Pleasure and Happiness

When thinking about happiness, we often try to think of moments of when “we were happy”. This might bring you to the day you graduated from college, your first date, your recent promotion, when you bought a new car or your first flat.

However very quickly you reach the conclusion, that those are not really moments of happiness but moments of pleasure. Moments of pleasure should not be confused with happiness.

Pleasure is designed to come and go, happiness is designed to be a state that stays. For every moment of high caused by pleasure, comes a low which feeds your desire for a new high. The cycle doesn’t stop.

Nikolay Gogol said in his short story ‘Nose’, that the ‘highs’ you experience tend to disappoint as time goes by.

“nothing is permanent in this world. Joy in the second moment of its arrival is already less keen than in the first, is still fainter in the third, and finishes by coalescing with our normal mental state, just as the circles which the fall of a pebble forms on the surface of water, gradually die away.” - Nikolay Gogol

One clue to finding happiness might be remove the desire to go after those new highs through a long term pursuit of pleasures.

But isn’t the idea to remove desires a desire in itself? Perhaps there is something deeper.

Perhaps behind every desire is a hidden word attached to it. The secret word might be “ego”, “status”, “want to be like Tom”, “that new car” etc.

And therefore I think it might be wise to spend time understanding the secret words, or the roots, behind our desires.