Published on February 17, 2025 3:56 PM GMT
In being ascetic, you abandon the usual sources of material pleasure, guided by the benefits of the lifestyle: you use less money and effort on avoidable pleasures, you can better focus your mind on the spiritual and the creative, and you make yourself resilient to potentially losing these pleasures.
In being a hedonist, you proportionally focus your lifestyle around the pursuit of pleasure. Pleasure is appealing — perhaps an outright moral good — by very intuitive appeal.
The types of products you consume and activities in which you partake affect the pleasure you get. I have often taken those things thought of as less pleasurable than the majority's preferences. Sometimes I would opt for things less pleasurable than my personal norms. Such pursuits revealed that Pareto's asymmetry applies: 80% of the pleasure comes from the first 20% of variance along the scale of "quality". People stretch out the high-end differences into 80% of an imagined, discussion-implied scale of pleasurability.
As an efficient-minded hedonist, I get almost as happy with much less effort. Other people struggle to reach the maximum, out of naivete or naturally-different experiences of pleasure, and so see me as an ascetic.
Candy, cookies, and their high-sugar ilk taste delightful, if eaten without guilt. Adults tend to replace them with processed, professionally-designed "snacks", which taste about as good and harm the body about as much. I tend to replace them with, say, a mere baked potato. It tastes less good, but the difference is small. From there to lettuce is a change about as large, i.e. about as small.
This may sound like boasting of a great, disciplined, and/or mind-hacking accomplishment, but the methods I recall were trivial. Just eat some boring, average food. Notice how deliciously foodish it tastes: except where it tastes actively bad, the experienced difference between eating at all and the default overwhelms differences between foods. Get used to that.
Likewise, scrollable feeds of short video — TikTok, Instagram Reels, or whatever has replaced them when you read this — look to have struck an anomalous new level of enjoyment, or so you might conclude from how many people stare at them regularly. Their increase to enjoyment is probably real, but small. They became common out of their addictive properties, orthogonal to happiness. Get your entertainment another way, and you stay almost as happy — typically happier, accounting for the feeds' costs you thus avoid.
For years, I amused myself with longer infotaining videos. Later I found that, as reading is easy, almost as exciting are blogs of mere text, taken for the same role. They're also easier to access, working on a limited phone browser, or in places that need me to listen to what happens beyond my device.
When I finished the switch, videos felt like a superstimulus, and blogs felt more fun than I needed. So I switched again to books, dropping a similarly-small level of pleasure and the need for electricity.
I used to look at internet memes: short, formulaic, visually-appealing jokes. They, too, are an overly-enhanced artifact of modernity. Serving as humour, their milder equivalents — less fun by maybe 15 percentage points — are the quips and surprises of everyday in-person banter. Exposing myself to more of the latter as society recovered from CoViD-19, memes became redundant, even a disgusting excess.
Listening to music makes me happier, as it would for most people. Many people see it as essential. Ignoring it for years made it feel gratuitous when I started again, and I can still tell that the change from silence to music is small enough that "quality" differences between types of music must be tiny. Thus precludes any "favourite" genre, artist, or track, even beyond the usual difficulty of favourites for less emotional domains.
In enabling ascetic hedonism, perhaps stronger than Pareto's asymmetry is hedonic adaptation. After getting used to any one level of pleasurability, a small increase from there saturates your happiness in that domain. Hence the downside of ascetic hedonism: you go blind to nuances in the levels above.
Moderately lowering your standards of fun is a tradeoff, making life cheap, flexible, and mindful, while destroying any complex or strong sense of quality.
Discuss
