Maybe You’re Unhappy Because You’re Confusing Pleasure with Happiness
People hire me to be their therapist because they are seeking help and solutions to their problems and they call me when they are struggling to solve some of their own riddles and not finding viable solutions to their distress or unhappiness. People want to be happy, that’s understandable. We all want that. Basic happiness seems to evade most of us and I think it’s fair to assert that one reason is because the basic understanding of what happiness actually is and what it means is an idea that is as evasive as bigfoot. All the pictures are blurry.
Happiness is an abstract idea, like love, it has been reduced, basically, to just feeling good and so when people think about what makes them feel good, they equate it to happiness when what is happening is that they are experiencing pleasure. I want to make something clear about pleasure, there’s nothing wrong with it. Pleasure is good. We even need it. But pleasure needs to be limited.
The Lottery Winner Dilemma
What happens when you catch up to the people after they’ve won the lottery? You know, a year later, three years later or five years after they hit it big, told their bosses to shove it and bought into the idea that the day had come when they would never ever have another problem ever again? Consistently, it seems that within a year these people are completely miserable and from what I understand, it’s usually not very long after that before they are completely broke and crawling back to the meat packing plant they worked at before.
But why? Why does this go so wrong? Probably because they got it into their heads that happiness is what you have when you surround yourself with constant pleasure. One problem with pleasure is that it’s expensive so, it would seem, the solution to some is for them hit the jackpot so they can afford constant pleasure. And what they fail to realize is this.
Pleasure is just pleasure. It isn’t happiness.
The Problem With Pleasure
The problem with pleasure is that, like a muscle, the pleasure center of our brain gets tired and gives out. Pleasure produces dopamine, the neurotransmitter that feels really good but we can burn completely out on dopamine to the point where we either don’t experience the effects of it or the pleasure center of the brain just stops producing it.
For those that depend on dopamine as their only source of happiness, something dark and horrible can happen. When pleasure completely loses it’s effectiveness in making a person feel better and they have never been able to create other sources of what we might call happiness, that’s a dark place indeed. There are case studies where males became so dependent on porn to provide them pleasure and when it completely loses it’s effectiveness when they can no longer get an erection or even remotely aroused. That is truly a dark and bleak place to be. They usually report crippling hopelessness and plans to commit suicide.
People fight me on this idea until they are pushing forty, struggling to find pleasure and completely exhausted. Pleasure is taxing. It doesn’t replenish us, it provides us with some fun, but it usually comes with a price and sometimes that price is extremely high. As I said, there’s nothing wrong with fun and there’s nothing wrong with pleasure but too many people mistake it for happiness and it taps our energy and willpower over time.
About a year or so ago one of my buddies who was a major pot smoker confided in me that smoking his high-quality bud wasn’t getting him high anymore and that he had to take in massive and expensive quantities to get any effect at all. He didn’t want to hear it but he had proven my point. Every good thing can be overdone and there’s also a lot to be said for being dependent on something like a substance in order to feel good.
Real Happiness
Honestly, the most dysfunctional and chaotic adults that I see in therapy are often those that pursue pleasure as one of their only measures to feel good and what’s really interesting is their commitment to it even though it has only produced disastrous results. So what is real happiness?
If pleasure is dopamine, happiness is serotonin. It’s a general state of wellbeing and contentment. It’s feeling okay. It’s being okay. It’s a lack of chaos. It’s the results of efforts invested in long term rewards. It’s feeling satisfied, confident and safe. And sometimes it’s even the gratification that we get when we see that maybe, just maybe, we’re graduating from being a moron.
While pleasure is instant gratification that sometimes comes with a massive toll, happiness is basically the opposite. There is no massive toll. That’s what makes it a happy thing; unlike the constant pursuit of pleasure, we don’t end up paying the price for feeling good. And like so many other things in life like confidence or being in shape, you really gotta want it and be willing to earn it.
