represents a brilliant (if destructive) competitive strategy by a specific coalition: those who excel at enduring pain but may not excel at generating valuable outputs.
This coalition has engineered a status environment where their comparative advantage—pain tolerance—becomes the dominant competitive dimension. Consider the strategic brilliance:
Coalition Formation: "Grinders" form a status alliance that attempts to redefine the status metric from "results produced" to "pain endured."
Signal Manipulation: By valorizing visible suffering, they transform a potentially negative signal (inefficiency) into a positive one (commitment/loyalty).
Competitive Advantage: This creates a status environment where their particular trait (pain tolerance) becomes the dominant competitive dimension.
Moral Language Deployment: Terms like "lazy," "entitled," or "lacking commitment" serve as coalition enforcement mechanisms, punishing those who reject the pain-status equation.
The evolutionary logic is that humans possess remarkable flexibility in what we consider status-worthy. Throughout history, coalitions have successfully redefined status metrics to advantage their members. Aristocrats valorized "refined idleness," certain religious groups elevated asceticism, and modern grinding cultures celebrate suffering.
This reveals a more profound insight: Pain can become the correct unit of effort in environments where pain endurance has been successfully established as a status metric. But this isn't a fixed truth—it's the outcome of an ongoing evolutionary competition between coalitions with different status strategies.
What makes this particularly insidious is how it creates a zero-sum competition. In environments where outputs create genuine value, status competitions can be positive-sum: everyone benefits when more value is created. But in pain-status environments, the competition becomes purely relative, with no broader benefit.
The most successful organizations typically resist this redefinition, focusing on output-based status metrics rather than input-based ones. Meanwhile, less productive organizations often drift toward valuing visible suffering as a proxy for contribution—creating a destructive arms race of performative pain.
4. The Ritual of Suffering and Promotion
Perhaps nowhere is the pain-status equation more visible than in organizational promotion practices—where "paying your dues" becomes a ritualized suffering requirement for advancement.
This represents a fascinating twist on traditional initiation rites. Throughout human history, groups have required painful initiations to:
Test commitment to the group
Create coalitional binding through shared sacrifice
Establish hierarchies based on endurance
Reduce the likelihood of defection after investment
What's remarkable about modern organizational "suffering rituals" is how they've evolved from functional tests of commitment into dysfunctional displays of status loyalty. Consider how this manifests:
The Suffering Escalator: Junior employees must demonstrate more intense suffering than their predecessors did.
The Memory Distortion Effect: Leaders remember their own suffering as more strategic and purposeful than it actually was.
The Legacy Legitimization: "I suffered to get here, so you must suffer too" becomes a moral justification rather than a strategic necessity.
The Status Protection Racket: Reducing the suffering requirement would devalue the status "earned" through previous pain.
This creates a "costly signaling spiral"—an ever-escalating display of commitment that becomes disconnected from actual contribution. What began as a legitimate test of dedication transforms into a self-perpetuating system where each generation must suffer more visibly than the last.
The most damaging aspect is how this creates a psychological investment in the suffering narrative. Leaders who endured significant pain to reach their position face a stark choice:
Admit their suffering was unnecessary and potentially meaningless
Perpetuate the system to validate their own experience
Evolutionary psychology predicts that most will choose the second option—leading to a "legacy trap" where each generation imposes higher costs on the next to justify their own sacrifice.
Organizations caught in this trap systematically select pain tolerance rather than value creation, creating cultures where advancement depends more on suffering displays than strategic contribution.
5. The Existential Pain of Uncertainty
Beyond the coalition dynamics, there's another reason pain-based status metrics persist: they offer something profoundly seductive to our evolved psychology—certainty.
Consider the fundamental challenge of knowledge work: How do you know if you're doing enough? How do you know if you're making the right decisions? How do you know if you're adding value? These questions create profound uncertainty, which our brains experience as a form of psychological pain.
Pain metrics provide an elegant solution to this existential discomfort:
Immediate Feedback Loop: Pain provides clear, immediate signals ("I worked until midnight, so I must be working hard enough")
Binary Clarity: Pain creates artificial binary outcomes in a world of ambiguity ("I'm suffering more than my colleagues, so I must be contributing more")
Effort Justification: Pain triggers cognitive biases that make us value outcomes more when we've suffered to achieve them
This creates a "surrogate endpoint trap" – we optimize for a measurable proxy (visible pain) rather than the actual outcome of interest (value creation).
The most profound insight? Pain metrics aren't just wrong—they're psychologically addictive precisely because they eliminate the existential discomfort of uncertainty.
This represents a fundamental mismatch with the actual challenges of knowledge work and strategic decision-making. The most valuable decisions typically occur in domains where:
The outcome cannot be guaranteed.
Multiple valid perspectives exist.
The solution space is underdetermined.
The feedback loop is extended.
By substituting pain for these complex dimensions, we create a decision architecture that systematically misaligns effort with value—while providing psychological comfort through false certainty.
This explains why, as one commenter brilliantly observed, "for every 1 person crushing it in their personal hustle olympics, another 5 are stressed or beating themselves up for not keeping up." The pain metric creates an unlimited status game with clear rules: more visible pain = more status. Anyone can access more suffering by working longer, sleeping less, and sacrificing more—creating an arms race with no natural endpoint.
6. The Strategic Effort Confusion
The pain-status dynamic creates a profound strategic misalignment that extends beyond individual psychology to organizational strategy.
Organizations have systematically confused the means (operational effectiveness, infrastructure, process optimization) with the ends (strategic advantage, distinctive positioning, value creation).
This represents the Strategic Effort Paradox – the mistaken belief that investments in higher human effort automatically translate into strategic advantage.
Consider the three distinct levels of organizational activity:
"Right to Play" Activities: Basic infrastructure and capabilities everyone needs, including effort.
"Right to Compete" Activities: Operational effectiveness that creates parity.
"Right to Win" Activities: Genuine strategic choices that create advantage.
The "pain as status" culture cleverly conflates these distinct levels, creating "effort theater"—the appearance of strategic action without actual strategy.
The most damaging aspect is how this diverts organizational energy from actual strategy (making distinctive choices about where to play and how to win) to optimizing visible effort. This represents a severe imbalance in the four strategic vectors:
Overinvestment in Concentration (amplifying existing approaches through effort)
Severe underinvestment in Foresight (seeing what others don't)
Neglect of Optionality (maintaining strategic flexibility)
Minimal investment in Adaptability (ability to pivot when conditions change)
The evolutionary insight here is crucial: Pain-as-status creates a one-dimensional competitive arena that actively prevents strategic thinking.
What's most revealing is that pain culture thrives precisely because it eliminates the need to make genuine strategic choices—which are always tricky and uncertain. Status from visible pain substitutes for status that should come from making consequential choices under uncertainty.
This explains why organizations caught in pain-status cultures often find themselves stuck in strategic stasis—plenty of activity but little advancement, exhausted teams but minimal progress on truly distinctive positioning.
7. The Three Status Pathways
To understand how we might break free from pain-based status metrics, we need a framework for understanding alternative status pathways.
All organizations contain three distinct status acquisition strategies, each creating different incentives and outcomes:
Pain Status
Core Metric: Visible suffering and effort
Key Behaviors: Working late, sacrificing personal time, visible struggle
Status Signals: "I pulled an all-nighter," "Haven't taken a vacation in years"
Organizational Impact: High burnout, low innovation, misaligned effort
Evolutionary Driver: Signal costly commitment to the group
Process Status
Core Metric: Adherence to established methodologies
Key Behaviors: Following protocols, maintaining standards, perfectionism
Status Signals: "Did it by the book," "Flawless execution," "Zero defects"
Organizational Impact: Reliability, consistency, potential rigidity
Evolutionary Driver: Signal coalition loyalty through ritual adherence
Outcome Status
Core Metric: Value creation regardless of method
Key Behaviors: Innovative problem-solving, focus on results, efficiency
Status Signals: "Delivered 20% growth," "Solved the intractable problem"
Organizational Impact: Innovation, adaptability, strategic alignment
Evolutionary Driver: Signal exceptional contribution to group success
These pathways are competing status coalitions within organizations. Each pathway creates different incentives and selects for different adaptive traits.
The choice of status pathway is the most critical factor in determining individual and organizational effectiveness. Organizations dominated by Pain Status prioritize visible suffering over outcomes. Those dominated by Process Status optimize for consistency but may lack adaptability. Those dominated by Outcome Status create the most value but require comfort with uncertainty.
What makes Pain Status particularly dangerous is its memetic advantage. It's easy to observe and measure, provides immediate feedback, and offers a simple recipe for status acquisition. This creates strong coalitional dynamics that can easily overpower the more ambiguous but ultimately more valuable Outcome Status pathway.
The strategic challenge for leaders is to actively reshape the status landscape to favor Outcome Status while acknowledging the legitimate evolutionary needs that Pain Status addresses—belonging, recognition, and status certainty.
8. Realigning Status with Value
Understanding pain status as an evolutionary strategy points toward more effective interventions. The goal isn't to eliminate status competition but to redirect it toward metrics that create value.
Here are strategies at three different levels:
Individual Strategies
Status Source Diversification: Deliberately build status in multiple domains beyond work
Coalition Alignment: Selectively align with outcome-focused status coalitions
Output Visibility Engineering: Make your value creation more visible than your effort
Status Metric Consciousness: Explicitly identify which status games you're playing
Strategic Pain Deployment: If pain is necessary, ensure it's strategically aligned with outcomes
Leader Strategies
Outcome Visibility: Create systems that make value creation more visible than effort
Status Economy Design: Deliberately construct status rewards around outcomes
Coalition Recognition: Identify and elevate outcome-focused coalitions
Uncertainty Comfort Building: Create psychological safety around strategic ambiguity
Pain-Status Disruption: Actively challenge narratives that equate suffering with contribution
Ritual Redesign: Replace suffering rituals with value-creation rituals as promotion requirements
Organizational Strategies
Metric System Redesign: Replace input metrics with outcome metrics
Status Structure Realignment: Create formal recognition systems for value creation
Coalitional Reconfiguration: Disrupt pain-status coalitions through structural changes
Cultural Narrative Revision: Tell stories that celebrate efficient value creation
Decision Architecture Reform: Build decision systems that reward quality over certainty
Initiation Evolution: Transform costly signaling requirements from pain endurance to value creation
The common thread in these strategies is the recognition that our evolved psychology can't simply ignore status—it's too fundamental to how our brains work. Instead, we must create environments where status acquisition aligns with genuine value creation.
The goal isn't to eliminate status competition but to redirect it toward metrics that create value. As one organizational psychologist puts it:
"The goal isn't to create a status-blind organization—that's impossible. The goal is to create a status system that rewards the right things."
This represents an adaptive challenge requiring conscious evolution. We must acknowledge our evolutionary heritage while creating structures that align our evolved drives with modern needs.
9. The Evolutionary Challenge
Let's return to our opening scene: the professional proudly declaring their late-night suffering as a badge of honor. Through our evolutionary lens, we now see this is a sophisticated status strategy that cleverly exploits our evolved psychology while undermining both individual well-being and organizational effectiveness.
The insight that "pain is not the right unit of effort" reveals a profound truth about modern work: we've created systems that systematically misalign our evolutionary drives with our strategic goals. Pain provides a comfortable certainty that strategic decision-making cannot, creating a seductive trap that diverts our energy from value creation to status display.
The most insidious aspect is how this system perpetuates itself through generational suffering rituals—where leaders who endured pain to reach their positions create cultures that require similar or higher suffering from the next generation. This is a sophisticated evolutionary strategy that protects the status value of past suffering while creating tribal cohesion through shared pain.
The evolutionary challenge we face is to consciously design environments that align our status instincts with genuine value creation. We can't deny our evolutionary heritage, but we can channel it productively.
Organizations that succeed in this evolutionary challenge gain a significant strategic advantage: they harness status competition toward value creation rather than suffering displays. They create conditions where the path to status runs through genuine contribution rather than performative pain.
At an individual level, understanding the pain-status game gives you a choice: you can see the game for what it is and decide whether and how to play. You can seek environments where status aligns with outcomes, not inputs. You can build your identity around value creation rather than suffering endurance.
As
eloquently puts it:"We don't have a scarcity of grind. We have a scarcity of optimism, earnestness, kindness, sincerity, curiosity, delight, aliveness, and exuberance."
The true measure of effort isn't the pain it produces but the value it creates. It's time we evolved our status games accordingly.
I wrote this in response to Paul Millerd's excellent Substack post "No, Everything Doesn't Have To Suck", which I highly recommend reading. His perspective on work, status, and grinding culture provides an essential counterpoint to the dominant "hustle harder" narrative. Also strongly inspired by:
Status is Weird, by David Pinsof
Pain is not the unit of Effort, by alhjash