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Dear Bolu,
I only just discovered an apt retort for when people say, “read the room” in a snarky, you’re-so-ignorant way and I’ll tell you for free. There is a book titled “The Room”, by Jonas Karlsson and after reading it, you can comfortably say in any social situation that you have read “the room”. You’d become untouchable. You’d be completely rid of any fear of walking into a conversation and making a comment that isn’t appropriate for the moment. Oh, you’d be feared. You’d be revered. Look how much power you can get from simply reading a book!
Away from retorts and books and on to the message of this letter, I have a question I’m unable to satisfactorily answer. I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I consider it worthy enough to share it with you. It’s a question about pain and pleasure—not particularly in the existential or carnal sense, but in how we optimize for pleasure. Before I ask the question, here is a not-so-brief background on how it came about.
A while ago, I needed a placeholder text for use on a project. The text could have been anything—an excerpt from a letter, a scraped Wikipedia page, anything at all. But I sought the standard of placeholder texts—Lorem Ipsum. You have very likely seen it in use, either in PowerPoint templates, portfolio templates, physical prints, or graphic designs. It’s a Latin-like text named after its first two words and is pretty common. I found a website that generates the text, and in the process, stumbled on its origin. I can’t attest to the reliability of the available information, but you can check it out here.
According to the website, Lorem Ipsum was derived from an original piece of Latin text, titled De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum by Cicero. I indulged myself in reading parts of this text (the English translation, of course) and I found it quite interesting. What a wise man Cicero was! The following is an excerpt from the text, and the motivation behind the question I shall soon ask you;
“In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains.”
There is a utilitarian undertone in those words, as it states that if it was entirely up to us, we’d act such that we maximize (wholly embrace) pleasure and minimize (completely avoid) pain. This makes sense. Cicero acknowledges, however, that in everyday living, we sometimes have to avoid certain pleasures and instead, embrace some pain. This also makes sense. To conclude, he says that the guiding principle for wise people is that they should reject smaller pleasures for greater ones, and endure bad pains to avoid worse ones. Now comes my question; how do you know when to stop rejecting small pleasures for greater ones? How do you know when to finally settle on a particular pleasure, rather than reject it because there is an even greater pleasure?
Say you have $100 and that’s the cost of a bag of chips. You could say that spending that money on a bag is settling for a small pleasure. Investing the money instead, such that you are $100 richer and able to afford two bags of chips is settling for a bigger pleasure. Ah, but an even bigger pleasure awaits you if you invest this new fortune, and can afford four, five, six or even twenty bags of chips. You could continue investing to maximize the number of chips you can buy without ever buying any. At some point, however, you need to settle, don’t you? You need to have that bag(s) of chips. But how do you know when it’s time to settle and enjoy the crunchy chips? I’m not sure what the answer is.
You could say when you have $200, why not spend half on a bag of chips and invest the rest? So that way, you’d have gotten some satisfaction from eating the chips and still have the prospect to buy more in the future. Doing this, however, means you’re not maximizing the possible number of chips you could get in the future as the original $200 would have compounded better than the $100 you now have. It means you are settling for a small pleasure. So the question really is for how long should you delay gratifying your desires? How do you know when it’s time to finally satisfy them? I don’t have a good answer, but we need to satisfy those desires at some point.
Billy Joel’s Vienna and Passenger’s Flight of the Crow are two songs that remind me of the importance of going through life and ensuring to enjoy its pleasures. Although one is more upbeat than the other, they are both beautifully written and accompanied by painful nostalgia. You should listen to them. We should enjoy life’s pleasures, yes, I know that. And I’m sure you do as well. But how do you know when to enjoy them, dear friend?
Fin.
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Write you soon, merci!
- Wolemercy