Before the modern age—before the industrial and information revolutions—pleasure came at a cost. Things felt good because (a) they were good for us (food, sex, warmth, victory), and (b) they were hard to get. The reward had to be strong enough to justify the effort.
Today, we've made pleasure cheap and easy. You can get dopamine on demand. The old ways still exist, but now there are shortcuts. These shortcuts offer a high reward-to-effort ratio, so people almost always choose them: porn, fast food, video games, scrolling.
But humans—especially men—didn’t evolve for this. We evolved to struggle. To hunt. To fight. To build. To win. The reward used to be tied to overcoming something. We've forgotten that.
The result? People are soft, anxious, numb, and depressed.
Humans always want the next thing. That’s our nature. But the easy path leads nowhere. Cheap pleasure is sterile. It creates nothing. It adds nothing. And it leaves you emptier than before.
Also, humans feel pain more strongly than they feel pleasure. A unit of pain weighs more than a unit of joy. So we’re biased toward avoiding discomfort, even if it means missing out on something better. Most people would rather avoid a little pain than chase a big reward. That’s why they pick what’s easy now, even if it makes life worse later.
The hedonist burns out. So does the person who gives up on their path just because it got hard. They end up worse off than if they’d denied pleasure entirely.
Still, we’re human. We want to feel good. That’s not the problem. The challenge is in balancing pleasure with purpose.
The solution is simple: earn your pleasure.
There are endless things I could do right now to feel good. Most cost almost nothing and take no effort. But if I indulge too much, I feel worse. I adapt. The pleasure fades. My life declines—less money, less strength, less focus, fewer skills.
So I have to ask: can I afford this pleasure?
There are two categories of pleasure:
The first group splits again:
Most people seek perverted indulgences to numb themselves. Not just from pain, but from awareness—awareness of what they lack, what they’ve failed to pursue, who they’ve failed to become. Addiction is often just an attempt to drown consciousness until it disappears.
The cure for a fractured self is not escape—it’s attention. The antidote to consciousness is not less consciousness, but more. Only by turning fully toward the thing we fear can we begin to overcome it.
Perverted indulgences come from weakness. Cut them out.
Genuine indulgences are good—if they don’t interfere with your goals.
To earn pleasure means this: don’t indulge unless you’ve earned it through effort, patience, or discipline. Do the hard thing first. Then you can enjoy.
It’s a contract you make with yourself. A line you draw to keep the chaos out.
And when you do earn it—when you suffer first, then get the reward—it feels way better anyway.