Pleasure And Purpose: The Ingredients Of Happiness

In fact, researchers agree that both pleasure and purpose are two basic ingredients of pleasure. But first we must answer an important question: what is happiness?

To a large extent, the feeling of being happy depends on what we do and how we think. We cannot be happy without doing things that make us happy. Nor can we have a negative mindset.

What is happiness?

When someone is happy, life must go well for them. But what is happiness? This is an important question because the different ways we can define happiness affect how we want to improve our level of happiness. Professor Paul Dolan believes he has the answer to this question.

Paul Dolan is an internationally renowned expert on pleasure, happiness, behavior and public policy. He is a professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics, and has been a researcher at Princeton University on Professor Daniel Kahneman’s team.

According to Dolan, happiness is an experience of pleasure and purpose that takes place over time. Life goes well when you feel happy. According to the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, happiness is the only good thing and pain is the only bad thing. However, some specialists prefer terms such as “joy” and “suffering”.

In general, we can categorize ourselves based on the different ways we feel. Happy people have more positive than negative emotions. According to Bentham’s language, they usually feel joy and not much pain.

So the more frequent and intense your different feelings of pleasure are, the happier you will be. However, there are other experiences that are important apart from joy and pain: Purpose and lack of meaning.

The principles of pleasure and purpose

We can understand pleasure and purpose as abbreviations for a wide range of positive and negative emotions. These feelings include fullness, meaning and usefulness. On the other hand, their contradictions include boredom and futility.

If we think about work or study, we realize that these activities can give us meaning or purpose in our lives. Other times we do not feel this way. But both the good and the bad feelings mean as much as the feelings of joy and pain.

Writing a book is a good example of doing something that seems to give us a purpose in life. Drinking a beer with friends makes us feel happy, it gives us a feeling of joy. These are two different emotions, but they both give us happiness.

So to be truly happy you must feel both pleasure and purpose. You can be happy or discouraged depending on the different combinations of purpose and joy you have in your life. The point is, we need to feel both emotions: pleasure and purpose. This is what Paul Dolan calls the principle of joy and purpose.

Negative emotions can be positive

This principle explains the human motivation to seek pleasure and purpose. That explains why we want to avoid pain and lack of meaning. It also helps to explain why certain negative emotions can sometimes be positive if we have a goal in mind.

Anger, for example, can dampen selfish behavior and stimulate cooperative behavior. This is just one example of why we do not always want to experience positive emotions. Life can be cruel, just like people, so sometimes it’s only natural for us to be angry. We can get angry when we are stressed or when small things get on our nerves.

Pleasure and purpose: We can not lose pleasure and happiness back

Day after day we experience feelings of joy, purpose, pain and lack of meaning. We are happier people when we experience a greater proportion of positive emotions, and when we experience them for a longer period of time.

Therefore, happiness has to do with the principles of pleasure and purpose over time. Time is undoubtedly a scarce resource. There are some researchers who consider joy based on the way we spend our time.

In the long run, we must try to use our time in a way that allows us to achieve total joy and purpose to the highest degree and for as long as possible. Just as we cannot make up for lost time, nor can we make up for lost happiness.

Staying in a job we do not like or enduring a frustrating relationship only prolongs the discomfort we experience. No future happiness will fully make up for all the time lost. The time we spent feeling miserable will be lost forever.

The real reason most of us are not as happy as we could have been is because we focus our attention on the wrong places. If we really sat down with ourselves and had an honest conversation about what things and people make us happy, our lives could look very different. If we spend time doing things that ultimately mean nothing to us, how can we ever be completely happy?

So now you know. If you want to be happier, you need to do activities that give you pleasure and purpose in life. But do not forget that it is important to do these activities over a long period of time. This is the way you can maximize your happiness.