The Hedonic Treadmill is real. The more empty-pleasures you chase, the more empty-pleasures you’re gonna need and the more it’s going to hurt when you can’t get another even larger empty pleasure. That’s how chasing any high works, whether it’s a drug or sex or meaningless success, the better the selfish sugar rush, the more you’ll need next time if you want to avoid the crash at the end. The illusion of power is most like this, of course, you’ll live ninety years if you’re very lucky and any so-called “power” you accumulate will mean nothing the moment you croak, but money’s pretty much the same. Never mind when you want acclaim, man, there’s a whole other Narcissistic Treadmill for that, growing your ego while insulating yourself from reality and also isolating yourself from narcissistic wounds. When you go down paths of trying to paste together the broken pieces of your mind and heart and soul with “more” and “More!” and “MORE!” it’ll always end with a taste of ashes in your mouth. As a sneaky bonus, calling it A Treadmill drives home not only the endless horizon of it but also the ceaselessness of the pain, because gyms are the worst places we ever invented? All stink and judgement and suffering. Hell is a gymnasium. That’s why the word is so damnably close to “Nausea”. The wisdom of this language is infinite.
If you meet a person whose material “success” you envy so much it hurts, you meet a person in more agony because of someone else with a bigger yacht or a fancier title. All the way up to the so-called “emperors of the known world” throughout history? Alexander the Great existed in an abject bitterness that he could not instead be as powerful as his immortal gods and then he died!
But there are alternatives, if you can find the strength in yourself to ignore all the structures that
have been forced into your head since birth. If you can reject The Hedonic Treadmill, there is as balm in Gilead, The Wellspring of Empathy. It takes a helluva lot more work but it’s so worth it.
If you dig down deep enough in yourself, where you can manage to help someone else hurt less, there is cool water down there as well. To chill you out, to fill your cup with joy. It’s not a thing you can own, it’ll steam away if you try to hoard it, it’s not a title you can have, but it’s real and you don’t have to chase a bigger dragon every time. Just dig another well, to help someone else.
This life isn’t about making yourself a bigger deal, baby-doll. It’s about helping others hurt less.
Reject that treadmill of hedonism! Embrace those cooling depths of empathy! They are the only reason we’re here. And hey. Don’t go to that goddamned gymnasium ad nauseum, either. Life’s too excruciating-anxious and mayfly brief to suffer even worse, just to look marginally prettier!
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