The need to be able to experience pain to know pleasure isn't about social or cultural relativism, it's a function of how we perceive stimuli. Try putting your

The need to be able to experience pain to know pleasure isn't about social or cultural relativism, it's a function of how we perceive stimuli. Try putting your hand in hot water for a while, then put your hand in cold water, and repeat the procedure without first putting your hand in hot water. The cold water will feel much colder going from the hot water. Research has also demonstrated that pain that doesn't change in character or intensity is noticed less over time. Our perceptions are not based on some absolute scale but relative to other perceptions. My argument is that in order for a game or story to be compelling, the outcome must be uncertain, and the possibility of loss or failure must exist. Nobody wants to play a game that is basically "push start to win" and nobody wants to read a story that is basically "a long time ago, in a land far far away, everybody lived happily ever after". I'm happy to stay out of the personal, you were the one that brought up your depression. I'll leave that track with the suggestion that maybe it is worth entertaining the possibility that your depression isn't the result of some chemical imbalance resulting from a bad draw of the genetic lottery, but rather a product of your beliefs and thought process. I don't see how I'm "victimising" myself by recognizing that there is both good and bad in the universe, and put on the cosmic scale, the good massively outweighs the bad.