Why the pursuit of pleasure is the answer to every problem but you’re still not doing it
The leader who knows what they want and has no qualms in pursuing it will always be the one to enjoy the greatest profit margins, employee retention rates, and even satisfaction outside of work. The answer to every problem in life lies in chasing our deepest desires.
Hedonism is the true birthplace of peace.
There’s a reason you want what you want. Even your deepest, darkest, most illicit desires carry meaning and their healthy expression brings about total fulfillment for you and ironically, also for those who are in relationship with or work for you.
Hedonism is the ethical theory that pleasure (in the sense of the satisfaction of desires) is the highest good and proper aim of human life. Whether you believe in a creator or total chaos or anything in between, the energetic conscious awareness that is you is locked into this human form on average for 28,000 days (76 years or so) and you have a daily choice to make - to live in such a way that brings you pleasure or not.
Here’s what I know both personally and clinically as a licensed counselor and existential advisor: truly happy people are the most generous, productive, orgasmic, and profitable people on the planet. They are not weighed down by the normative challenges and constraints, whether biological, cultural, sociopolitical or otherwise because they understand that they always have options. Their locus of control is internal, meaning no matter what they were born into or have to deal with around them as they forge their own path in life, they have learned how to be comfortable making their own decisions as seems right to them.
Thus, it’s not about the abject denial of reality but rather accepting the position of finding new ways to create and play within it. Even one of the greatest existential theorists to ever have lived, Viktor Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, having survived a Nazi concentration camp when his parents, brother, and even pregnant wife did not wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Sadly, most of you will not though. Why? Because you’re afraid of being “selfish” and hurting others. You don’t yet understand the paradox that your happiness best guarantees the likelihood for theirs, even if they don’t agree.
