Monday, October 3, 2022

How Hedonism Intensifies Personal Problems

Other than sheer emotionalism, it is unlikely that anyone would gravitate towards hedonism except as a supposed relief from the harsh psychological, social, and physical difficulties of life.  Pleasure can sometimes mean the absence of pain or at least less of a focus on one's trials for a time, so it is not unusual that people desperate to drown out painful memories or situations might resort to the pursuit of pleasure above all else.  The irony of this is that hedonism both leaves many problems unaddressed--while only giving them the chance to increase in intensity as they are set aside--and easily creates plenty of additional problems that only interfere with getting to the heart of one's troubles.  There are not just moral concerns and philosophical idiocy related to hedonism, but very extensive personal ramifications as well.

Trying to escape work and finance-related trials by alcoholism, for instance, only puts them in a worse financial position, which only intensifies the difficulties they are going through, which might in turn make alcoholism more subjectively appealing to some people, but they would have to be fucking pathetic to truly believe that this kind of pleasure either truly relieves them of their deepest problems or does not actively contribute to them or create major new trials of its own.  All alcoholism does is impair someone's grasp of reason or resolve to align with reason and morality, distract someone from the life problems they might genuinely be able to resolve, and drain them financially and otherwise.

Alcohol, like many other things, is also a fucking expensive way to try to "escape" problems that will not even disappear simply because a person is glutted with brief pleasures.  Desperation can lead people to so intensively try to forget about their problems or focus on something else that they overlook the fact that their problems will still be waiting for them when the influence of alcohol or the most addictive, dangerous kinds of drugs wears off.  They invest more and more money and time into such pathetic attempts at escape that they only tend to dig a deeper pit for themselves that will be harder to climb out of, in part because of the increasing expenses and squandered time they throw at problems that will not even diminish because of this. 

Promiscuous, superficial sex will never give a person the emotional and holistic personal connection they need to flourish in their relationships as much as they can.  As such, it will almost never resolve someone's emotional, relational trials except by mere happenstance, and even then promiscuity always brings with it the possibility of sexually-transmitted diseases.  Like with alcoholism, promiscuity not only does not do away with pressing existential or circumstantial woes, but it also introduces new ones of its own that spawn more and more problems.  A hedonistic approach to life is irrational because of the assumptions and beliefs behind it while also being personally destructive.

It is only difficult for irrational people to understand the objective fact that pursuing pleasure above all else is both philosophically asinine (even if pleasure was the highest moral good, things like reason would still be the core of reality and thus more fundamental in another sense than pleasure, and people who just assume pleasure is good at all because it is appealing to them are already stupid at the start) and a fountain of more severe trails than a person would otherwise face.  Hedonists might not care until either unexpected or even incredibly probable financial, emotional, social, or intellectual problems are worsened, but all they are doing is ideologically deluding themselves with convenience-based assumptions and forfeiting their chances at eliminating some of the problems that might drive them to hedonism to begin with.

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