Life should be pleasurable. It really should. It’s an incredibly brief period of time, so we really ought to make the most of it. Nobody on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time doing mindless work that they didn’t enjoy, or that they had spent more time accumulating more material wealth. Everybody wants to be happy, to be loved, to be fulfilled.

It’s strange, then, that we talk so little about pleasure. Nobody talks about it in school much, at least as far as I can remember. There’s this unquestioned assumption that education is supposed to be difficult, tedious, cumbersome, to prepare you for a job in the real world, which is supposed to be more of the same. This strikes me as somewhat ineffective, and I suspect that some of the undesirable elements of the world are manifestations of this inequality- if we could hack it, we could strike at the root of the problem.

I suspect that our general habit of not-talking about pleasure is what makes “forbidden” pleasures so much more alluring. We all desire pleasure, yet we don’t really incorporate this into our frameworks as effectively as we should- and I can’t help but sense that this is somehow sub-optimal, a mismatch. Some institutions do this better than others. I’m willing to bet that average usage of drugs, alcohol and prostitution are far, far lower among employees in firms like Pixar, where pleasure is incorporated into the job itself, than firms like, say, Merrill Lynch.

What do we think of when we think of pleasure? I suspect that we usually think of vices, and excess. Luxury, wealth, opulence- good food, good drink. Sex and drugs. Excess. Pleasure is typically associated with some degree of recklessness and chaos, a sort of break from order. But there’s a problem buried in there that I’d like to unearth.

Pleasure ceases to be pleasurable when it becomes too predictable. There’s an interesting phenomenon in war and politics that necessitates phase-cycling. One shouldn’t always resolve his problems with force, because that becomes predictable. We should occasionally choose to be cunning. But we cannot always be cunning either, because that becomes predictable too. A man who is known for being forceful is best able to get away with being cunning, and a man who is known for being cunning has the opportunity to apply force without facing resistance. So by cycling between the two styles, one becomes unpredictable and formless- which is a good thing, and adds to your power as an individual. I think the same applies to order and chaos- too much order is boring, stale and easy to defeat- too much chaos is equally stale. The ideal state is complexity- some method to the madness, and some madness to the method. And I think this general notion has implications for pleasure, too. If we ration out our pleasure in predictable, orderly ways, the intelligent mind quickly gets bored, and a momentary lapse is all it takes to be won over by appeals to chaos and danger. At the same time, if we operate under a general principle of chaos, living in daily excess, we quickly find ourselves bored and unfulfilled.

Pleasure is a simple business in early childhood- it’s usually about play. Almost everything is pleasurable when you’re a kid, except perhaps pain. (I’ve never met a masochistic child.) Children learn a lot through play, and perhaps it’s possible that play is most pleasurable when there is learning and understanding involved. I saw a young boy on the train the other day, spinning round and round on the pole in the center. I used to do the exact same thing as a kid. Why did I do it then, why is he doing it now, and why do I not do it anymore? I suspect he was learning something about himself, about gravity, about momentum and centripetal force. Kids like repeating things because that’s how they learn, they’re still building the frameworks through which they make sense of the world.

Learning is always pleasurable. Being forced to learn something against your will isn’t, and neither is learning something that doesn’t interest you, that doesn’t feel important or relevant to your life in any way whatsoever. But learning itself is pleasurable. We might not like the learning process, but we’re all very proud of everything that we’ve learnt.

Pleasure is directly related to happiness, and a lot of life could be described as the pursuit of happiness. Happiness, however, is a complex concept, a bit of a buzzword- everybody has a different idea about what happiness is. I like the idea of replacing happiness with excitement- sustainable pleasure, and happiness, can happen when we make it a point to be sustainably excited, to always have something to look forward to.

Pleasure is context-dependent. No stimuli is always pleasurable. You can always create or visualise a context in which something that we assume to be inherently pleasurable ceases to be so. Orgasms are supposed to be pleasurable, but they have diminishing returns- if you spend a month having as many orgasms as you possibly can, after a while they diminish in value. The problem with stimuli is that they are subjective- their value is dependent on our perception of it, and perception is inconsistent, fallible.

Working out is pleasurable. But not always. There was a period of time a few months ago where I was hitting the gym very regularly- every 3rd day. Initially, it was difficult, tiring, painful. After a while, I got comfortable with it, and it started getting fun. Pleasurable. As I maintained that same intensity though, it began to take a toll on me. It started to feel mundane. A sort of prolonged fatigue started to set in, the kind that takes longer than a few days to recover from. I eventually stopped going altogether, and after a month or so I lost most of my gains in fitness.

Cigarettes are pleasurable. But not always. The first cigarette of the day is always wonderful- and if you delay it a while, intentionally, consciously, it becomes even more so. There’s a sort of journey you go through as a smoker- your first few cigarettes may not do much for you, and as you progress you learn to appreciate it more, you develop a taste for it. You learn to flourish it, you learn to inhale properly. You develop an understanding, and develop nuances and variation in your smoking. You meet other smokers, and you feel like you’re entering a whole new world that you were completely unaware of before. It’s like being a child again. You learn, you discover. Inevitably, though, the magic stops. You stop appreciating it. It becomes a mindless routine with a life of its own, and it couldn’t care less about you. You find yourself buying packs, opening them, lighting them, smoking them- barely aware of it, staring into the distance with a glazed look in your eyes, mentally occupied with something else. Before you know it, you’re up to almost a pack a day, and you start to get a niggling cough that doesn’t quite go away. It becomes a part of your identity, a stowaway in your mind, a virus in your hard drive.

I read something once about someone who studied driven, successful people- people who make sacrifices, who give up the good things in life in pursuit of the great things. He found that these people often seemed happier and more fulfilled. Their journeys may have been difficult and challenging, but they are happy. There are few things more pleasurable that developing a skill to an exceptionally high level. There’s something that highly-skilled people know about pleasure that most of us average Joes only dream about.

Being comfortable isn’t pleasurable. Not exactly. Getting comfortable is pleasurable. Getting out of our initial comfort zone, doing something challenging, learning something new, accomplishing something we couldn’t before, developing and growing as individuals to the point where we become comfortable with something that we weren’t comfortable with before- now that’s pleasurable. It’s easy to forget this, and to just get complacent and sit in our comfort zones- and before we know it, we find ourselves feeling empty and unfulfilled. Ask anybody who’s been sitting on their ass for more than a couple of months. Life should be a constant struggle, in a sense, and when we get too comfortable we cease to find it pleasurable.

Spending money is pleasurable, but having money in the bank, being financially independent and secure is even more so. Hoarding your money isn’t pleasurable, though, you got to do something with it. Build something. Create something. Make meaning. Make art.

Sometimes a bit of excess now and then can be fun. You know you’re smoking or drinking more than you should. But it can be fun to lose control a little. So there’s an element of chaos in pleasure, of reckless abandon- but too much of that makes it predictable, stale. There is value in some degree of moderation and temperance- but that could get boring after a while, too. So it might be prudent to operate in cycles, just as nature does. I find that the best way to do this is to keep track of things. When we make it a point to pay attention to what we do, to how we live our lives, certain patterns emerge that we may not otherwise become aware of. If we notice we’ve been smoking heavily but we don’t seem to be enjoying it anymore, it makes sense to take a break for a while, to let our body (and mind) sort of cleanse itself. Conscientious detachment inspires intense engagement. It’s a way to hack the human brain.

There are several levels of pleasure: the simplest and most base comes in the form of direct stimulation. But the body and mind can only take so much of that- our nervous system is inherently limited. It’s unsustainable to depend on direct stimuli for pleasure, because it’s subjective and yields diminishing returns. Living day to day can be fun and meaningful in short bursts, and we might learn something from it, but it’s not inherently sustainable. (The learning is a special sort of hack in itself, which we’ll get to later- but the point is that not everybody learns, and if you keep doing something that doesn’t work, you’re not exactly learning either.)

Serendipity is pleasurable. Discovering something that you weren’t exactly looking for, that turns out to be what you needed. Who doesn’t love serendipity? If we look back, we often find that we found a lot of the best things in our lives en route while we were looking for something else. I think a lot of us use this reality to deceive ourselves, though- sitting in front of our computers every night, scrolling through the internet, hoping to stumble upon something incredible and life-changing. But we know that it’s not really going to happen. There’s some degree of self-deception at play here. What we ought to do, I feel, is to create conditions that allow for serendipity. Make an effort to try new and different things, to meet people, to break from routine from time to time. Serendipity can be pursued. You just have to step out of the door, figuratively speaking.

Learning could very well be the highest order of pleasure. I think it’s learning, making effective decisions, growing as an individual and contributing to something greater than yourself. These pleasures are endless, limitless. As with first-order pleasure, you can never get enough to be well and truly satisfied, but in this case there are no diminishing returns. Learning something new tomorrow will be just as pleasurable as learning something new today. Helping others never gets old, or any less pleasurable. Or if it does, well, then you can help others to help others. Being part of a great relationship is always pleasurable- friendship, romance, family, whatever. It’s something greater than yourself. There’s always something to strive for, something to build, create, transcend.

IN SHORT: I think that thinking about pleasure is a useful exercise in getting more out of life. We need a sort of balance between order and chaos to keep ourselves interested. We should prepare for serendipity, and work Most importantly, pleasure should be sustainable- except, perhaps, when it shouldn’t. And we should always be learning. We tend to imply that the desire for pleasure should be suppressed, when in reality it makes more sense to treat it as a drive to be effectively managed and harnessed. Life should be pleasurable. It’s too precious to be lived in any other way.