#65 - THE TRAP OF HEDONISM

Let me ask you something: If you had to trust your life in someone, would it be in one who wants to feel good or one who wants to do good? Obviously the latter, yet we still live in a society full of obsessive hedonism, so why is that? Well it's a bit of a vicious cycle, really...

Stuck in the ego, when you desire something, your first instinct is to chase it. But whether you get it or not, you still crave more, and keep going and going, never satisfied. Your pleasure baseline gets higher and higher, creating the need for more and more extreme measures to get the same feeling.

Although this is repulsive to others due to the fact that you are more inclined to use them for your own pleasure, the sad thing is that many people rush to quick highs for temporary relief in difficult times due to creating a dependency on it through repetitive habit.

Now that we know the process of how this works, what causes this in the first place? It's quite simple really: Introduction to addictive habits, especially in youth where you typically carry little responsibilities and have no strong convictions.

What's quite depressing about this is that, even if you have strong conscious morals, the addiction trains your subconscious mind to protect it at all costs as it's now dependent on it for emotional comfort and security. 

Now although I've been talking about the context of drugs specifically to demonstrate the basics, this fundamental process of thinking can actually be extrapolated even further beyond this, to things that don't even give instant gratification.

As an example: Feeling a lack of love and intensely craving intimacy? It also functions the same way, just the specifics are different. You probably developed a dependency on your mother's love as a child; so when that doesn't satisfy you in older age, you look for romantic relations to try and get that same base feeling at a higher level, since this type is new and exciting when foreign in youth.

But even if you never actually get any sort of real relationships, you still chase it because the dependency is so great that you want to keep chasing to have even a sliver of it. And again, this can be applied to many other things than just sex.

Alright, so now you understand why this happens and how it happens, so how do we actually escape this and do good? In order to stop the chase of pleasing the ego, the ego must die. As far as I know, there are two ways that this happens. The first is that you exhaust all options of chasing desire and realize that there's more to life than just feeling good.

Now obviously, this applies more to social relations than drugs, as with drugs you can just increase the dosage until you die, whereas with things like sex and status, there is a certain threshold where you just... Take it all for granted. The ego has nothing to feed off of anymore and starves slowly.

With all avenues of pleasing yourself closed, the only way forward is self reflection, fighting against the ego and working on the mind and soul, thus altruism is the logical next step after realizing that "you" are such a subjective illusion in the grand scheme of reality.

But there's another way of this: Sudden ego death, and there are also two ways that this happens. The first one is taking psychedelics for ego suicide; however, although this is fast, this is extremely risky as it can lead to insane psychosis; pardon if I'm rude, but because I've seen people I love ruined by this, I must yell at you: DO NOT USE ANY PSYCHEDELICS WHATSOEVER!!!

So if that's off the table, what's the other way? I'll admit I don't fully understand this one, as I don't know anyone very well who has done this as it's quite rare, but I'd be remiss if I never mentioned it. For lack of a better term, I'll name this archetype "the monk"

The monk has seen some real shit. Typically intensely traumatic experiences completely murder his ego and are left feeling totally dead and empty at first, nothing really distracts him from what happened. But then he looks inward, and sees the beauty of the soul, and thus his focus has now been set on that, even if he's totally socially isolated.

And to me, it now feels like... I'm the monk. I've never had any real intimate relations nor any great respect from anyone, and for years I've struggled with addiction. But now? Well, after a series of traumatic events back to back, I went through a period where I just... Felt totally empty. No matter how much I indulged, I could never stop thinking about all of what happened to me.

But after looking deeper than I had ever bothered before and actually taking action, I've come out of it stronger and wiser than ever. I realize that I'm not what happened to me, I'm what I choose to become; and I choose to become the very best, like no one ever was. I want to make the world a better place before I die.

Call me delusional if you wish, but know this: If you can figure out what you can do that causes what you want to happen as the effect, you can do anything. That is why you can unlock infinite power once you understand the meaning of the phrase...

NIHIL EST SINE RATIONE