Enough, Discipline, & Pleasure vs Happiness
Wednesday Wisdoms for December 18, 2024
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living with 3 quotes, 3 observations, and 3 questions.
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Enough
🤨 Quote
“Consider any individual at any period of his life and you will always find him preoccupied with fresh plans to increase his comfort.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
Source: The Antidote
Observation 🧐
We’re creatures of comfort. When push comes to shove, nine out of ten times we will seek out comfort and pleasure over discomfort and pain.
We believe there is a richer life in pleasure, that happiness resides there. But we hardly ever take into account the cost of pleasure.
Pleasure has an ever-growing appetite that needs to be fed. We become accustomed to our lives very quickly and therefore need more and more pleasure to reach our original baseline of happiness.
The ancient philosopher Epicurus saw this over 2,000 years ago knowing humans would always seek out more pleasure in an effort to avoid pain, their appetite insatiable.
Epicurus taught his students that it was the acceptance of enough that brought about the good life, that sometimes the benefits of pleasure did not outweigh the pains that accompanied it.
When we step on the hedonic treadmill, we must be prepared to accept the costs that are associated with it, namely, the sacrifice of true happiness for ever growing inputs of dopamine hits.
“I find full pleasure in the body when I live on bread and water,” Epicurus once said, “and I spit upon the pleasures of plush living not for their own account, but because of the discomforts that follow them.”
Sometimes enough is just what one needs to live a good life.
🤔 Question
How do you stay grounded in having enough when the world tells you that you should always want more?
Discipline
🤨 Quote
“We should take the pleasure or pain accompanying our actions to be a sign of our disposition.”
Aristotle
Source: How to Flourish
Observation 🧐
In order to live a good life, we need to be aware of ourselves and why we feel a certain way in the situations we encounter.
There is a difference between wanting and getting, between pursuing and obtaining.
We often conflate desire and need. We make this confusion because we’re pushed to based upon the world we currently inhabit.
We have celebrity endorsements, million dollar marketing budgets, and companies paying psychologists to change their platforms to release dopamine hits to keep us engaged.
But when we can be disciplined and not immediately buy into this, when we can take a step back and understand our own willpower, we suddenly take back control.
Whether we immediately see it or not, there is pleasure in discipline. There is gratification in not being gamified by the world. There is happiness in knowing you are stronger, have more willpower, or have setup your life in such a way that you are not easily pulled into these schemes.
“The problem with getting what you want is that now you have a hole, because you don’t want that thing anymore, you have it,” writes Seth Godin.
Sometimes wanting, but having the discipline to abstain, is the best route to happiness because we know it does not put us on the endless cycle of the hedonic treadmill.
🤔 Question
Think of the last thing you really wanted that brought you pleasure. What was it and how long did the pleasure-high last?
Beneath the paywall this week we explore the wisdom of Socrates. Click below to support and get access.