Pleasure vs Fulfillment

I wanna talk about the tension between pleasure and fulfillment — an important distinction.

There are so many ways to achieve the feeling of feeling good,

but what does that mean,

and which direction is the way so to speak.

I'm interested in this distinction when I think about life.

The Buddhists taught us that desire is the precursor to suffering.

This ancient concept holds true.

Throughout humanity's journey, from hunter gatherers ---> to farming and building societies, we've had this desire.

It went from the burning desire to hunt down a herd of caribou, providing enough food (and survival) for the tribe to survive the winter. ------> to obsessing about the latest and greatest piece of technology.

Once we gained the ability to collect items, we went down the long and arduous path of creating cellphones, airplanes, the internet, and everything else.

Before society, we could only keep the items that we could carry around on our backs.

In the post-society-late-stage-capitalistic world, we've been fed materialistic dreams of owning a plethora of things which need not be described.

Without discipline, this plethora of products creates a certain longing to attain them. This longing could be compared to that of a petulant spoiled child, endlessly obsessed with the next item which would make their life complete.

Longing creates the illusion that satisfaction lies in attainment.

That attaining extends from products we can purchase into activities like sex, food, or the litany of other ways life offers us a gentle buzz.

Ultimately, offering us some short-term satisfaction, but then leaving us with less happy juice for the brain to deploy going forward.

This isn't to say that all types of longing are bad. In fact there are many things in life that we can long for that are positive influences in our lives. These can include the desire to be healthy, the long-term gratification of harvesting veggies from your garden, and so on.

Now let's talk about the cyclical longing that societal norms have instilled in all of us, it is of course, the age-old concept: "THE WEEKEND".

The separation between the "week" and the "weekend" is a fairly new concept in human history, which was introduced during the Industrial Revolution (1800's) in America. America being a predominantly Judeo-Christian society, Sundays were designated "holy days", creating a brutal 6 day work week. Jewish workers who observed Saturday as Sabbath pushed for Saturday rest, which was eventually given.

By the 1920s, Henry Ford introduced the five-day workweek. Do you want to know why??

It caught on remarkably fast because it boosted factory morale, and it substantially increased consumer spending (since people had enough time to buy things).

Fast forward to today, and the weekend has become a cultural staple around the world. According to a 2016 study, 63% of alcohol by volume is consumed between Thursday and Saturday. Thus, we create a cycle of doing generally unhealthy things but only for 2 days out of the week creating a cyclical, weekly desire for the week to "end".

What a destructive idea, that at the end of the week we can "be bad" and do stuff we ultimately shouldn't be doing, but we think, 'oh, but it's the weekend'.

This cycle works pretty well for both parties (society and its population).

It lets us (the population) feel like we're free from responsibility for a little while, giving us valuable time to escape and disassociate from our normal reality.

The ruling class is down with this arrangement as well. Do you think any uprisings will happen on a Saturday night? I suppose time will tell, but unlikely. Saturdays are a day of mutual relaxation and disconnection.

Anyway, I feel I've escaped from a decent chunk of the noise and circus-like antics that society throws at us on a daily basis.

If I think about my parents as the stereotypical American lifestyle (as well as the specific lifestyle I've strayed from), I've been able to largely eliminate the things which negatively affect my mindset over the long-term:

• Cable Television
  • Negatives
    • being afraid of the world because of what is talked about on the news
    • ingesting media in the same thoughtless and unorganized way, watching commercials, never having the SPACE to simply sit quietly and think your own thoughts.
      • This one comes with a big caveat because of course I still ingest plenty of media whether its YouTube or Instagram, which have their own set of negative effects.
      • This also isn't necessarily their fault I think it's just a product of what they've become used to in their generation of media.
  • Positives
    • they're generally more informed about the world through what's happening in cable news even if it makes them more negative about the world and hurts their global outlook.

Okay that's pretty much all I have about escaping from my parents bubble of the world.

I wanna get back to this pleasure vs fulfillment idea.

The weekend offers a chance to get everyone together. It sets up the expectation that the weekend will be something that is worth looking forward to, as opposed to the week, which should generally be dedicated to working and living virtuously?

The truth of course is that if we lived how we did on the weekends everyday, that our lives would be terrible and in complete shambles.

It begs the question of what if we lived to the best of our ability as human beings, following our inner virtue to the land's end, every single day. Because as human beings we're already ruled and dominated by the patterns of life such as mood, energy, and the ebb and flow of our existence.

To throw in the idea of the weekend and habitual chaos, only serves to keep us in perpetual turmoil. It's a cycle of recovery, regaining structure, only to throw it away again and again.

I've personally seen that habitually turning off the structure only serves to provide a grey area, a cloud of undisciplined behavior which can coast into the week ahead, pretty soon degeneracy follows you everywhere, and the DESIRE, that's the killer, the precursor to suffering.