Philosophies of life naturally must focus on suffering. They must, because physical pain is real, despair is real, loss is real, tyrants are real, betrayals are real, toiling at work is real, disappointing ourselves is real, aging is real, and death is real.
There is more to life than suffering. That’s why we possess words like joy, pleasure, happiness, exultation, gladness, glee, elation, euphoria, and ecstasy. Those words represent true things that are sometimes part of the human experience.
Of course, they are only sometimes a part. Not one of those words has ever come with an adjective like “constant” attached. But that doesn’t make them meaningless or irrelevant. Pleasure and joy irrelevant? Not to human beings.
And what if they are only punctuation marks rather than steady currents? A comma of pleasure and an exclamation point of joy rather than tidal waves of wonderfulness? All right, then. Maybe they are only that. But punctuation is something!
Language would be gibberish and life would be intolerable without punctuation. Imagine a steady stream of nothing-in-particular punctuated by absolutely nothing-at-all. We’d pull out our hair and fall over in a heap. We need exclamation marks!
As if a thing that happens only occasionally or even just once is not worth mentioning! Is your child’s first step meaningless because it happened exactly once? Is your first kiss meaningless because it happened exactly once? No; not to our species.
Ah, but is your child’s third step or ninth step quite the same thing? Do we get that same welling up? Do we feel our heart pierced? Well, we do feel something and we do still smile, even though a first step is a first step. That is how our species experiences life.
As kirists, we are obliged to think smartly about these various words, about what they represent and what they signify. We need to distinguish pleasure from joy from happiness from ecstasy. We need to be smart, so as to know what to promote.
If we aren’t smart, we might cavalierly name some things as pleasures and then chase after them. Don Juan chases sex as if it could never let him down. Kirists know better. We know that something is a pleasure only if it is experienced as a pleasure.
Nothing is a pleasure just by virtue of its nature, just as nothing is meaningful just by virtue of its nature. A thing is only pleasurable or meaningful if it is experienced as pleasurable or meaningful. How pleasurable is a snow cone in an ice storm?
Sex may often be a pleasure. But painful sex is not a pleasure. Unwanted sex is not a pleasure. Sex followed by regrets is not a pleasure. Sex as performance is not a pleasure. Sex may sometimes and even often be a pleasure, but it also may not.
Things are only pleasures contextually. That myth-making, that some something can always be a pleasure, can confuse us and prevent us from doing the wise thing, which is to create opportunities for pleasure, make investments in joy, and so on.
This mention of opportunities and investments should remind you of meaning. Meaning is like that, too: an experience is meaningful only if it is meaningful. That is why kirists talk about meaning opportunities and meaning investments.
These are sister ideas. Nothing is pleasurable unless it is experienced as pleasurable, nothing brings us joy unless it brings us joy, nothing makes us happy unless it makes us happy. Life does not come with “shoulds” but rather with “mights.”
A beautiful day might make us smile. Or, if we are in a foul mood, it might not. A kiss might make us happy. Or, if it is part of an arranged marriage, it might not. A beautiful day or a kiss might bring us some joy. Or they might do nothing for us.
This can really trouble and confound us, that a pleasure isn’t a pleasure unless it is. When something that we presumed would prove a pleasure doesn’t, how disappointed we can feel! What a mountain we can make out of that everyday occurrence.
Let us be easy with this truth and let us be on the look-out for what might prove joyful. Joy is available. Pleasure is available. Yes, life is hard; and a philosophy of life must acknowledge that hardness. But if it forgets to mention joy and pleasure, it isn’t really doing life justice.
* * *
Eric Maisel is the author of 50+ books. You can learn more about him at www.ericmaisel.com, subscribe to all of his blog posts at https://authory.com/ericmaisel, learn more about kirism here, and write him at [email protected]
—
This post is republished on Medium.
—
