Understanding Hedonism and Embracing Your Own Freedom

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Understanding Hedonism and Embracing Your Own Freedom

August 3, 2008

“No human thing is of serious importance.” – Plato

“Pleasure is the beginning and end of living happily.” – Epicurus

“A well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well spent brings happy death.” – Leonardo da Vinci

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.” – Bertrand Russell

“Somewhere between cosmic freedom and responsibility to the people you love lays the answer to life.”

Earlier this afternoon, as I lay on my black satin sheet bed in my private castle high above the ground reading tales of history’s greatest hedonists, I could hear the pleasureful shrieks and cries of fellow residents of my building enjoying themselves outside at the pool.

It was then I put the book down and said “This is irony.”

For years I never understood hedonism. When I was younger, I never even knew such a concept existed. I was mostly brought up in a world of sacrifice, duty, and efficiency – often of my own creation based on how I saw others living around me, their consequences, and the advice (or lack thereof) from parents and grandparents.

Speaking of parents and grandparents, you probably never met a family such as mine. Imagine a dinner table where family rarely speaks, not because they dislike one another but because they simply have nothing to say that everyone there hasn’t already heard before. And when they do speak, majestic topics like “The Weather”, “What Happened Last Week At The Store”, or the ever-popular “How Good This Food Is” frequently make up 95% of the conversation… and I use that word lightly. What part of the time isn’t spent talking of these things is mostly spent in utter silence… chewing, swallowing, drinking. And repeat.

Then after dinner, everyone scatters off to their various cubby holes to work, lay down, or whatever, rarely to be seen again until the next meal.

The point is, I remember a childhood largely consisting of nothing happening. Only every once in awhile did we do something great and exciting, but they were few and far between. Even worse, there was often no one around to answer all my millions of questions about life; sometimes because there really was no one around, other times because no one knew the answers. No one is to blame for any of this; it’s just something that happens when there’s no dad, mom works all the time to pick up the slack, and everyone else lives out in the country whereby definition, nothing significant ever happens… ever.

So being young and of limited means at the time, I learned most of what I knew via educational TV and books. True real life experience was rare, because when you’re young you have no money and when you have no money, your backyard is about the most exotic locale one can hope for.

In a way it’s good to get all your info from books instead of family members; books are far more likely to be credible, and… most importantly… correct But for life’s intangibles – like anything that involves feelings, emotions, and connecting with other human beings in a meaningful way and using all those experiences to form your own view of what it means to “live life” – books, TV, and efficiency just won’t cut it.

What happened to me when I was little seems to be a microcosm of what’s happening today in the United States at large: Instead of living their own lives and making their own decisions, people are increasingly doing the art of “living” mostly through other people (so called “reality TV”, or for that matter ANY television in general, Ipods, computers, and other bits of technology that continue to separate us from one another, yet ironically promise us greater connectivity.) The only difference is that while I had little control over my situation when I was young, the people here in the U.S. are fully grown adults perfectly free to do (mostly) as they please. Any entrapment they feel exists only in their minds.

So what is “living”? I tackled bits of this in a previous post. Your view of what “living life” means to you is colored by a combination of how you were raised and your base temperament (the default settings of your personality when you were born)…plus a few other pieces gathered along the way.

There are a lot of people out there who will try to tell you what living “should be” or who will force you into a particular way of living – if you let them. Typical examples are religion and patriotism.

Religion = you “should” live this way because it is your duty to God as a created being (and the ideas are reinforced after-the-fact by saying things like “well, even if God didn’t exist, this set of rules is still a great thing to live by… and that’s what matters”)

Patriotism = you “should” live this way because as a responsible citizen of this country, you have a duty to make sure its ideals survive for future generations

It’s very easy to get caught up in these things, and the arguments in their favor can be incredibly convincing. But after I’ve studied deeply into the subjects of astrophysics, astronomy, biology, natural selection, religion, and others, I see no real reason to believe there is any way life “should” be lived a particular way over another.

Instead, I believe life is all about what you, the individual, wants.

This means you have total freedom to choose whatever you want to make of yourself. Total freedom to choose however you want to spend your time. And total freedom to determine what gives meaning to your life, if anything at all.

This is the root of what hedonism really is; it’s the process of discovering that which really matters to you, and then using as much of your life’s time as possible to exploit it as much as possible.

This kind of total freedom comes with great responsibility. It’s a funny thing because you’d think it’d be the other way around; concepts like religion and patriotism bearing the most responsibility of all, and something as seemingly flippant as hedonism requiring the least.

But no. Because if you really stop to think about it, things like patriotism and religion are a way of GIVING UP your personal freedom to some perceived “higher power” or “greater good” whereas hedonism requires you to think everything out on your own and make your own decisions based on these beliefs.

All of this ultimately comes down to the one thing everybody wants: happiness.

A strange and disturbing epidemic seems to have gripped the nation of late in the form of a most ludicrous assumption: “If you avoid all things pleasurable, you will live a long and happy life.”

But can happiness really be found scampering along on a treadmill in a smoke-free environment, iPhone in hand, chasing after the capitalist ideal?

Are 60 hour work weeks, bulging stock portfolios, and a packed agenda really the keys to the good life? I think not.

In recent years, the Western world has become a kaleidoscopic pastiche of bright lights, media manipulation, global gossip, and desperate competition. People stare at computer screens all day, eat lunch at their desks, plan their daily schedules on hand-held devices, and make “play dates” for their children.

Obsessed with becoming richer, thiner, more successful and, implausibly, even younger, millions of us deprive ourselves on a daily basis of the one thing we misguidedly believe we are rushing toward – “the good life.”

After a long workday, we rush home to watch what is amusingly known as “reality television” only to return to the office the next day to discuss the startling twists and turns in the manufactured realities of strangers, our own lives reduced to mere afterthought.

This hectic pace is sometimes cleverly offset by regularly scheduled workouts, carb-free diets, a stiff shot of wheatgrass juice, and two weeks of “vacation” carefully planned online. It’s happiness, don’t you see?

Added to this lovely cocktail of confusion are increasingly capricious laws that have smokers huddling on sidewalks, fast-food restaurants disclosing the shocking news that their food may make you fat, e-mails being monitored, and various restrictions on language and lifestyle in general.

It would seem that we – the masses – have become little more than fat baby ducks who need to be shepherded through life lest we veer off into a dangerous realm of personal responsibility and free will.

At some point, “the good life” became some distantly imagined finish line that could only be reached through psychotic effort and willful determination. Like overcaffeinated hamsters on a wheel, we began running, sweating, sacrificing, and panicking. The weight may be lost, but the self-loathing remains. The promotion may be earned, but the expenses keep rising. And despite all outward successes, the inner feelings of inadequacy and the disapproving sneers of the neighbors seem to become magnified.

Could there possibly be something wrong with this Master Plan? Is there something out there, some lost key to the Kingdom of Happiness that is being overlooked?

Of course.

It’s called pleasure. And whatever happened to pleasure? The Oxford American Dictionary defines “happy” as “feeling or showing pleasure or contentment.” To “enjoy” is “to get pleasure from.”

So, it would seem happiness and enjoyment are rooted in the very principle of pleasure, which is currently on the brink of extinction here in the U.S. And pleasure has always been at the very heart of hedonism since the very first notion came into being back in the days of Ancient Greece.

It is no coincidence that in times of great pressure, stress and strain, people tend to look for means of relief and escape. But if these moments of glorious indulgence are weighed down with unrealistic expectations or feelings of desperation, they often backfire because they tip the scales and throw off the cosmic balance of life.

You can’t run a marathon and then go decide to suddenly get hammered. Bad things will happen. You can’t fast for a month and then eat a whole cake. And you can’t deprive yourself of pleasure and bliss for years, striving to become a superstar, only to try to escape from all the pressure by going on a messy crack bender.

The trick is to pace yourself.

Eat the cake, drink the wine, lie in a hammock and stare at the stars with the beautiful woman you met on the beach… but don’t try to cram it all into a tightly-scheduled six-day “vacation.”

If you give in to beauty, pleasure, and self-indulgence on a daily basis, not only will you be happier day-to-day, you will be less likely to go off the deep end when it all gets to be too much and you finally cave in. One must practice the art of hedonism regularly to get really good at it. (And “practice” means experiencing the wide range of things life has to offer… even if they seem “pointless” at first glance.)

By most definitions, hedonism is considered a lifestyle in which pleasure and happiness are the ultimate goals. And a “hedonist” is one who seeks pleasure and avoids pain above all else.

Somehow, this lovely and charming premise has been twisted and perverted to the point where it actually has negative connotations in the minds of many.

But are the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain really such bad things?

No. Especially not when you realize you can make anything you want out of your life… so why not make it the best one possible? I say this already assuming you are not bound in chains by concepts like religion and patriotism as I talked about earlier.

My beliefs right now stem from these facts, in no particular order:

In 5 billion years, the Sun will begin to run out of fuel, become a Red Giant and scorch everything still left on earth.
Even if humans manage to escape earth to somewhere else, eventually the entire universe will die what is called a “heat death”, meaning all the energy created by the Big Bang will run out, leaving the universe a cold, dark, lifeless mass.
Aspects of different religions may or may not be true, but there is really no way of knowing for sure… and believing in them on total faith seems like a waste of time if we indeed only have 80 to 100 years of life in this existence. On the other hand, if some of them are true, then in the end all will be fine and forgiven anyway because there is no way any of us could have possibly known and it is generally assumed that God is a loving, forgiving being with nothing but the best of intentions.
Biology and natural selection seems to show us that nothing is really special in the larger scheme of things, and what we have now is merely a brief snapshot in time of an ever-changing system. So it seems like the only purpose we have is the one we create for ourselves.
Once we die, we’ll probably find out how it all works anyway… assuming of course there’s anything to be found out at all. So let’s just enjoy ourselves while we’re here. It’s the only real thing we can be sure of. (Hence the quote: “Today’s bread is the only bread you can eat.”)
We are just a speck of a speck of a speck of a speck in a universe larger than we can truly comprehend. Even traveling at the speed of light, we could never explore even the tiniest fraction of the place in a lifetime. Not even several lifetimes. Now if worm holes exist, that changes things a bit, but the fact still remains we know laughably little of what is really out there, let alone how it works.

That last one is interesting because I’ve heard a lot of people using it as an excuse to justify our own insignificance. I disagree. Just because we are a speck of a speck to the universe, it does not mean we don’t matter. Again, we are only as significant as we WANT to be. We are the ones who give meaning to our lives, not some outside force. Bigger does not equal more significant. It’s all perception.

So in the meantime, let’s all discover what makes us happy – what brings us pleasure – and experience those things as much as possible.

Pleasure is good. Eden, if it ever existed, was fun. Excess may be bad, but self-deprivation is just stupid. To live life consisting of only hard work, virtue, sacrifice, and self-discipline is to be a martyr, and martyrs make lousy lovers, friends, and party guests.

Of course, every good thing taken to the extreme inevitably turns bad, but when the true principles of hedonism are employed on a daily basis, the result is a happier you. Granted, that happy you will undoubtedly piss off the martyr next door, but a truly happy person has no interest in such dreary characters.

The truth is, we live in an age of manufactured fear. Television reports warn of everything from terrorist attacks to killer cottage cheese. Some of these threats are real, others only created to control and manipulate the populace. Because when you control people’s perceptions of what “real” is, then you’ve got them by the balls.

Yeah, it can be a rough world out there. But life is about taking chances. Risk and reward. Cigars may be bad for you, but so is getting hit by a bus. Life is full of surprises and there are no guarantees of anything.

Life is unfair… but you know what? That’s one of the best pieces of news we could possibly have.

Because if life were fair… none of us would have the “best” of anything life has to offer.

If life were fair… there would never be any incentive to produce good work or a quality product… because you’d get the same reward as the lazy guy down the street.

If life were fair… we’d all be waiting in line to get our daily ration of soup.

Yes, life is UNFAIR… and that’s the best news I’ve heard all day.

A life lived without pleasure, beauty, and a sensible degree of self-indulgence is a sad and wasted one. Despite what people tell you, it’s OKAY to have a good time.

The challenge is… you just gotta go out there, tell the world what you want, and discover what makes you tick. I think life is all about the process of doing just that, while meaningfully bonding with other human beings along the way.

Don’t be afraid to exist. Don’t be afraid to live. Far too many people are.

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