Oct 12 2025

I was thinking about hedonism, which is maximising pleasure, but on the contrary would minimizing pain lead to the same outcome? In a different essay I would also like to explore the different time frames on which you are chasing pleasure, back to minimizing pain. If I wanted to minimize the pain of hunger I would get a job to have money for food, food that specifically makes me less hungry over tho longest period time. Essentially satiating myself. There would be two forces at play. The pain of being hungry and pain of having to work and since pain of hunger > pain of work. You would rationally decide to work. Let me try and extend the pain minimizing as far as I can. If you live your whole life life in this way, like imagine, there was no desire but not feel pain, perhaps you would kill yourself, but who knows what lies after death so it may be in your best interest to feel the pain of existence rather than unknown pain. Maybe it’s important to slow down and think about pain, after just survival. There is an intellectual pain, where you are given a very insulting task, and in order to do something that stimulates your brain, you may need to work hard. This on a societal level might look like everyone would cease to achieve the moment they find find their equilibrium, the point at the pain of improving is greater than the pain of existence. Quite frankly, this maybe how people unconsciously operat, another word for equilibrium, is being content.

That aside, life has been great. School is hard but I’m getting better at it everyday. One thing I realized is that external success doesn’t always mean internal strength. Doing hard things won’t make you a stronger person, or a better person even. I feel like I still equate achievement with moral superiority, because in my head good people have good things for the most part. This unfortunately isn’t the reality we live in. I’m thinking about how I can divorce these two concepts, but maybe it will lead me to an outcome that I fear. The outcome that I become successful at whatever endeavour I intent to pursue but I’m still not a moral, or even a mentally strong person.

The picture above is gradient descent, imagine all the actions you can take with a corresponding height that is pain, you would go down go and minimize pain.