The Pleasures of Life

What are they? What is our attitude towards them? Two big questions we do not think about very much.

Because we do not think very much, we just act the way everyone else acts.

There a lot of advantages to this.

We learn to use the same language everyone else uses. Although we cannot help but improve on it.

And we are always acquiring the latest fashions and possessions. As well as new, useful skills.

We agree that we should increase our pleasures and decrease our pains. But only some pleasures and pains. And we are strict about what these are.

Our attitude towards drugs is typical of our ambivalence. We are the only animal that has drugs, that can be almost anything, even ordinary food. Even relationships can be drugs.

That makes a person's life better or worse.

We should be carefully thinking about this, and one whole branch of Philosophy is about it: Ethics.

But most of us don't do this very much. And this is a fundamental fact of life in our time. We don't think about our pleasures very much. And this is not likely to change.