A Slave to Pleasure and Pain
Wednesday, Apr 14, 2021 | 5 minute read | Updated at Wednesday, Apr 14, 2021
I have spent a lot of time thinking over how to decide between what is right and what is wrong. I reflect on my learnings from the course “Justice - What’s the right thing to do” from Harvard university …
You prepare for the future, plan for it and if it happens it has to be yours!
Nothing particular is on my mind at the moment. I was just contemplating the importance of playing long-term and not losing the focus for short-term gain. Pleasure is a tricky business, one that most of us are driven by. Where did that come from? Hang on, it gets better.
While I was going through an online course in Law, there was one particular lecture that talked about what guides us towards what is right and what is not, what we call gut feeling in day-to-day life.
After an interesting debate, it was apparent that a man (and women, all Human beings for that matter) are guided in some way by pleasure and pain. We usually strive to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. The question then stands, how do we decide what gives pain and what gives pleasure? The answer is very interesting! Given an option to choose one out of the two experiences (after having experienced both), people usually choose the one that maximizes pleasure or minimizes the pain. By default! Consider for example you taste (for the first time in life, say) an Orange and a bitter Gourd, there is a significant chance that you’ll pick the Orange the next time you are asked. Convinced?
My claim is that this “attempting to optimize” behaviour governs our daily life. All those small actions we take every day are in some or the other sense guided by this proposition. While maximizing pleasure seems the right thing to do, trying to minimize the pain can have certain long-term consequences which we don’t realize right away. Consider, for example, most of those I know don’t go to the Gym or otherwise don’t exercise daily for the pleasure of being in the Bed for a little longer. The effects of such decisions come much later in life when one falls sick.
Health is a crown on a healthy man’s head that only a sick person can see!
But it’s too late to go to Gym by then. People usually get engulfed in deep misery because their kids are yet to grow up or the finances are not in place or whatever. A greater misery is that their family has to suffer too! It’s a huge pain. What’s the learning for all of this? Our actions are mostly governed by pleasure and pain. So what about it?
Well, no one really knows whats the purpose of life; why we are here etc. We do know though that with time, energy, resources, health, connection and even loved ones reduce in number. And this kind of has a very depressing impact. You don’t die but rather live a depressed life. Of course one day we all shall die. But I think it makes sense to die gracefully. To close our eyes forever while not shaking the families too much out of place. I think that’d be much more respected and remembered by those left behind. The point I am trying to drive home is while we try to maximize pleasure, it makes much more sense to optimize it for the duration rather than for the quantity. I’d prefer small happiness for a longer duration vs a much bigger in magnitude kind of happiness. I am not sure anything I write would convince the exact point but maybe another example can help, what would make you happier? A puppy running around in the house, shaking its tail and jumping the moment it sees you or winning a lottery (equivalent to say, 20% of your salary/monthly income. And of course we assume you are not bankrupt!)?
I am not sure about yours but my true motivation of daily living these days seems to be in – planning out ways to span out the pleasure over a longer duration and reducing the spikes of pain that might occur in future (which of course are bound to happen anyway!). This also sounds to me like the fundamental idea of distributing risk. You save a part of your sunny day for a rainy day. You never know what can go wrong and having redundancy in guarding against the pain just helps (which is another way of saying having multiple reasons to be relaxed at any point in time).
While a good deal of my present-day continues to be miserable, I think I am pretty focused on planning out risk reduction for the future. The fact that every day in some sense is being spent towards building a solid base for the future keeps me going. I am convinced that it is the right thing to do and one that shall bring lasting pleasure. Once I am through this phase I never really want the depression cycles to repeat. Ever! I’d always spot them beforehand most of the time and diffuse the impact. I think that’s the way to go… And of course, I’d have maximized the risk of some Joker judging me –
Your life is not adventurous… It’s not happening and you have missed out on living…
Such opinions won’t affect me. The difference between madness and adventure is very clear to me. I choose adventure!
