Every little thing that you think you need every little thing you think that you need Every little thing that's just feeding your greed, oh I bet that you'll be fine without it.
You're listening to The Minimalist Podcast with Joshua Fields -Milburn and T .K.
Coleman recorded live at Earthings studios in sunny California.
Yes, thank you Malabama.
Hello everybody, today we're talking about when the pursuit of pleasure turns into hedonism.
And we'll answer a bunch of your questions about self -indulgence and pleasure seeking and self -gratification and self -restraint and in moderation overindulgence, extravagance and much more.
Coming up on this free public minimal episode, a caller has a question about the types of pleasure that are likely to get in the way of living a meaningful life and then we've got a question about the best and worst kinds of overindulgence.
That's followed by our Right Here Right Now segment and a Listener tip you can check out the maximal edition of episode 486.
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Let's start with our callers.
If you have a question or comment for our show, we would love to hear from you.
Give us a call. Our phone number is 406 -219 -7839 or you can email a voice recording right from your phone to podcast at theminimalist .com.
Our first question today is from Brian.
Good afternoon or good morning, minimalist. This is Brian.
a Patreon supporter from Okemos, Michigan.
I'm calling in today regarding your upcoming podcast episode about the pursuit of pleasure.
Alcohol was a thing that I enjoyed consuming for pleasure at one point in my life.
I enjoyed it with friends and family at special occasions and family gatherings.
I enjoyed it with co -workers usually on a Friday afternoon after a long day of work for happy hour at some local watering hole.
At some point, though, alcohol, this thing that I consumed and enjoyed, became more of a pacifier and a distraction in my life.
If you asked me back then when I was drinking, if my relationships, my health, my passions, and my ability to contribute were important to me, I would have said yes.
In those things lip service.
Alcohol was getting in the way of me nurturing those things that I claimed to value.
The strange thing is I didn't fully recognize that this was happening in the moment.
Alcohol was so sneaky in that way.
I'm glad to say that I've been sober for just over five years now.
While I have more clarity on what my values are right now and on what things might be getting in way of me nurturing those values, I sometimes wonder what other pastimes I might be enjoying or engaging in right now that might be getting in the way.
My question is, what are the signs that our pastimes have become pacifiers or distractions?
PK, I'm so excited to have this conversation with you.
I've been wanting to do an episode about hedonism for a long time, and I thought this was a great question, Malabam.
Thanks for starting with this one because it's the perfect opening.
He's talking about the pursuit of pleasure and the sort of sneaky distractions.
He calls them pacifiers.
And we could just call them pleasures, right?
Pleasure isn't inherently good or bad, but what Brian's asking about here is what pleasures are likely to get in the way of a meaningful life?
And of course, we can answer that head on.
We could say things like smoking or drinking or overeating, overconsuming anything.
So scrolling, I often say that scrolling is the new smoking because it's an insidious addiction.
In fact, you could even argue that it's more pernicious than smoking because at this point, no one smokes cigarettes for their health, but we can go to the internet for our wellbeing to amplify or enhance our wellbeing because there's a lot of useful information there.
And there's also a lot of really wonderful entertainment, but when we become pacified by that entertainment, it can certainly turn into hedonism.
So I do want to start by talking about hedonism.
Maybe you could tell us what hedonism is and when or why does it lead to suffering.
Yeah, so the way the word gets used today is much more casual than its philosophical origins, but hedonism in a nutshell for our purposes here is the optimization of the pursuit of pleasure.
It is the belief that pleasure is the highest good.
And while pain to some degree is inevitable or unavoidable, a good hedonist would attempt to minimize pain or avoid it in whatever way they can.
There is some diversity even within hedonism about the kind of pleasure that is most prioritized.
One of the ways that we sort of stereotype conversations around pleasure is we tend to equate pleasure with immediate gratification, but where it gets tricky and where it gets fascinating is that pleasure is also something that can exist in very substantial sophisticated forms that one cannot easily access unless they engage in a lot of hard work.
So you think for instance of C .S.
Lewis who had a very spiritual idea of pleasure and he wrote a series of novels called a space trilogy where he kind of gave his fictional representation of heaven, the ultimate state of bliss.
And he depicts heaven as a place of infinite pleasure, but the nature of that pleasure is so substantial and so solid that it would be extremely painful for the person who never exercised discipline or any aesthetic practice in this life.
And so you have a being who takes a trip through heaven and because he's so flimsy and shallow because he never pushed himself in this life, even like the blades of grass in heaven feels like they're cutting him like knives, right?
And so, even when we talk about pleasure, we have to think about that more than immediate gratification.
And that's where, you know, my perspective on hedonism, which we can get into later on begins to become more of a critique because so much of what hedonism gets used for today does amount to a kind of superficial form of pleasure.
Right? A type of pleasure chase.
I was talking to a friend the other day having coffee, and what I told her is, she was talking about deciding between a path that was super pleasurable.
I want to go do this thing.
And I know it's going to lead to pleasure.
But I also know that staying here and working on this book that I'm trying to finish might lead to more reward in the long term.
And so that's a different type of pleasure.
And what I told her is the path to peace is not paved with pleasure.
Ironically though, or maybe paradoxically, there's a lot of pleasure within that piece as a by -product, but not as the thing that we are seeking.
On my way into the studio this morning, I had to stop and I just wrote down two, I was starting with this essay about hedonism and it didn't turn into an essay at all.
It's basically just a bunch of bullet points now.
So I'm gonna need your help connecting some of these dots throughout this episode, but especially on pages two and three when we get into the weeds behind all of this because I see hedonism at its worst as, and maybe even at its terminus, it looks a lot like psychopathy.
When we think about a psychopath, what do we think of?
A selfish person, someone who is narrowly self -centered.
We think about someone who doesn't learn from their past experiences.
And doesn't that happen with hedonism?
So, hedonism in the modern sense can be correlated with consumerism, not consumption, but with consumerism, the ideology that buying more is going to make me happy, it's going to extend my bliss or maybe even create a perpetual bliss.
And when we think about psychopaths, we realize that they don't learn from their experience and hedonists at their worst, at our worst, And I say this as a hedonist myself, not someone who practices hedonism, but someone who was battered by consumerism for a very long time.
And if I'm not careful, I can resort to that default.
I can go back to it because it's the shortcut.
I love the thing you were talking about with C .S.
Lewis. What you're talking about is the shortcut to heaven is actually the path to hell, in a way, right?
And to speak about it metaphorically, then getting back to the psychopath here, if you don't learn from your experience, isn't that what a hedonist does?
It's like, oh, you know what?
This car, this happened to me, this Lexus is gonna make me so happy and it didn't, but the second Lexus will, right?
It's like, well, wait a minute, that's psychopathic behavior from me.
Also, a psychopath doesn't care about other people and they also don't care about their future self, which in some way, I heard a clinical psychologist talk about this, how not caring about others and not caring about your future self is essentially the same thing.
Because at a fundamental level, your future self is a different self from your current self.
And so, in a way, I'm punishing my future self for today's pleasure.
I wanna feel good right now, tomorrow be damned.
You know, there's another aspect of this too.
I love that phrase, I'm punishing my future self for today's pleasure.
And I, a corollary of that would be punishing our past self for today's spiritual evolution.
Sometimes when we outgrow something and we graduate to a more sophisticated or sustainable or substantial form of pleasure, we look back on our past and we condemn the old us for being so superficial.
I think about my brother and I, one of my brothers where whenever we give each other advice, we go straight to analogies and examples that come from a video game that him and I spent a lot of time on when we were kids.
And we understand so many things in terms of that video game.
And we don't play that video game anymore.
It feels like a waste of time today.
But if you go far back, when we were teenagers, man, we would lock ourselves in the basement and play that video game for hours.
And I don't look back on that stage of life as, oh boy, you know, I really wasted my time and I was a terrible person.
I'm glad I became spiritual.
It's no, there's a time to be a kid.
There's a time to explore the contrast and the meaning and the pleasure to be found in things.
And when we grow up and evolve into something different, we don't have to look back on our past selves and say, shame on you.
Sometimes, but not all the time.
Right, right. But here's where I would make the distinction between sort of hedonism of today and psychopathy of today.
The psychopath is unable to feel remorse.
They actually have a part of their brain that's turned off.
I had to look this up, right?
And so it's called the mid -singulate cortex or the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. A part of their brain that processes rewards and punishments.
And also it helps us a bit with understanding delayed gratification, but also opens us up to compassion or even empathy for others.
caring about other people and the hedonist is able to learn from their remorse, and if they are able, then they can cease being a hedonist in a way, right?
Because it's like the buyer's remorse, literally, oh, this happened to me when I had all of this debt.
I had almost half a million dollars worth of debt, and so on the surface, I looked ostensibly successful, but I was punishing my future self with debt in order to acquire these objects right now.
There was nothing wrong with the Lexus.
But the problem was I thought it was going to complete me.
And because I thought it would complete me right now, I forsook my future self, right?
And also, to go along with what you're saying, in a way I almost renounced my former self too.
Like, oh, poor, literally like poverty JFM was bad and therefore I need to signal that I'm no longer That was a barrier in poverty.
Although ironically I was broker than when I was poor because of all of the debt that I had to put myself in this, this strange situation.
But the person who can learn, the hedonist who can learn from remorse, the buyer's remorse, that's a type of visceral learning.
In fact, you can't have that visceral learning without some sort of remorse, like, oh, I can't believe I made that.
So instead of condemning my past self, it's learning from the past self.
And that's really what wisdom is.
the wisdom comes from that type of suffering.
And by the way, it doesn't mean you have to go look for suffering in your life.
It's gonna show up regardless.
You don't have to seek the suffering.
The suffering will often seek you.
Ironically, it will seek you more, the more hedonistic that you become.
And then you start to become resentful of your own success or you become resentful of the decisions you made, right?
And then it's really difficult to be grateful.
And so what do we do?
We'd pacify ourselves more, as Brian said, and we start to forsake the things we say are our priorities.
The things that lead to living a meaningful life.
When he mentioned our health and relationships and contribution beyond yourself and pursuing your creative passions.
Wow, those are things that we find to be meaningful.
They don't always correlate, and they usually don't correlate with instant gratification, instant pleasure.
Yeah, and that's the beauty there of thinking beyond the hedonistic, immediate gratification, the belly is full kind of hedonism, because it leaves you ill -equipped for many of the inevitable sufferings of life that are neither avoidable nor terminable.
And when you have to deal with chronic pain or you have to deal with some form of grief that is going to remain with you for years.
You need a worldview that can imbue those experiences with meaning.
Gabby Castello has this video that he put up maybe about a month ago called, Taylor Made Crosses.
And it's about a guy who describes himself as a former wise guy picking on people and just fooling around all the time not taking life seriously.
And in his older age, he has Lou Gehrig's disease.
And he calls it a Taylor Made Cross because it's a great burden for him to carry, but it's suitable for the person that he needs to become because it teaches him to value little things.
It causes him to become aware of how he treated people, how he needs to treat people, all of the things that he needs to make right in his life in terms of character.
He is experiencing this illness as something that is doing that through him, to him and for him.
And it doesn't mean that everything you experience in life has to be analyzed or thought about in a deeply philosophical way, but that kind of possibility to adopt that framework comes from going beyond the hedonistic point of view.
I think that's an interesting point because when I think about hedonism, there's a particular kind of immaturity to it.
And I wanted to say it's childish, but we almost use that phrase pejoratively.
When I say immaturity, It's value neutral here.
Like obviously, my daughter Ella, when she was a baby she was by definition immature, right?
And I don't mean anything bad by that.
But as we grow, what happens?
Our prefrontal cortex grows and we're able to regulate.
Our prefrontal cortex allows us to time travel.
No other animals can do that.
It's the biggest difference between us and a lot of our primate cousins is we can time travel in a way, we can think about the past or we can consider the future.
We always do it right now in the present moment.
We're time traveling now in the present moment.
We're thinking about our future self.
But the hedonists, or the psychopath, they switch that off.
And we do it all the time.
In fact, we catch ourselves doing.
And it's like, oh no, I've been scrolling for 45 minutes.
And this has happened to me dozens of times, where I didn't, it was so, it was pulling me in.
And there was nothing wrong with doing that.
It just wasn't the best use of that time.
And that is something that is immature.
We see it in babies, we also see it in our pets.
Your dog can't plan for retirement.
And nor would we ever expect it to.
The same with a baby.
Is a baby or a pet, they simply want to fulfill their base pleasures, like hunger or thirst or for a pet, it's like sexual gratification, right?
And an immature person whether it is, usually like an immature adult, I'm thinking of, they're dominated by pleasure -seeking.
We, when we act our most immature, we are dominated by pleasure -seeking.
However, what I love about you, TK, is you've reclaimed that childishness to mean childlike curiosity and wonder and play.
And that's why I didn't want to use the word childish because childish can be really beautiful.
It doesn't mean that you're necessarily weak or you're unable to delay gratification.
There's a childlike wonder that we can have even amid the difficult things, even amid the discipline, or even amid the suffering.
And that's one of the things that makes it admittedly hard for me to critique hedonism, not because I don't disagree with it, but because so much of how I see life is based on a reframing of the concept of pleasure.
What does it mean to be truly satisfied?
I even think about John Piper and his idea of Christian hedonism.
I don't agree with them on everything.
And I hate when I say stuff like that because I don't agree with me on everything.
But he has a lot of interesting things to say about that idea of pleasure at being at the foundation of life.
And many of your great spiritual philosophers are often appealing to a deeper kind of pleasure, something that we might call eudaimonia, something that we might call fulfillment, something that we might call inner peace, something that we might call the invincible joy.
And so I definitely see things in that way.
And I think ultimately, when you prioritize pleasure, one of two things are gonna happen.
One, you'll make yourself miserable by chasing after pleasures that are unattainable.
But the other is you'll actually get what you want and then those pleasures will begin to teach you about their own futility.
They'll begin to teach you about just how fragile they are, just how finite they are and you'll begin to realize that who you are is so much bigger than what possessions can fulfill, than what fleeting experiences can fulfill.
And hopefully you realize that soon enough to begin to ask the deeper questions about what will truly satisfy the soul.
And I think with respect to Brian's question here, one thing that we can do is we can build experiences into our lives so that we can take the time to pause and create space between our experiences of pleasure.
So we can ask ourselves, is this more about familiarity, or is it about fulfillment?
because it really may be possible that you've got some things in your life today that are like what the alcohol was for you in the past, where it's like, this isn't really you, but sometimes we get on autopilot.
In fact, sometimes we even have thoughts where we say, man, I can't stand that person.
I hate them. They bother me so much. And then when you pause you go, wait a minute, that's not me anymore.
That's a habit. That's a program that I've got running.
I absolutely love that person.
I would never want to live without them.
They mean everything to me.
That's a habit. That's a program.
And I'm ready to let go of that habit of just complaining about things.
And it's time for me to change my instincts.
And so taking the time to create little breaks from the things we enjoy doing not because it's wrong to do them, but because it is right to always give ourselves the opportunity to reconsider and recontextualize.
And we bring that energy of self -awareness back into the experiences of pleasure if we continue in them.
I love the distinction you're making between, sort of what you call eudaimonia, we could just call it satisfaction versus gratification, especially instant gratification.
I think about Ella when she was really little and we'd go to a grocery store together.
Maybe she's like two and a half years old and she wants the Milky Way bar at the checkout line there at Target, right?
And she really, really wants it.
and she wants to be gratified right now and if she doesn't what happens she might throw a fit she might get really upset and don't we do that as immature adults.
I wanted it I want it now remember the J .D.
Wentworth commercials back in the day?
877 -CASH -NOOOO. Not a sponsor not an ad just a good song.
That's so good yeah An earworm right it's like it's my money and i want it now No, that's immaturity.
That particular level of immaturity is a type of hedonism.
I can't wait for it, right?
This is what happens when predatory payday lenders will go after people and give them something absurd, like a 2 ,700 % interest rate, because it's like you want it now.
They're playing on that immaturity.
So the biggest downside of immaturity is the people who are in power can take advantage of that weakness, immaturity is weakness.
I think about Harvey Mansfield, he wrote a book about this.
He talks about the sort of three different types of men.
You have weak men, you have manly men, and then you have gentle men.
And the weak men are the sort of immature men who can get taken advantage of because they're physically weak, but also mentally weak usually, right?
Then the manly men are the ones who have attained some level of power.
And in fact, today, we might even call it toxic masculinity, right?
But really what it is, is it's people using their power and wielding it over other people to take advantage of them.
And then you have the gentleman, right?
This is the people who do have power, but are willing to be benevolent with it, right?
And but the problem is that there are a lot of people who are in power, who are not going to use it for your best interest. And so if you show up to a car dealership immature, they're going to take advantage of that immaturity.
If you're pleasure seeking with your next purchase, you are probably being taken advantage of.
If you're buying something from an Instagram ad, which by the way, have you noticed that it's never good when it shows up at your house?
I've stopped buying from Instagram ads altogether, and it's been a while now.
But like, I realize after making two or three purchases, even like, because they know you so well, right?
They seduce you so well, and they know exactly what black t -shirt I'm going to want.
Or they're going, oh yeah, I really want the cotton, whatever it is, right?
And they get it. And so they take advantage of my weakness there, as opposed to me being willing to put in the work and the research, they funnel a product to me, and they appeal to my base desires, is that they appeal to my desire to gratify myself right now.
And so what I've learned is that hedonism is sort of a type of suicide.
We're killing our future self just to pursue today's pleasure.
I'm reminded of two quotes here, TK, I wrote down for this episode specifically for Brian's question.
Carl Jung said, "'The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.
Ooh, let's break that down for a moment, right?
Because what is hedonism?
It is an unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering, not unnecessary suffering, that's a different thing, but we're all going to have suffering in our lives and when we try to paper over it with pleasure, it just makes it worse.
If you have an infection and you just put a bandaid over top of it, it doesn't heal that infection underneath your skin.
We actually have to do some excavating here and the same is true with our own lives.
We have to be able to sit with that suffering, to sit with the boredom, to sit with the discomfort.
Paradoxically, that does lead to a different kind of pleasure, one that we might call satisfaction or fulfillment, but it may be different from the pleasures that we keep chasing.
You know, it's a funny thing about happiness, right?
As we go around chasing happiness and it's always running away from us, well, why is that?
Because anything you chase tends to run away from you.
And that is true with pleasure.
It is true with happiness.
But those things show up the moment or shortly after we stop chasing them.
In a legitimate way, we sit through the suffering and we experienced the real lasting eudaimonia on the other side of it.
One other quote that really stood out to me was from Deepak Chopra.
He said, "'Discover your own discontent and be grateful, "'for without divine discontent, "'there would be no creative force.'" And this really reminded me of TK Coleman here, right?
Because what it's saying here is maybe that discontent you're experiencing, Brian, isn't a bad thing.
We pathologize it. Oh, no, discontent, quick, cover it up, buy something, smoke something, drink something, eat something, feel something.
But maybe, maybe that type of discontent is actually what leads our creativity.
It leads to a more meaningful life if harnessed and leveraged appropriately.
That's right. And I want to make a distinction here between contentment as appreciation and contentment as addiction.
There is a contentment that says, hey, you know what, I don't want to be in this place or position anymore.
It's time for me to move on to something else.
But I'm so grateful for this experience.
If I had to be in this position for another 10 years, I wouldn't cease to be grateful.
But then contentment as addiction is, hey, I'm really comfortable here, doing something different requires me to confront some fears.
So, I'm going to settle for something that is mediocre by my own standards, by my own values, and I'm going to compromise my future self in order to remain here.
And that's often what we call selling out.
And so, the divine in divine discontentment is that aspect of our discontentment, whereby we feel appreciation for an experience or a situation, but we also honor that principle within us that says something needs to change.
This could be better.
Hey, I'm grateful for this event that we threw for everybody, but I think we can create even more value for people.
I'm grateful for that vacation we had, but the next time we take a vacation, I think we could plan a little bit more efficiently and avoid some of those unnecessary problems we had.
I'm grateful for this conversation, but the next time I have a conversation over conflict, I think there are some ways I could say things that would allow us to achieve our result more effectively.
Listeners, I'd love to hear from you, what pleasures are likely to get in the way of you living a meaningful life?
Let us know in the comments on YouTube or on Patreon or better yet, you can send in a voice memo to podcast at theminimalists .com if you've been able to overcome some of those instant gratifications that lead you to a more meaningful life.
Before we get back to our callers, Malabama, what time is it?
You know what time it is.
It's time for the lightning round where we answer the Patreon Community chats question of the week.
Yes, indeed. Now, during the lightning round, we attempt to answer your question with a short, shareable minimal maxim.
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What's the question of the week this week?
What do you overindulge in?
What do you overindulge in?
I thought this was a perfect corollary with hedonism because we're talking a bit about in moderation today and in self -restraint, but also this indulgence versus overindulgence.
So before we get to our pithy answers, I wanna hear from our simpletens.
Bama, what does more listeners have to say?
Ed said, on the positive side, I overindulge in great books and beautiful music.
On the negative side, I can overindulge in mindless internet.
One leaves me filled, the other leaves me drained.
So TK, this is an important distinction to make here.
What's the difference between indulgence and overindulgence?
Intentionality, the presence and the absence thereof.
You know, indulgence, you know, we could we could strictly define as the decision to immerse oneself in an experience of pleasure.
You dive into a pool because you imagine that cool water would feel good as you're wading your way through it.
That would be indulgence.
But overindulgence would be, you didn't do any thinking before this experience about why you want to get into that pool, how long you want to be there, what else you have going on today and what the need is you're trying to fulfill.
And because of that, you become a slave to impulsive thinking, which usually leads us in the wrong direction.
I, I like that distinction because what Ed's talking about here, the great books and beautiful music that sounds to me like an indulgence, not an overindulgence, even though he's saying that he overindulges in that, but then the mindless internet searching the mindless internet scrolling is really what he's talking about here, that can be an overindulgence because the, the mindlessness that's behind it.
And then I think of course we have to, we have to talk about the hedonic treadmill since we're talking about hedonism here.
And it's also known as hedonic adaptation, which basically describes the human tendency to return to a baseline of happiness despite significant life events, both positive and negative because people will always adapt to their circumstances.
And so you become super wealthy and you're a multimillionaire and you have the big house on the beach and you have the luxury cars, your baseline of happiness doesn't change.
It's not like your happiness increased with those things.
Your pleasure did increase for a period and we mistake that pleasure for a type of happiness.
And of course, when the pleasure goes away, what happens?
Well, the low feels much lower because we had a huge spike, the mountain was huge, but the valley is even bigger.
And we end up in those valleys more and more often.
So we seek more pleasure.
We seek higher mountains.
But of course, we don't seek to do the work to get to the top of the mountain.
I want to take my helicopter to the top of the mountain.
I don't want to climb the mountain myself, which is where a lot of the reward comes from.
I mean, it becomes a cliche, right?
The the the journey is the destination or whatever.
But cliches are cliches for a reason.
And there are profound truths in many of these cliches.
Any shortcut that we take to get to that feeling of pleasure, I think about the easiest one is just eating a piece of candy.
A piece of candy isn't gonna kill you, right?
But if your whole diet consists of sugary goodness, you lack the nutrition to fuel your mind, to fuel your body, to fuel your skin and your organ systems. And what happens is you get that moment of pleasure, but the payoff isn't an actual payoff.
It is you're going into debt with your own health in a way.
And so this happens all the time with the hedonic treadmill.
When we seek pleasure, we get it, but then it ceases to be pleasurable the moment we get it.
It's like going to the ocean and trying to take the ocean home in my hands.
Yeah, I might get my hands a little bit wet, But I'm gonna end up with nothing by the time I get home.
What else you got? Amy said, I binge watch TV shows to the point of obsession, and I like it.
I would say obsession is value neutral here, right?
Obsession isn't always a bad thing.
We often talk about obsession as though it is bad, and of course we pathologize.
And sometimes it is a pathology for sure, obsessive compulsive disorder.
OCD is something I have. And while I think it's a super power, I also understand when it can become pathological.
But the thing that I wrote down here is liking a thing is not a reliable measure of its value.
Now, part of it has to do with liking it.
If you dislike it, then yes, probably not very valuable to you.
But just because you like a thing, that is not the full picture of its value.
That's right. And obsession is a funny word. I got triggered when that word was mentioned because it made me think about the movie with Idris Elba and Beyonce.
It's kind of like a modern day take on fatal attraction, which makes me feel so old to even describe it as modern day.
I'm like, fatal attraction was just last week!
But I think in popular culture today, when we use the word obsession, we have reframed it as a very positive thing.
We don't think of it as a fatal attraction, as an attraction to something that leads to the detriment of yourself and others.
We think of it as really intense preoccupation with Coby Bryant described himself as being obsessed with the game of basketball.
And what that meant is I'm a student of it.
I love it. I enjoy talking about it.
I'm never gonna be the person that's bored by this.
And if you're obsessed with your shows or your literature or your genre, that often just means I'm really, really into this thing.
And if we were to have a 10 hour conversation around it, you would be the one to say, Can we talk about something else?
And that's a good thing to be in tune with those sort of things.
And if it's not creating detriment for you or for others, then that's the positive sense of obsession.
I think about Don DeLillo, he talks about writing a book is like having a deformed pet.
Like it just always follows you around.
You always have to take care of it no matter what, like it's always this idea of like, yeah, writing a book, you have to be obsessed to write the book because it's not just that if you're spending an hour a day or three hours a day writing the book, that's part of it.
That's the mechanical composition side of it, but it's following around in your mind this whole time.
And so I think the key for me is being obsessed about the things that fuel me, that make me feel the most alive.
And for me, that is writing.
I get really obsessed about this podcast too.
I mean, the preparation that goes into these episodes is pretty intense.
I spend three, four, five days quite often.
For this one, I think I spent four days.
It was just, and I wasn't sitting down for eight hours a day, but it follows me around, even if I'm out for a walk or I'm out at dinner.
And sometimes it will follow you there.
Oh, I gotta write this down real quick, sorry.
You know what? I just, I need to get this down and get it out of my head because I'm obsessed with this communication.
I'm obsessed with these conversations.
I'm obsessed with this topic.
I'm obsessed with understanding.
And that's the reason that I write and is the reason that I do these podcasts is because it helps me better understand what I think about the world.
That's why I wanna do this episode.
I've got all these disparate points that I wrote down and you're helping me connect the dots and you just show me when obsession can be really helpful as opposed to just being harmful.
It's harmful when it gets in the way of something more important.
If I'm really obsessed about tying my shoes all day, well, that's an obsession that's probably getting in the way of my own personal greater good and maybe even getting in the way of the greater good of the people around me.
What did Kyle have to say?
Kyle said, I overindulge in food waste elimination.
I'll overeat way too much just to get rid of the excess.
Even if it's food I don't necessarily want that badly or I'm not that hungry for, I always feel guilty throwing away leftovers and will eat them beyond suggested expiration dates and in extra quantities to make sure there's no excess.
Kyle, you don't have to eat the trash.
And I know that sounds wild, right?
But that's literally what you're talking about here.
These things would otherwise be trash.
And I understand. I'm very much with you.
I don't want the food waste.
That becomes a problem.
But also, it's a bigger problem if I'm putting trash into my body.
And so it's trading one problem for another.
But it could mean, OK, I want to be more deliberate with the way that I plan my meals in the first place to avoid the food waste, as opposed to, I'm going to just shove as much of this leftover food down my throat because I don't want to waste it.
What if I don't create the waste in the first place?
There you go. My thought on this is exactly that.
Follow your conscience, but expand your vocabulary of what it could look like for you to follow your conscience.
If you feel so passionate about not wasting things that you're willing to eat, even if it makes you feel bloated or bad, then that shows dedication.
And how can we apply that dedication creatively to something else that you can do to either get rid of that food in a way that helps someone, or just get better at ordering and purchasing so that you don't get in that position.
For the sake of time, let's just go to James.
One more from James here.
James says, I overindulge on spending time in my rock garden.
Yeah, so James, he actually posted several, maybe three pictures in the Patreon community chat.
They were so beautiful.
Wasn't it, right? It made me want to rock garden.
You might call it overindulgence.
It just seems like a beautiful place that you've created that you're able to indulge in.
And by the way, you created it, you put in the work, you went through the pain and suffering.
And I bet you sweated, you maybe even bled for this rock garden.
And to me, that is not hedonism at all.
There is a payoff on the other side of that discipline of that effort, of that obsession.
All right, time for you TK, give me something pithy.
What do you overindulge in?
All right, excess turns pleasure into burden.
I think about my friend, young Ettman in the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe who enters through the wardrobe and unbeknownst to him, he is a great threat to the evil queen.
She knows who he is, but he doesn't know who he is.
And so in order to render him a little bit more useful to her, she offers him Turkish delight and he eats it and it is the most delicious thing that he ever had, but it's enchanted.
It makes him want to eat more.
And eventually, he just exists in almost a drunken -like stupor, and he is so easily manipulated by the queen.
She can tell him to do anything.
And even if he knows it isn't right, he doesn't really care.
He's just like, well, I get more Turkish delight?
We'll see about that when you take care of what I want you to do.
And it makes me think about the world today.
All of our TV shows, all of our movies, all of our food, it's enchanted, perhaps not literally, but it's design.
and it's engineered, it's made in a way that just makes us want to consume more of it.
The best creators, the brightest minds spend a lot of time, not only making videos and food for us, but making treats that will make us want to buy more and eat more when we consume it.
And so what do I indulge in?
Everything because everything is designed to be that way.
And I felt like I'm on a dance floor where there's like a hundred amazing best ever songs playing at the same time, and my job is to listen through that noise to the song that's coming from my heart and making sure I dance to that.
And also not to go over to the DJ and turn the volume up on the other 99 songs, right?
If anything, what you can do, and you can have even a responsibility to do, responsible for your own wellbeing, responsibility meaning ability to respond, you can turn down the volume on those other 99 songs.
If you want to be intentional, if you really want to indulge in that one song, when you're on the dance floor, it's often about turning down those other ones or the bare minimum avoiding turning the other ones up to make the one you want to dance to more difficult.
Which brings me to my pithy answer, which is, freedom from obligation is the ultimate extravagance.
Bam, we were talking about this before, and notice I'm saying freedom from obligation, not freedom from duty or responsibility or freedom from compassion or freedom from others, necessarily, but it's freedom from obligation.
Because as soon as I feel obligated, like I have to go do this thing, as opposed to I get to go do this, well, to me, that's a particular kind of freedom.
I get to do this. The spaciousness of my days are really what dictate my freedom.
It's not the hedonic treadmill, it's not getting more cars or more square footage.
It's not scrolling more, it's not getting more.
In fact, we have a question on page two about sexual gratification and how lust can get in the way of meaningful relationships.
And that one is difficult to navigate, but I think we'll thread the needle on that.
I'm really interested in your perspective on that as well, but freedom from obligation, or maybe you could just say freedom from frenzy.
When you think about the frenetic world around you, oh, that doesn't feel like extravagance, although it does sometimes look like extravagance and the right advertisement, that party, but after a while it becomes frenzy.
In fact, my favorite song of the year, we're playing on our added value segment on page three today, and it is a total hedonist song.
It's a song about hedonism, but I wrote a short essay about it, And I wanna make an argument that it's illustrating the seductiveness of hedonism that we see in how sexy it is.
But then also you can see if you look closely, you can see what happens, the punishment that happens on the other side of hedonism.
We're getting toward the end of page one here.
We still have an entire switchboard of callers to talk to.
But first, real quick for right here, right now, here's one thing that's going on in the life of the minimalist. I've been on a writing frenzy lately.
I wrote two essays that I think apply to hedonism in some way.
And they're published on different sites.
These two are not at theminimalists .com, although I have some new writings over there as well, one called Letting Go in Advance you can check out.
But what I'm talking about right now, I wrote this essay called The Amplification of Joy and the Diminishing Marginal Utility of Things.
Now I just wrote that second part because I knew TK would like it.
Our resident economist here.
You knew I liked anything with too many words.
What are you overindulging?
Talking? He's like you had me at diminishing marginal utility.
And so I finished writing this essay and then it's the first time in over a decade that I published it on someone else's blog.
I finished writing.
I'm like, you know, where this belongs?
Joshua Becker's blog, which is called Becoming Minimalist. And so I just sent it to him.
I said, hey, can I give this to you for free to publish over at Becoming Minimalist?
And he was like, actually, I really needed so I'm going on vacation this week.
I really needed something to publish.
This is perfect. So the timing worked out, and I thought it was just right because it talks about, well, I'll just read the first paragraph or so, and then you can read the rest. So we'll put a link to it in the show notes.
My friend, Derek, wanted to be a good minimalist. So after his son, Sammy, was born, he refused to buy toys for the little boy, assuming he would be just as happy playing with the rocks and sticks strewn throughout their backyard. A few years later, however, My friend started questioning his own minimalism when he saw his son erupt with joy each time he played with his friend's toys.
Sammy smiled while he constructed deformed dinosaurs with his multi colored Lego bricks.
He laughed as two Ninja turtles perform backflips and ate plastic pizza slices.
And he literally jumped with joy the first time he slammed a nerf ball into its doorframe hoop.
Derrick realized he had been denying Sammy in the name of minimalism, dampening his boy's playtime with his own preference for simple living.
So he did what many loving fathers might do.
He logged onto Craigslist and found a big box of used toys.
When Sammy opened the box, his facial features expanded with delight.
He extracted his new toys one at a time.
a walkie -talkie, an etch -a -sketch, a miniature Wright Flyer model airplane welcoming each with gratitude.
Yet, at the sight of Sammy's glee, Derek was overtaken, not by triumph, but by the consumerist mindset.
You might even say the hedonist mindset here, right?
His thought was, if one box made him this happy, then 10 boxes will surely make him 10 times happier.
And of course, that's where it breaks down.
And the essay goes into talking about the diminishing marginal utility of toys and thus the diminishing marginal utility of things, which I think is perfect for hedonism.
And then the other essay I wrote, which is over at Minimalism Life, our side project, you can find it at minimalism .com.
We'll also put a link to this specific essay in the show notes.
It's a short one, it's called Expensive Clothes are Not an Investment.
and Savi Dee and Jordan O 'More and I went out and made a video around this one as well.
It wasn't the full essay, but the essence of this essay, which the last paragraph says this.
designer clothes aren't bad if you can afford them.
In fact, some luxury items last longer than their fast fashion counterparts.
But please understand, you're not investing your hard earned income on an asset that will generate dividends.
you're playing dress up with a fashionable liability.
And so you can check that out.
Minimalism .com, our side project Minimalism Life, the essay itself is called Expensive Clothes are Not an Investment.
You can read that for free.
And same with the essay over becoming minimalist, The Amplification of Joy and the Diminishing Marginal Utility of Things.
You can find the links for those in the show notes.
Malabama, what else you got for us?
Here's a minimalist insight from one of our listeners.
Shalom to the minimalists from Israel.
My name is Diana, a Patreon subscriber and I want to say thank you.
Your podcasts changed my life so much. I'm an action items person and love the way your podcasts are full of doable insights.
Everything that remains book is a constant remember on my nightstand.
Here are just a few things that changed my life.
For the past complicated year, letting go of worries for things I cannot change helped me to cope with fear and anxiety better.
By saying no to other people's ideas, I am much more focused on what really matters to me, like taking care of disabled father and focusing on my career.
I was able to get more control over my online shopping by removing the credit card information from all online store accounts.
I've replaced old plastic food storage boxes with new healthier glass containers, and I'm using the 99th rule on a daily basis.
I really believe it became a habit for me.
So thank you for your amazing podcast and bye from Israel.
Diana, thank you so much for that kind comment.
Yes, everything that remains is my favorite book from The Minimalists as well.
But she mentioned this word, TK, before we get on to page two here, control.
And I think that is maybe how we sum this up.
Hedonism lacks a particular kind of self -control or self -restraint.
One of my favorite episodes you and I ever did was an episode just called, Restraint.
And it was just me and you and Bama here in the studio.
And I really enjoyed that because we talked about the sort of virtues of restraint.
And that is not possible with a hedonist lifestyle.
Because it doesn't provide you with the opportunity to strategically seek out uncomfortable experiences for the purpose of building strength.
I think of restraint or self -control as a kind of psychological or spiritual weightlifting.
If you want to be physically strong and be able to lift things, you have to develop that strength by exercising that muscle and getting to the point where you can do in the future what you're not capable of doing today.
In a similar way, the weight of desire, the weight of craving, is very strong.
And if we always give into it, we seem like we are in control because we're choosing to nurture those pleasures, but we're actually becoming weak because we don't know how to say no to that.
And so you have to practice through little things the art of developing the spiritual -psychological strength to carry the weight of your own cravings so that when your body says, Hey, instinctively, I want to punch that guy in the face for irritating me.
Hey instinctively, I just want to have five slices of cheesecake.
You can say, I hear you.
I understand that makes perfect sense.
But that's not what we're gonna do today because we have a path that's gonna lead us the way we want to go.
And it's not gonna be fun or comfortable, but I want you to come with me this way.
Yeah, understanding the true cost of your comfort, the true cost of your pleasure, right?
But also the true reward of your discomfort.
not seeking pain for the sake of seeking pain, not seeking suffering for the sake of seeking suffering, you're going to experience pain.
You're going to experience suffering.
I just don't wanna wallpaper over those by just agreeing that cravings are the number one virtue. And if it feels good, then I should do it.
Well, what we do can feel good, but just because something feels good, that is not reason by itself to just do it.
That's right. My guiding principle for this is that it's always permissible to do what feels good to you in the absence of any logically or morally compelling reason to do otherwise.
Does it feel good? All right, excellent.
Is there a logically or morally compelling reason to not do it?
Well, then let's sit that feeling on the shelf or find a more creative, ethical outlet for it.
And just because something is permissible doesn't mean you have to do it or should do it or your life would be better just because you're doing the thing that you're permitted to do.
Deanna, thanks again for your lovely comment.
For anyone else who has a listener tip or insight about this episode, send a voice memo to podcast at theminimalists .com so we can feature your voice on the show.
Up next, page two and page three, But first, let's take a quick pandiculation break.
We'll be right back.
All right, that's the first of 32 percent of episode 486.
We'll see you on Patreon for the full, juicy Maximal Edition, which includes answers to a bunch more questions, questions like, what's the difference between self -care and self -indulgence?
When does self -gratification turn into escapism?
And why does pleasure seeking lead to the fear of missing out?
Plus we have a million more questions and simple living segments over on the Minimalist private podcast on Patreon.
And that is our minimal episode for today.
Big thanks to Earthing Studios for the recording space.
On behalf of Ryan Nikodemus, TK Coleman, Malabama, Post Production Peter, Spire Jeff, and Spire Dave, SaviD on the board, and the rest of our team, I'm Joshua Fills -Milburn.
If you leave here with just one message, whether be this, love people and use things.
because the opposite never works.
Thanks for listening y 'all.
We'll see you next time.
Peace. Every little thing you think that you need.
Every little thing you think that you need.
Every little thing that's just feeding your greed.
Oh I bet that you'll be fine without it.
