The literal pain as others have mentioned is a biological feedback loop and feature of the human brain and evolution. When a baby is born, the baby needs to eat

The literal pain as others have mentioned is a biological feedback loop and feature of the human brain and evolution. When a baby is born, the baby needs to eat or it will feel pain. When you touch fire, you feel pain, so you avoid fire. When you eat, you receive positive feedback, so it encourages you to eat rather than starve. Back in the hunter-gatherer days, life was hard so people needed to stay in tight-knit groups or communities. Being kicked out of the group meant death- that is why so many people have issues today with social media. Social media can connect but it can also isolate, and that isolation can create a psychological pain. So all those likes, upvotes, and positive feedback give tiny dopamine hits and feel nice, but when you don't receive them, you start craving them, and you can feel isolated. Also social media is probably not a substitute for good human interaction. Philosophically, if you decide to find some meaning in life, suffering can be considered a gift. I luckily don't have any literal chronic pain but I've been blessed to experience a lot of pain in my life. It has helped me be thankful for what I do have and I think it has helped me empathize with people who have faced similar trials. It also gave me a mission and a desire to prevent or help others from going through what I did. Of course, this could also be some psychological feature that I'm not aware of, like the need to tell a story to make my suffering feel meaningful. But to support my point, one example could be this great blog post I read today on why you need hardship for passion. https://brookeallen.com/2015/01/27/passion-requires-that-you-hate-something/ https://brookeallen.com/2015/01/27/passion-requires-that-you... One of my favorite theories, Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Integration, suggests that pain is necessary to reach higher self-awareness. For example, you realize one morning that the world is pretty messed up and that's a pretty painful reality, so what do you do? It makes me feel better because it suggests my mental health issues could be more societal than personal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration