The Virtue of Pleasure

Lesson 7: Seek Pleasure (1 of 3)

Matthew McConaughey is one of the most thoughtful people in Hollywood and leveled what I regard as the most plausible critique of making happiness your goal in life.

Happiness is an emotional response to an outcome. If I win, I will be happy. If I don’t, I won’t. It’s an if-then, cause-and-effect, quid pro quo standard that we cannot sustain because we immediately raise it every time we attain it. See, happiness demands a certain outcome. It is result reliant. And I say if happiness is what you’re after, then you’re going to be let down frequently, and you’re going to be unhappy much of your time.

There’s a lot that’s right about this. Happiness is about cause-and-effect. It is the emotion that proceeds from achieving your values. And it’s also true whenever you achieve a value, you are quickly if not immediately focused on the next challenge, the next goal, the next value. There is often a gap between what you think achieving a goal will feel like—and what it actually feels like.

Psychologists refer to this as the hedonic treadmill. You chase after things that will make you happy—and they don’t. Not for long. And the problem isn’t just the pursuit of “conveniences,” like a new car, a new dress, or a new home. The same pattern seems to show itself in your pursuit of your most inspiring goals. Achieving a goal doesn’t satisfy you—it merely spurs you to set a more ambitious goal.

In my own case, my driving goal up until the age of twenty-nine was to author a book. For years I would imagine what it would be like to hold a book with my name on it in my hands. When I would visit bookstores, I would often hunt for the place on the shelf where my book would eventually sit. And then it happened, and what I felt was not the ecstasy I had imagined, but only a quiet sense of satisfaction—and the desire to write more books, that would reach more people, and would tackle more ambitious themes.

This phenomenon has led some people to argue that happiness is illusory. You chase goals thinking they’ll make you happy—and then discover that they don’t. The solution? Focus on something other than happiness, something better than happiness.

It’s the wrong conclusion to draw.

Here is the root of the problem. Life is a process—an ongoing process of pursuing, achieving, and maintaining values. Why? So that you can continue pursuing, achieving, and maintaining values. The work of living is never done. You must continually grow or you’ll deteriorate. Stasis is precisely what you can’t achieve. You’re becoming stronger—or you’re becoming weaker. You’re raising your sights—or you’re razing them. You can tread water, but with every kick you’re wasting energy and bringing yourself closer to drowning. Thus, your emotional mechanism drives you forward, from one goal to the next, encouraging you to a summit you can never reach.

And, yet, psychologically, you need the experience of summiting. You need to experience your life, not only as a process, but as a series of victories. Yes, you can and should enjoy the process of pursuing goals, of growing, of making progress. But if nothing counts as achievement then nothing counts as progress. You need, throughout your life, the experience that now, today, at this moment life is an end in itself.

Ayn Rand puts it this way:

Since a rational man’s ambition is unlimited, since his pursuit and achievement of values is a lifelong process—and the higher the values, the harder the struggle—he needs a moment, an hour or some period of time in which he can experience the sense of his completed task, the sense of living in a universe where his values have been successfully achieved. It is like a moment of rest, a moment to gain fuel to move farther.

How can you attain such moments? How is it you can experience life as an end in itself?

One popular answer today is: mindfulness. Mindfulness has as many interpretations as it does advocates. But the basic idea is that you learn to block out the mental tape playing in your head—the one ruminating about past regrets and future worries—and focus on the here and now. To stay in the moment and take joy in the sheer fact of being alive.

Mindfulness practices can be extremely valuable. They can calm you, recharge you, bring you into the present. But to truly experience life as an end in itself, what you need is the experience of pleasure.

When you get a massage, or become immersed in your favorite novel, or play with a puppy, or kiss someone you love, it’s not because you think those activities will have some further benefit down the road, but because they feel amazing in the moment. They are moments that are worth living through for their own sake. Nathaniel Branden puts it this way: “Through the state of enjoyment, man experiences the value of life, the sense that life is worth living, worth struggling to maintain. In order to live, man must act to achieve values. Pleasure or enjoyment is at once an emotional payment for successful action and an incentive to continue acting.”

And not only that. Branden goes on to note that pleasure gives you a sense of your own efficacy. To feel good is to feel that you are able to meet the demands of reality, that you are in control of your life. To feel pain, by contrast, is to feel helpless and impotent. “Thus, in letting man experience, in his own person, the sense that life is a value and that he is a value, pleasure serves as the emotional fuel of man’s existence.”

The point here is not that anything pleasurable is good. You can value things that are bad for you and set your pleasure/pain mechanism in reverse, the way a junkie does, moving yourself toward destruction. If you want to live, you must choose and pursue pro-life values. The point here is that the only reason to pursue pro-life values, the motive and reward for the hard work of living, is enjoying yourself in the here and now. Pleasure is the form in which you directly experience the fact that life is an end in itself—that life is a value and you are a value.

Achieving happiness is a long-range endeavor. You err when you trade pleasure today for destruction tomorrow. But you also err if you focus so much on the long term that you never enjoy today. That’s a mistake for the very simple reason that all you have is today. Tomorrow is always out there, one step beyond your grasp. It would be a fool’s errand to spend your life living for the long term by denying the short term, in the hopes that in the last moments of your life you could look back at your years and get a jolt of orgasmic pleasure. No. So long as you aren’t sacrificing your future well-being, then your policy must be to squeeze as much pleasure out of every “today” as you can.

Too often people live life as if someone is watching and giving them a grade: their lover, their parents, God. When I’m ruled by external “shoulds,” pleasure can seem like an indulgence. If I’m working out, or learning something, or producing something, then I can feel good about what I’m doing. But if I’m playing video games? Or eating a delicious meal with my best friend? Or taking a warm bath? Or watching my favorite sports team? Those are just my “guilty” pleasures.

Bullshit. If these moments are not escapes from a life that is going nowhere, if they are woven into the fabric of rational, long-term value pursuit, then there is nothing to feel guilty about. This is the stuff of life. Morality isn’t about gaining some authority’s approval. It is a guide that allows you to achieve as an adult what you probably achieved so effortlessly as a child: pure, unadulterated enjoyment.

Morality gives you a roadmap that helps you build such a life. It keeps you from sacrificing what’s important to what’s not important. It keeps you from pursuing fool’s gold—shiny objects that seem desirable, and yet that leave you unfulfilled, hung over, guilt-ridden. It orients you toward genuine values—the real gold that can bring you pure, unadulterated joy.

Of course, morality doesn’t do this by giving you some concrete list of values. Morality isn’t religion. It doesn’t tell you what foods to eat on which days, or whom to sleep with after which ceremonies. It gives you abstract principles that you have to apply to your own life. Unfortunately, we aren’t taught how to live by principles. We’re taught to ask for permission.

When people are first learning Ayn Rand’s morality, it is common for them to ask questions like, “Is it okay to masturbate?” “Is it okay to like rap music?” “Is it okay to do drugs?” The answer to all such questions is: they are bad questions. They all reflect a religious or authoritarian mindset. Your life belongs to you. You don’t need anyone’s permission to do what you want. The question is not: “Is this okay?” The question is: “What value am I after—and is that value rational?”

Take the question of drugs. Morality doesn’t take a position on drug-use per se. What it does tell you is how to assess any activity. It tells you to respect identity and causality. This means asking yourself: What is this drug? What are its properties? What will it do to me? What might it do to me? And, with this knowledge in hand, it teaches you to ask: Given these properties, is there a real value to be gained here, and under what conditions?

Let’s say the drug under consideration is alcohol. Like all drugs, its potentialities depend on dose. At small quantities, it can relax, calm, energize, heighten social interactions. At higher quantities, it can wipe out your ability to make good decisions, shut down your capacity to think, make you sick, or even kill you. Over time, it can become addictive, with all that implies. To act morally means, first and foremost, that you make the decision with your eyes open—that you think about the issue. You don’t bow to peer pressure. You don’t drink or abstain because that’s what people in your culture or your family do. If you decide to drink, you do it to achieve a legitimate value, like relaxation, not to avoid facing reality, which is wrong for the same reason that any form of evasion is wrong. And it means that you do it in a way that’s consistent with achieving positive values—that is, you don’t get so sloshed or drink so often that you threaten your values.

But what if you’re wrong? What if you think there’s a potential value to be gained—and discover that actually there wasn’t? What if you pursue a potentially rational pleasure, but get carried away and do it to excess? Again, it’s the religious view that teaches you to be terrified of making mistakes. It teaches you that the safe path is to just say no. You’ll never be blamed for saying “no” to a potential pleasure. But life is not about winning virtue points by saying “no” to things. It’s about saying “yes” to values.

Discovering your values often requires experimentation, and experimentation often entails failure, disappointment, and regret. So long as you act with your eyes open, so long as you have good reason to think that an experience might add to your life, so long as you aren’t evading or giving in to peer pressure, so long as you aren’t being reckless and threatening your long-term values, so long as you’re willing to own up to and learn from any mistakes, then go out there and sample life.

The world is filled with potential values. Your job, your only job in this world, is to find them and enjoy them. Seek out things that bring you pleasure—big and small, physical and emotional. Fill your days and hours with pleasure. Aim at the long range but stop seeing life as some painful struggle. Life does involve pain and struggle, but that is not what life is about. Life is about moments of delight. Moments when you look back and think: that was worth living through.

Happiness, to put it differently, often remains in the background. To truly enjoy your life, you need to regularly bring it to the foreground. You need to experience, viscerally, emotionally, that life is an end in itself. You need to experience the value of your person, the value of this world, the value of life. That is the role of pleasure.

One of the foundational pleasures of life we’ve already discussed: productive work. When you get lost in creative thinking and time vanishes, you experience the efficacy of your mind and the intense joy of creativity. When you stand back and reflect on your achievements, you feel an intense pride.

But there are two more foundational pleasures we have not discussed: contemplation and connection.