There is no point in taking opium; it is better to put salt and vinegar in the soul's wound ; for if you fall asleep and no longer feel the pain, then you no longer exist. And the point is to exist.

Numbness costs you your own life

Most of us reach for some kind of opium when life gets hard—distraction, numbness, the comfort of not feeling. It's tempting because pain genuinely hurts, and there's a relief in finally not noticing it anymore. But Unamuno is pointing at something most self-help advice ignores: the cost of that relief is your own presence in your life. You can't numb just the bad feelings. Numbness spreads.

What he's really describing is the difference between existing and merely getting through. Salt and vinegar sting, but they're alive. They actually touch something real. When you stop running from discomfort and instead move through it, something shifts—you become more awake, more capable of noticing what's true about yourself and your situation. The pain becomes information instead of just noise.

This matters now more than ever, in a world built to offer us endless ways to check out. We have access to more opiums than Unamuno ever imagined—the scrolling, the streaming, the strategies for not having to sit with difficulty. But the trade-off is real: every time we choose numbness, we're choosing a smaller version of ourselves. Existence, he's saying, isn't comfortable. It's conscious. It's painful sometimes. And that's precisely what makes it worth doing.