The Right Path: Long-term Hedonism
When we talk about hedonism we are talking about pleasure. This concept encompasses the idea that pleasure or enjoyment is the end and foundation of life itself. When referring to pleasure, we do not stay in the superficial part of this term, but we go further: pleasure is also the absence of physical and mental pain.
There is currently a search for instant pleasure. Some call it “Carpe Diem” which literally means “take the day. ” When the Roman poet Horace pronounced the “Carpe Diem”, he was referring to not wasting the present day at hand.
Another very different thing is how we have used the term today. The “Carpe Diem” has served as an excuse to justify a multitude of behaviors that are actually harmful to ourselves.
It is one thing to live and enjoy our present without wasting it and quite another is to obtain immediate gratification with the belief that you do not know what will happen tomorrow or that you have to die of something , to give a few examples.
Short-term consequences of hedonism
When we take short-term hedonism as an alternative in our lives, we are victims of immediate gratifications and this a priori can generate great pleasure. The problem is that this pleasure, although intense, is also very ephemeral.
Settling for any job for the reward of making money quickly, sabotaging the diet with the excuse that life is two days, taking drugs -both legal and illegal- because you have to enjoy worldly pleasures even if they are harmful or start a A couple’s relationship with the first person that crosses our path are some of the many examples that exist of short-term hedonism.
But this recess doesn’t last long. In the long run, what happens is that this sudden pleasure gives way to the decline of our own vital goals, as well as our healthy emotions.
In simpler words: the more I settle for obtaining a fleeting delight, the more I lose in the long run since, after this time, what made me happy stops. In reality, what we held on to never gave us happiness, it was just an illusion.
The ephemeral temptations
We realize that it loses the value that we initially gave it and that more difficult or longer objectives to achieve, which could have interested us more or have been more beneficial for us, we have left behind.
If we think that we are not able to resist those pleasures or that we will not be able to tolerate the negative emotions that resistance would bring, then it will be easier for this to happen.
For example, when a person has to prepare for an opposition, he has to leave many pleasures aside: partying every weekend, a job that pays him a salary every month, regularly seeing friends and even some hobbies.
If this person has a healthy self-esteem and a good tolerance for frustration, it will take less effort to put those pleasures aside for the sake of achieving a much greater one.
Choosing the right path: long-term hedonism
If we want to obtain a more authentic and full happiness and achieve our life goals, the best option is to guide your life according to long-term hedonism or at least a combined hedonism. By this we do not mean that you have to stop enjoying some of life’s pleasures.
That would make life too boring and demotivating, but it is good that we make an effort to increase our tolerance for momentary discomfort or pain.
The appropriate thing is to have goals that mark the course of our life, while on the way we enjoy from time to time pleasures that give it variety, but that do not deviate us from the objective we want to achieve. Doing a smart combination of these two hedonic dimensions facilitates the feeling of fullness.
Think that flexibly prioritizing hedonism will make you furnish your life in a way that makes you happy with it. It will be a place where the sacrifices will not be so hard, where you will enjoy fleeting pleasures much more and where you can achieve those goals that you have set for yourself, for which you need time and patience.
