We all know we’re not gonna be here forever.
Life is about the experience
“YOLO”
“I’m here for a good time not a long time.”
In this experience, we seek pleasure. Happiness and pleasure sound the same, we assume one will lead to the other.
The philosophy of hedonism is about the pursuit of only pleasure. If you make yourself feel good, your soul will follow.
Pleasure is objective, like the body, but happiness is subjective, like the soul.
Thing is, happiness means different things to different people. You can’t argue with any of them because we can’t tell other people what’s best for them. A lot of the time, we barely know what’s best for ourselves.
Lifting weights. It hurts in the moment, but to some of us that’s the pleasure. It’s a form of masochism. Even if you’re in the ‘hurts’ camp, the stimulation of the muscles and their growth is a form of pleasure, whether it’s the physical strength or the aesthetic benefits. Some people find lifting to be a spiritual endeavor. Outside of the physical factor, they feel tranquility from it.
On the other hand, if somebody drinks and smokes every day, there’s no doubt they’re full of pleasure, but would you say they’re happy?
Or like the ‘1 cookie now or 2 cookies later’ social experiment. If you don’t know what that is, it’s when you take a child, sit them at a table, and put a cookie in front of them. You tell them, you can eat this cookie now or whenever you want, but if you wait 10 minutes, I’ll give you another one, so you’ll have 2 cookies. Do that, and walk out of the room. There’s usually a camera set up to record them too. Most of the time, you’ll see the kid get agitated and start fidgeting over the temptation of that one cookie.
The kids who were able to wait for that second cookie are said to be more successful in life because they know how to delay gratification. Ima sound like a self-help guru for a minute, but that’s where a lot of life’s greatest pleasures are. I mentioned lifting weights as one. Working to make money is the one we all do, most people don’t enjoy work. Me reading and doing these studies can be boring. I’m not always having the time of my life reading these subjects, but the knowledge makes it worth it in the end.
To that point, our pleasures adhere to our bodily senses, yet a lot of them are hostile to our souls. That’s why if we say a person is superficial, we’re saying they focus too much on the outside and what feels good in the moment. We’re criticizing their soul, or lack thereof.
Problem is, we can’t really articulate what the soul is. So we don’t have much of a reason to care about it.
So it really comes down to you can either feel good on the outside or the inside. Of course we want to try to get both.
The whole necessity of philosophy is to stop the soul from being anchored down by materialism. The more somebody seeks pleasure in outside things, the more unhappy they tend to be on the inside.
On the other hand, I don’t think monks have it all figured out. Their answer is to not indulge in anything and just stay ascetic. I think that’s disrespectful to the creator to completely deprive yourself of life’s joys. If that’s how you choose to live as a human, I would’ve just made you an animal for all that.
People-pleasers take abuse from the outside and may tell themselves they’re happy on the inside, but if you’re submitting to all that abuse, then you lack self-respect, which is on the inside.
Or even the one that I’m dealing with, would you rather be liked or be right? To me being liked is pleasurable, while being right can lead you to happiness. Some may disagree and say it’s vice versa.
Like any philosophy, there is no answer for this.
I ain’t gonna spend too much time on this. All in all, most religions state that our souls will be judged in the afterlife. Even if they have different version of how that’ll happen, it’s still likely to happen. You don’t have to believe that if you don’t want to.
Grant Abraham 