Rees D.

What would life look like when prioritizing pleasure?

Essay • 1,137 Words • Philosophy, Living Better, 2026 • 09/03/2026 • View in graph

Exploring the logical consequences of Hedonism

There are 1215 words in this article, and it will probably take you less than 7 minutes to read it.

This article was published 2026-09-03 00:00:00 -0400, which makes this post and me old when I published it.

It took an estimated to develop this article from conception to publishing.

On Hedonism

Hedonism, while typically thought of in relation to the Greeks (it is a Greek word after all), is actually a far more ancient idea. It’s also a very simple one. It starts with the idea of feeling good, you like that kind of stuff right? How would you like to do more of that? I’m not going to get more formal than this right now, but you can look at Epicurus’s Cradle Argument or Mill’s “proof” in Utilitarianism if you’d like to see it explicated in a more formalized way.

Hedonism, like most theories, is not without its problems, but in this essay, I am going to sidestep all that debate by simply saying Hedonism in some forms is still being worked out, and we should not be so quick to dismiss it. In this essay, but also in my own broader philosophical practice, I am most interested in if a theory is productive. Which is to say if it can provide insight or drive discourse, in this instance about how we should live our lives.

I am most interested in unraveling the thread of consequences with intellectual curiosity and honesty in order to see what falls out of simply accepting the idea of hedonism. I will try my best to appeal to real research, whether philosophical or scientific when I can, but I am not an expert by any means.

Can we feel good all the time?

Our base case is that feeling good is intrinsically good and thus should be done for its own sake. This is essentially asserting hedonism as true and we have to do this because that’s the whole point of this essay.

If feeling good is good, then the best case scenario would be being able to feel good all the time. But is this possible, can we only ever feel good? I believe the answer is no, and have three arguments as to why:

1. We adapt to pleasure, which means that we cannot have unlimited pleasure/feel good all the time.

   1. What brings us pleasure will marginally diminish over a certain period (but does reset eventually), this is called hedonic adaptation.

   2. Our receptors downregulate because overstimulation can be harmful to the cell. Additionally, their firing is a signal, so it cannot be firing all the time, otherwise it provides no information.

2. Pleasure is relative, to know pain is to know pleasure, especially by contrast/in comparison.

   1. Homeostatically, food tastes best after you’re hungry. Comparatively, after suffering through a marathon, finishing it feels ecstatic. These are different neurological mechanisms that both produce feelings of pleasure over transition between opposing states.

3. If you were to try to remove feeling bad, you might also affect the ability to feel good.

   1. Over-the-Counter Relief From Pains and Pleasures Alike: Acetaminophen Blunts Evaluation Sensitivity to Both Negative and Positive Stimuli

      1. More research needs to be done, but the two things are likely more intertwined than intuition may lead you to believe.

I think the better way to think about it is how can we organize experiences and pleasure inputs across time as to maximize pleasure over a day/week/life. If what you do one moment affects how you experience pleasure in the next moment, you have to be thinking about long-term sequencing. It’s not the case that you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul such that a pleasurable experience now necessarily detracts from your future ability to experience pleasure. It isn’t a scarce resource quite in that way, but it does however tell us that we probably shouldn’t attend back-to-back concerts of our favorite artists in the same week.

However, I see no reason why you can’t watch your favorite movie and go out for ice cream in the same night. I think that rotating types of pleasures in this way may be a near optimal strategy, but that’s just my intuition.

What should we spend our time doing?

I think you have three main goals: doing what makes you feel good, expanding the ways that you can feel good, or extending your quality lifespan. This leads to some second order things as well, and so I have created a list that I feel like is exhaustive, but I’m sure that it could still be incomplete:

1. Engaging in pleasure: Create, consume, cavort, commune

2. Taste mapping: Understanding what makes you feel good/what you like

   • There are reasons for why you might like something versus not like something. You can learn to like the taste of cilantro as soap, but it still is a different qualitative experience than most people.

3. Taste expansion: Expanding the breadth and/or depth of what makes you feel good

   • We can change our preferences/learn to like new things to a certain extent.

     • Nature versus nurture: Your inputs from sensors are fixed, but your evaluations of stimuli/how you process them is fluid.

4. Mindfulness: Increasing your capacity for pleasure via stress relief, presence, embodiment work, etc.

5. Systems development: Creating ways to spend more time doing things that you like and less of what you don’t

   • Making it easier for yourself to access things that feel good like stocking your fridge, getting a robot vacuum, etc.

6. Longevity investment: What can enable you to live a longer life doing what makes you feel good (merely extending your life is not enough)

There are trade-offs to consider. For instance, you might not enjoy working out (shown to increase longevity) or love smoking cigarettes (shown to decrease longevity), you have to balance both short and long-term pleasures. In a similar vein, something might be hard in the moment, or even for a while, but it can still be worthwhile to do, especially if it is one of the activities listed above.

We are also not perfect predictors of pleasure, we can’t fully know how things will pay off. For example, you might lose touch with a friend only for them to come back into your life way later; life is very unpredictable in that way. I think this just means that you should act in ways that seem or should (or strongly could) help one of our main goals/tasks.

Conclusion

We have only about 4,000 weeks in our lives, so we really ought to be trying to experience joy every day.

There is a lot of ground that I was unable to cover in this essay like:

• How to structure your time within your day/across your days accounting for an explore vs exploit dilemma of taste

  • How does affect work, hobby, or relationships?

• The moral dilemmas that can occur when balancing your pleasure versus someone else’s (universal hedonism)

• Meaning and survival versus pleasure as enjoyment of life

I may or may not publish further essays on those topics, but I will say that the philosophy of pleasure is very interesting to me right now and I am intent on exploring it more.