As humans, we like to believe that we are always incredibly deep and everything is meaningful and that every action and motivation is incredibly complicated.
But in the end, we just want to feel good.
Obviously there are many ways we go about feeling good, and feeling good in the short term often comes at the expense of feeling good in the long term (eating something tasty but bad for you, drinking, watching TV, etc.).
And, of course, perhaps some things feel good in different ways. Some things may be deeply fulfilling, while others may just feel like passing pleasure.
Yet just about anything we strive for, we do so because we believe it will make us feel good. Even for things like charity or volunteering; we think that we’ll feel good about ourselves if we do it. And that’s probably rightly-so!
But what if we just dropped the pretense and admitted that basically everything we do is an attempt to feel good? That’s literally how our brains work.
Even the most deeply selfless acts are most likely always the result of someone choosing the way in which they think they’ll feel best; often the resulting choice between intense emotional anguish or brief physical harm and maybe even death.
Now, you might be thinking, “I know people that are always trying to feel good, and that kind of hedonistic pleasure-seeking leads to a bad life.”
And this is where I think it’s important to note the difference between being impulsively drawn to short-term pleasure and carefully planning to feel good long-term.
I’m starting to think that it’s better to plan – virtually always – to maximize how you feel long-term.
So let’s look at a common example: drinking.
Drinking is famously enjoyable in the short (when done in moderation). But what about the long-term?
It would seem that even relatively small amounts of drinking have a pretty serious, lingering, negative impact on mood and other measures of well-being.
At the risk of being overly analytical, if you were to graph how you felt over time, the purpose of life (or at least the unavoidable aim as mammals) is to maximize the integral; the area under the curve.
While most people are probably decent at doing that for the next… 15 minutes, they are not so good at doing it long-term. And that’s what I want to focus on.
Sure, I want my highs to be high. But I don’t want my lows to be so low, and I certainly don’t want to be feeling bad most of the time.
Yet that’s where I think most people are. They live in an unhealthy way, they work too much, they spend too much, they don’t communicate, their priorities are off, they drink, they don’t sleep enough, and in the end they might have some moderately high highs, but most of the time they are very low.
And I don’t want that.
So going forward, I’m going to think a lot more about this concept and use it to reevaluate things like drinking and see if it wouldn’t be better to just give it up completely.
I need to focus on the things that will maximize the area under that curve at all times. Even at the expense of other activities, like working.
Pretty much anything that is “healthy” falls under this category. I don’t think total deprivation is necessary, but I do need to focus my efforts where they will be most beneficial.