On Pain & Pleasure
“The day a man becomes superior to pleasure, he will also be superior to pain.”
Today’s pain and pleasure are brought to you by the scattered thoughts of Epicurus, Seneca, Schopenhauer and Pascal.
The good name of Epicurus is one which is commonly misused. The term Epicurean is often paired with luxury, expensive dining, fine wine, indulgence, greed, gluttony, and unbridled hedonism. Once you actually read Epicurus — the best segments I’ve found are in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers — you quickly realize this is pretty much the opposite of what he was advocating.
One could say he was a hedonist in the sense that pleasure is the goal of life, but his definition of pleasure had nothing to do with luxury. To him, pleasure was aponia and ataraxia; basically, the absence of physical and mental pain, a calm mind, tranquility, a lack of fear. The simple things.
Above all, you could reduce Epicurus’ point of view to the following statement:
The highest pleasure we can hope for is the painless state.
This is kind of…depressing? The best we can hope for is to not be in pain? Enjoying the moments when all is well is as good as life gets?
Yet the more you think about it, it’s true.
Compare the pain of a toothache to the not-pain of a not-toothache. We feel the pain intensely. We don’t feel the not-pain at all.
This applies for pretty much anything related to health. There is either massive pain, or there is zero.
We feel pain more intensely than we feel pleasure. You learn this when you study behavioral finance, the concept of loss aversion or Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory, which states that the emotional impact of a loss is twice as strong as the emotional impact of gaining that same thing.
The logical extension of this?
More money, more problems.
The more possessions you own, the more worries you have.
This is because the more you own, the more you fear loss. This fear of loss breeds anxiety and causes you to lose your peace.
Hence why so many philosophers and saints shun material possessions. Seneca writes well about this, the superfluous and the necessary:
“Utility measures our needs; but by what standard can you check the superfluous? It is for this reason that men sink themselves in pleasures, and they cannot do without them when once they have become accustomed to them, and for this reason they are most wretched, because they have reached such a pass that what was once superfluous to them has become indispensable. And so they are the slaves of their pleasures instead of enjoying them; they even love their own ills,—and that is the worst ill of all! Then it is that the height of unhappiness is reached, when men are not only attracted, but even pleased, by shameful things, and when there is no longer any room for a cure, now that those things which once were vices have become habits.”
This whole idea — the superfluous becoming the indispensable — is why the rich are often miserable. If you are used to everything five-stars, luxury at every turn, there is a lot of room for you to be disappointed whenever one of the tiny little details inevitably goes wrong. If you’re used to the bare minimum, there is no room for disappointment.
One of Seneca’s most famous quotes is along these same lines: If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.
“Nature’s wants are slight; the demands of opinion are boundless. Suppose that the property of many millionaires is heaped up in your possession. Assume that fortune carries you far beyond the limits of a private income, decks you with gold, clothes you in purple, and brings you to such a degree of luxury and wealth that you can bury the earth under your marble floors; that you may not only possess, but tread upon, riches. Add statues, paintings, and and whatever any art has devised for the satisfaction of luxury; you will only learn from such things to crave still greater.
...Natural desires are limited; but those which spring from false opinion can have no stopping-point. The false has no limits. When you are travelling on a road, there must be an end; but when astray, your wanderings are limitless. Recall your steps, therefore, from idle things, and when you would know whether that which you seek is based upon a natural or upon a misleading desire, consider whether it can stop at any definite point. If you find, after having travelled far, that there is a more distant goal always in view, you may be sure that this condition is contrary to nature.”
That criteria is one worth using today. Basically, if something has no limit, it is never going to make you happy. You are always going to crave more. That could be money, fame, social media likes, followers, clothes, jewelry, cars, and so on. The false has no limits. If there is a more distant goal always in view, you may be sure that this condition is contrary to nature. We never seem to be content with what we have. As a great philosopher once wrote in his book Blind Spots, the problem with ambition is that it has no rearview mirror.
Next, we have something Schopenhauer wrote which altered my entire worldview: the idea that the life of man consists of nothing more than a pendulum swinging back and forth between desire and boredom. He wasn’t the first to think of this. Before him I can think of Pascal, and realistically, both Buddhism and Hinduism are based on some variation of attachment is the root of all suffering, or that all suffering stems from desire, so thus life is suffering and suffering is unavoidable. Schopenhauer is viewed as a pessimist but the truth is that he is no more pessimistic than the oldest religions of the East, nor is he any more pessimistic than the Christian doctrine of original sin. Anyway, here is how he puts it:
“Now the nature of man consists in the fact that his will strives, is satisfied, strives anew, and so on and on; in fact his happiness and well-being consist only in the transition from desire to satisfaction, and from this to a fresh desire, such transition going forward rapidly. For the non-appearance of satisfaction is suffering; the empty longing for a new desire is languor, boredom.
…The basis of all willing, however, is need, lack, and hence pain, and by its very nature and origin it is therefore destined to pain. If, on the other hand, it lacks objects of willing, because it is at once deprived of them again by too easy a satisfaction, a fearful emptiness and boredom come over it; in other words, its being and its existence itself become an intolerable burden for it. Hence its life swings like a pendulum to and fro between pain and boredom, and these two are in fact its ultimate constituents. This has been expressed very quaintly by saying that, after man had placed all pains and torments in hell, there was nothing left for heaven but boredom.”
His view is that the will of man is basically an empty, vain, aimless striving. We want something, we get it, we immediately get bored of it and we want something new. Repeat until death. We just can’t stop wanting things, we don’t have the ability to turn off our endless desires, and this is what causes man to be in a constant state of either pain (from unfulfilled desire) or boredom — which he emphasizes as “anything but an evil to be thought of lightly” in this chillingly-accurate depiction of life:
“Now it is at once well worth noting that, on the one hand, the sufferings and afflictions of life can easily grow to such an extent that even death, in the flight from which the whole of life consists, becomes desirable, and a man voluntarily hastens to it.
Again, on the other hand, it is worth noting that, as soon as want and suffering give man a relaxation, boredom is at once so near that he necessarily requires diversion and amusement. The striving after existence is what occupies all living things, and keeps them in motion. When existence is assured to them, they do not know what to do with it. Therefore the second thing that sets them in motion is the effort to get rid of the burden of existence, to make it no longer felt, “to kill time,” in other words, to escape from boredom.
Accordingly we see that almost all men, secure from want and cares, are now a burden to themselves, after having finally cast off all other burdens. They regard as a gain every hour that is got through, and hence every deduction from that very life, whose maintenance as long as possible has till then been the object of all their efforts.
Boredom is anything but an evil to be thought of lightly; ultimately it depicts on the countenance real despair. It causes beings who love one another as little as men do, to seek one another so much, and thus becomes the source of sociability. From political prudence public measures are taken against it everywhere, as against other universal calamities, since this evil, like its opposite extreme, famine, can drive people to the greatest excesses and anarchy; the people need panem et circenses.
The strict penitentiary system of Philadelphia makes mere boredom an instrument of punishment through loneliness and idleness. It is so terrible an instrument, that it has brought convicts to suicide. Just as need and want are the constant scourge of the people, so is boredom that of the world of fashion. In middle-class life boredom is represented by the Sunday, just as want is represented by the six weekdays.”
All of that rings true to life. The comic juxtaposition of how all we want to live longer, yet have no problem “killing time.” How boredom is used as a punishment tool in prisons. How a government must provide both panem et circenses — bread and circuses — lest the populace revolt out of either famine or boredom.
Next, Schopenhauer discusses how we can never be free from suffering, as it always “finds entry” in some other shape:
“The ceaseless efforts to banish suffering achieve nothing more than a change in its form. This is essentially want, lack, care for the maintenance of life. If, which is very difficult, we have succeeded in removing pain in this form, it at once appears on the scene in a thousand others, varying according to age and circumstances, such as sexual impulse, passionate love, jealousy, envy, hatred, anxiety, ambition, avarice, sickness, and so on. Finally, if it cannot find entry in any other shape, it comes in the sad, grey garment of weariness, satiety, and boredom, against which many different attempts are made. Even if we ultimately succeed in driving these away, it will hardly be done without letting pain in again in one of the previous forms, and thus starting the dance once more at the beginning; for every human life is tossed backwards and forwards between pain and boredom.”
Jealousy, envy, hatred, anxiety, ambition, avarice, sickness — all forms of want or of desire. All cause pain in that we want something which we don’t currently have. Suffering will always attempt to find entry in one of those forms. If, somehow, we are fully content and fulfilled with life, and have banished all those emotions, then suffering “…comes in the sad, grey garment of weariness, satiety and boredom.”
This same concept was expressed two centuries earlier by Pascal, how all of man’s problems stem from his inability to sit in a quiet room alone:
“Thus passes away all man’s life. Men seek rest in a struggle against difficulties; and when they have conquered these, rest becomes insufferable. For we think either of the misfortunes we have or of those which threaten us. And even if we should see ourselves sufficiently sheltered on all sides, weariness of its own accord would not fail to arise from the depths of the heart wherein it has its natural roots, and to fill the mind with its poison.”
It is sad how true this is, either observing your own life or observing the lives of people you know who can never seem to be happy. The idle rich. The people who have everything yet are never satisfied. Back and forth between pain and boredom, pain and boredom, with Schopenhauer defining “happiness” as being negative only, never positive:
“An satisfaction, or what is commonly called happiness, is really and essentially always negative only, and never positive. It is not a gratification which comes to us originally and of itself, but it must always be the satisfaction of a wish. For desire, that is to say, want, is the precedent condition of every pleasure; but with the satisfaction, the desire and therefore the pleasure cease; and so the satisfaction or gratification can never be more than deliverance from a pain, from a want. Such is not only every actual and evident suffering, but also every desire whose importunity disturbs our peace, and indeed even the deadening boredom that makes existence a burden to us. But it is so difficult to attain and carry through anything; difficulties and troubles without end oppose every plan, and at every step obstacles are heaped up. But when everything is finally overcome and attained, nothing can ever be gained but deliverance from some suffering or desire; consequently, we are only in the same position as we were before this suffering or desire appeared. What is immediately given to us is always only the want, i.e., the pain.”
With that first sentence, we see echoes of Epicurus. The greatest pleasure is not-pain. Happiness is “negative only.” The removal of pain is the closest thing we can find to happiness. The highest pleasure is the painless state.
So, what is the solution?
It is just as Seneca said: STOP WANTING SHIT.
Based on everything we just read, I think a pretty good definition of happiness would be “the gap between what you want and what you have.” Mathematically speaking:
Happiness = (What You Have) - (What You Want)
There are only two variables there that you can adjust.
You can increase “what you have,” but we have demonstrated here — and I’m sure your life experience confirms it, as mine does— that increasing “what you have” only leads to a subsequent and correspondent increase in “what you want.”
The gap remains the same in size, and our happiness remains unchanged.
This leaves only one other option.
Decrease “what you want.”
That’s it. That’s the key to happiness, or at least it’s the best humanity can come up with thus far.
Now you just have to go do it.
“The greatest wealth is to live content with little,”
GB
