My Breakup With Hedonism

Turns out avoiding pain is painful.

Raised by atheists, I understood early on that if my life was going to matter, it would be because I built it, shaped it around my values, my goals, my interests. And oh, was I pulled in by different interests! As a child, I thrived where creativity was allowed to spill over. Impulsive and averse to long-term planning, I grew into an eclectic, slightly chaotic right-brain thinker.

I fully realized, probably first during my time as a middle school girl, that life contains so much suffering. Every person is going to experience unavoidable pain, and likely a lot of it, in their lives. The fact appeared to me as obvious: This suffering is bad, and a good life means minimizing it as much as possible.

I didn’t have a name for it then, but I was 10 feet deep into the pool of hedonism. In terms of things worth pursuing, pleasure accounted for the entire hierarchy.

So when I entered college at 18, I reveled in what felt like my ideal environment where responsibilities were light, freedom was high, and consequences hovered somewhere far off in the distance. I did enough schoolwork to avoid failure or the kind of stress that threatened to puncture the bubble I’d built.

And then last year, I was dragged by my collar through the ringer and into a different worldview. Something terrible happened in my closest relationships and my physical health began to falter. Simultaneously, something in me began to shift. Not suddenly, and not because of any grand revelation, but through a slow erosion of the simplicity that hedonism had once offered.

Through a hedonist’s lens, the entire year was simply a deficit, an ugly stretch of misery I sadly had to endure. But as I looked around, the world felt alive, bustling, and beautiful, complicated yet full of meaning. I learned so much resilience and valuable information about myself. I learned that when I try to outrun anything hard or unpleasant, I end up trapped in a tighter version of my own life, my decisions now shaped around fear and avoidance. I started to question whether meaning required me to engage with the very things I’d spent years trying to minimize. If pain was inevitable then maybe its role in my life was more complicated than I’d allowed myself to believe.

I still believe that life is suffering, but it took me until recently to make peace with it. Not just to accept that it exists as an antithesis to our desire to thrive and lead a pleasurable life, but to actually make peace with it as having value in itself. Rather than despite the endless and needless suffering, a good life can exist because of it.

Even the pleasures we love most carry their own kind of sting. A cigarette wouldn't hit the same without attacking the throat (vapes are too good for a reason), and the gross taste is an essential part of the drinking experience. Even friendship and love, probably the most gratifying experiences in life, can be the most exquisitely painful. Being so deeply attached and intertwined to people brings so much pleasure and happiness, but inevitably exposes the most sensitive part of ourselves to becoming triggered by them. However, this pain is not a flaw; it brings a deeper understanding of each other, of life, love, and other people.

Maybe a life built only around pleasure is far too fragile for the real world. It collapses the moment anything heavy lands on it. But a life that lets suffering carve its shape is strong enough for meaning. Maybe real depth requires contrast. Whatever the reason, I wholeheartedly believe that suffering can be worth pursuing.