Monday 5 November 2007

Pic of the day: Anhedonia - the inability to feel joy or pleasure - is a classical symptom of severe depression. But it can also crop up occasionally in the rest of us, if we have already used up our pleasure ration.

Pleasure rations

I know I've written about this occasionally in the past, but it's been a while now. And yesterday's entry will be even worse if read by someone who doesn't understand this and take it for granted. In fact, all humans need to understand this and take it for granted. It is fairly simple, but understanding it could change the world. Your world first, and the shared world if more people "get" it.

There is no known limit to happiness, but pleasure is strictly rationed.

Let us focus on the simple part here. Pleasure is rationed. There is an upper limit to how much pleasure a person can experience over a set amount of time. This is biochemical and follows from the way the brain operates. It is also perfectly reasonable. Another case of intelligent design, whether or not you think intelligent design happens by accident... you simply would want it to be that way if you want your sentient species to survive. It is not a flaw, it is a necessary limitation.

In our more or less natural state, pleasure is used by our instincts to reward us for doing our best to keep the genes alive. If we are hungry, eating brings us pleasure. In fact, it does even if we are not especially hungry, but then only certain foods. Likewise if we are thirsty, drinking brings pleasure; but if we are full, plain water is just icky. And sexual pleasure is a reward for bringing our genes onward to a new generation (although it certainly has many other functions these days). Again, each coitus is more pleasurable if you haven't just had one, and for women there is generally more pleasure around estrus (ovulation), all other things being equal (and sometimes even if not). There are many other pleasures, some of them less obvious, like the joy of dancing or simply listening to music. I am not sure what the evolutionary psychologists explain music with, actually. I think I have already made my point though.

If we were rewarded for everything we did, we would be rewarded for nothing. For this reason, pleasure MUST be rationed. Otherwise we would simply establish pleasure as the baseline, and any lack of pleasure would be considered suffering. In fact, most of the suffering in Europe and America would be considered pleasure by people in the least developed countries, where hunger is the norm and clean water only exists briefly when it occasionally falls down from the sky.

You cannot save up your "pleasure ration" indefinitely; it leaks away over time, but quite a bit of time. This applies both generally and specifically. I once read an otherwise OK novel in which the male protagonist had sexual intercourse for the first times in several years. Let me assure you, it does not build up like that. A couple months is probably the maximum, possibly less for most people. But the misunderstanding is easy to explain: For the opposite is true. If we eat our pleasure ration immediately, it doesn't renew immediately. The more intense our pleasures, and the more of them we have in a row, the less our capacity for new pleasure for a while.

The most extreme case of this is pleasure drugs. These are designed to directly stimulate the brain to enhance pleasure, and they work. (Not saying this from personal experience of course, in case the law enforcement is reading.) But these drugs "burn out" their users, so that life feels like hell when the high wears off. This is not just in comparison with the pleasure. No, everyday life really feels less than blah, it feels like suffering. The brain experiences everyday life as a horrible mixture of pain, fear and boredom. Ordinary pleasures are tame, bland and lifeless. The pleasure account is drained, there is nothing left. The physical pleasures are there, but they do not cause the pleasure reaction. It has been used already.

Other pleasures do not have the same raw power to burn out all your pleasure in on glorious bonfire, but the effect is the same only to a lesser degree. If you chase pleasures, boredom will chase you in turn.

Conversely, if you don't use your pleasure ration, your capacity for pleasure will increase for a while. It seems to follow the same curves as market saturation in economics: The rise is steep at first, then gradually tapers off to reach a plateau. Since each person has their own "thermostat" for pleasure, it makes sense that the timescale may also vary. But this is why someone like me can experience ecstatic pleasure from simple Japanese pop songs, where the dedicated pleasure seeker needs bungee jumping and unprotected sex with strangers for the same intensity.

Actually it is not quite that simple, since each of us also have an optimal stimulation level. Some people need noise while others need quiet, the first need risk while the second need safety. But the thing is, people of the quiet type do not get cheated on their pleasure. They just derive it from less spectacular things. Again, changing your basic mental constitution requires divine intervention or decades of meditation (which may well be a subset of divine intervention). You can temporarily change by taking the right drugs, as people do with depression, but you better know what you do.

If you are depressed for entirely clinical reasons, brain does not work as described in the instruction manual, then by all means take drugs to get it running normally. But if you have simply used up your pleasure ration, then no, that won't work, and will quite possibly make things worse. There is no potion of Restore Magic in real life. You need to go on with your life quietly until your magic bar is restored enough to cast the spell of pleasure again.

Because I am all alone and can't praise or blame others for my feelings, I have observed myself for years and take all this for granted. But most people don't know it yet. They are surrounded by others and naturally think their pleasure or suffering comes from others. They often keep seeking for the one person that can make everything right and ensure that they live pleasurably ever after. This won't work.

Now that you know, you can choose to keep lying to yourself, but this will only make you stupid, not happy. It is also very expensive, both in money, time, and your soul which is rotting from lack of attention. For while pleasure is rationed, happiness is mostly lying fallow. Few are those who look for it, and fewer the guides that can help them find it.