What is "hedonism?"
Many are mistaken about it...
I miss running. It’s not what I miss most among the things that have become more or less impossible as I age, but it’s right up there…
What is it I miss most about it? The pleasure, both the sensation it afforded me & its consequences
This is not a digression (even though I enjoy recalling myself as I once was): the term “hedonism” is a noun based on the Greek έδοναι pronounced “hedonai,” which means “pleasure”
Thus “hedonism” implies “pleasure seeking,” both the experience of pleasure and “the search for” or “the practice of” pleasant activity…
…with an emphasis on the fact that it involves or requires activity; in other words, the contrary of “passivity”
At this point an unexpected insight appears: the most enduring or appealing pleasure is produced by something you do, rather than what merely happens to you in some way
Running, like almost all physical activity, is something one has to do; it shares this with almost every activity, but added to this is the fact that it is a full body experience
It shares this quality with swimming, dancing, rowing, tennis, and similar forma of exercise, but not with all “sports” (and definitely NOT with eating!)
I make the parenthetical point because “eating” is likely among the first things that come to people’s minds in reference to pleasure
Of course, I take pleasure in eating as well (& a familiar joke about exercise is that it guarantees you can eat more; in fact you actually need to eat more
Life requires we use calories & we can only replenish them by eating: but humans don’t naturally enact the equation: calories in/calories out
Since humans are both predator- and prey-animals, we are not inclined to use all the calories we eat unless we are threatened in some way
Americans, more dramatically than other peoples, are now mostly threatened with obesity, because as a culture we have removed most forms of movement from our daily lives
Even the forms of work we’ve devised are frequently designed to minimize movement
The evidence is all around us, including around our waistlines
But I digress: because hedonism is the quest for pleasure, I conclude that the greatest pleasures are both repeatable & sustainable (not to mention that they enhance one’s life, rather than threatening it with immobility & death!)