If your goal in life is to be happy and have peace, then don't fall into the trap of pleasure.

Often times pleasurable things lead to suffering and misery.

  • Pleasurable foods lead to pain, disease and thus financial ruin
  • Sex leads to relationships, emotional dependency, stds, and financial ruin
  • Comfortable things lead to laziness, weakness and disease
  • Pleasurable things cost money, and money is dependent on work, which requires loss of freedom
  • When you don't get the pleasurable things you want, this leads to psychological pain, suffering, misery and anger, thus you are weak.

When I became an atheist, it turned me towards hedonism, but hedonism doesn't lead to happiness, it leads to more pain and loss of freedom.

So if pleasure isn't something people should strive for? What should they strive for?

People should strive for peace. What is peace? Peace is the absence of pain.

Therefore one shouldn't chase pleasures, they shouldn't be masochists or sadists either and chase pain, but instead, they should try to stop pain.

The biggest brainwash propaganda of the 21st century is that PLEASURE removes PAIN

It doesn't. Pleasure only leads to pain indirectly. Either you have pain directly, or pain indirectly through pleasure.

So how does one defeat pain? Not by chasing pleasure, but through understanding pain. The only way to stop something is to understand it.

And who is the master of stopping pain? The Buddha, which if you don't know, he was a prince living a luxurious lifestyle and ran away from that lifestyle when he noticed that his luxury would not stop pain. So he figured out the 4 noble truths:

  1. There is pain
  2. Pain has a cause
  3. Pain can be stopped
  4. The way to stop pain is through directly observing and understanding the causes, and then no longer causing pain. This is done via vipassana meditation.

So download some Mahasi sayadaw books on vipassana meditation, and get started. See for yourself, and attain insight, and freedom.