Why enjoying life can get complicated

So you're born into this life, you live blissfully ignorant for a few years, and then at some point it happens. You lose your innocence - with the realization that some day it will all come to an end. So once you know that your time is limited, the question becomes: how do you spend it?

The two most general categories used for describing the human experience are pleasure and pain. As Freud pointed out, most all people will instinctively seek the former and avoid the latter (with the exception of writers, who love torturing themselves). So the ideal life to lead would be the life that offers the most pleasure, right? But pleasure comes in different forms. I separate it into two main types: the pleasure of sensory experience, and the pleasure of challenge and achievement.

We all know what the pleasure of sensory experience feels like. Eating a chocolate fudge sundae. Watching your favorite stand-up comedian perform. When "Black Dog" comes on the radio. Having sex with someone you are attracted to. Doing any of the above activities while under the influence of the magic cannabis plant. But all of these things are transitory - they don't last. All you gain from sensory experience is that feeling in that moment. Once you've finished your ice cream, once the comedy show is over, once the sex is over - no matter how spectacular - the pleasurable feeling leaves you, and all you're left with is a memory of it, and a desire to regain it. Enjoying these sensory experiences are what make the human experience lively, vivid and interesting. The monks who abstain from physical pleasures in order obtain some abstract spiritual enlightenment are dopes. They need to stand up out of the lotus position, get the fuck out of the temple and go get laid, because they are missing some of the great pleasures along the way on this ride.

But what do you do once that great sensory experience is over? You come back to baseline - your own banal, every day reality. You've enjoyed escaping through entertainment, the nutritionally nonexistent yet delicious junk food, the great sexual experience, but you really haven't gained much, you really haven't grown as an individual. The situation becomes worse when you become a "seeker" - living only for that next novel experience to distract you from the reality that you aren't improving yourself. In short, you are simply taking the value that the world offers you and consuming it without putting anything back. This is the "seeker's" mentality when they become attached to an experience that they ultimately get no lasting satisfaction from.

In my experience, what I enjoy most and get the most satisfaction from are activities that allow me to challenge myself, learn, and develop new skills. The difficulty here is twofold - first is actually finding out what these activities are for you; something not challenging enough to be frustrating, not easy enough to be boring, and something that will allow you to progress in the direction of what you are passionate about. Secondly, once you identify the actions you need to take, the difficulty is finding the motivation and discipline to put in the consistent practice necessary for progress.

Once you figure out this process, the only thing left to ask yourself is what do you want? What do you really want? Not many people sit down and think about this question honestly, they have vague notions of what they want, but they never definitively spell it out. I suggest taking the time to write out your goals in a document on your computer. Start with life goals, then identify the progress you want to make within the year, then within the current month, then within the current week. Suddenly your to-do list becomes sharply apparent and it energizes you to take action. You wish you didn't have to sleep or there were more hours in the day.

This is how you begin to take ownership, and have authorship over your life. You are the hero in the novel of your life, it's time to start mapping out the plot. Decide what you want, read the theories, look at examples of how other people achieved something similar, decide how you are going to get there and do it every single day. Once you have that foundation of self improvement in your life, then everything else becomes richer and more enjoyable. You can enjoy the sensory pleasures of life that much more once you have a rock solid sense of what you want, where you are and where you are going. Everything science tells us about the universe is that it is meaningless and purposeless; hoping to find an objective meaning to life is a futile search. You have to create your own meaning in life and this is how you do it.