Convince me that physical pleasure is futile

Take the epicurean approach. Yes, pleasure is good, but what feels good in the moment may not bring you the most joy in the long term. Temper your pleasure seeking with logic, reason, and foresight. An extreme example is something like heroin, sure it may give you the best opiate high possible, but is the life of a junkie the ultimate joy you can achieve?

>Why should I choose other things over being a decadent, hedonistic degenerate
Because that's not virtuous.

i don't need an argument, the regret you feel after getting smashed/eating too much/having sex with anyone is sufficient

As you get older you'll realise how well this works in most cases.

It's not futile, fun things are fun.

The problem comes with the mismanagement of pleasure seeking. Being a decadent degenerate ultimately leads to more suffering than pleasure.

If you truly want to maximise your well-being you should live a humble low stress life of simple pleasures, taking good care of your health, cultivating habits that lead to long term thriving and surrounding yourself with good people.

>fun things are fun
No, they are not. I mean, I can't be the only one to feel this way.

if you believed hedonism were an end to itself you wouldn't be asking this question

If you suffer from anhedonia you should consult your doctor and maybe get a referral to a psychiatrist/psychologist.

it's not a recent development, I've always found that "fun" things aren't particularly enjoyable. They're extremely superficial, fleeting, and meaningless.

It depends on what you mean by "fun" things

I mean things that your average guy will refer to as "fun".

The average guy is a strawman. I prefer reading over strip clubs and enjoy working on my car and cooking fancy food for myself. I'm also a football fanatic and casual anime fan. Most people are a compilation juxtapositions is all I'm saying. Do what makes you happy and don't worry about social memes about what "guys are supposed to like"

>Do what makes you happy
That's what I'm disputing. You shouldn't focus on what makes you "happy" or what is "fun", you should cultivate virtue.

Yes but cultivating your virtue is making you happy user. You're obviously gaining some sort of fulfilment from it.

Not now, maybe eventually, but that's besides the point. Because while happiness/fullfillment is the proper consequence of the pursuit of excellence, it's not an end in and of itself.

True enough, but not all self denial will make you virtuous. There's a healthy balance; I'm sure you're not living the life of an ascetic is all I'm saying.

If you were serious about cultivating virtue and pursuing excellence you would leave this place and stop wasting time arguing over trifles with strangers on the internet

This is a gigantic strawman of what pursuing virtue means and it's unfairly applied only to this effort.
If you see someone who wants to learn how to play the guitar doing something that is not playing the guitar, you don't go "if you actually were serious about it, you would be playing the guitar right now". People need some time off. Besides that, being on here takes a minimal amount of time.

Missing my point, probably intentionally. Veeky Forums is overflowing with hate and idiocy of all kinds, pornography, violence, blasphemy, etc etc. What you do has a direct effect on who you are. You think you can come here and spend an afternoon calling strangers niggerfaggots and then go back to the "pursuit of virtue" unchanged? It's akin to wanting to learn how to play guitar, but spending your free time smashing your fingers with a hammer

>You think you can come here and spend an afternoon calling strangers niggerfaggots
But I don't do that. In fact, when people act in a rude way towards me on here, I try to be even more polite.

>spending your free time smashing your fingers with a hammer
That was pretty good.

No desire for anything can ever be satisfied. How do I into asceticism? Asking for a friend

If you're asking this question, you'll never be capable of being a content hedonist

You should mean things that you find fun by it, not something a hypothetical other person finds fun.

virtue/excellence are arbitrary memes. at least pleasure and suffering are self-evident.

why give your whole life to a random spook?

Throw a way your non-essential possessions, shave your head, eat one meal a day, be celibate. Start with that.

>virtue/excellence are arbitrary memes.
I don't see how they're arbitrary at all. They're either grounded on teleology or teleonomy, which may leaves some vagueness when it comes to specific details, but arbitrary? No.
>why give your whole life to a random spook?
It's not random, it's not a spook in any negative sense of the word, and the reason why is because it's the right way to be.

how do you determine what is virtuous?

As I mentioned earlier, through teleolonomy (someone else might do it teleologically), grounded in anthropology, psychology and so on, basically, grounded in the study of the human creature.

*teleonomy

So you study how humans live and then conclude that that is how they are supposed to live?

is≠ought

Yes, it's not just you. Intelligent people have realized this for thousands of years. You know, like Buddha.

Cultivate non attachment through meditation. That leads to wanting less.

It's futile because I tried and I simply cannot get a gf. I have come to peace with this. I'm also getting too old.

Do you mean things that are socially conditioned "fun"? Like shit that normies think you're weird for not doing/enjoying.

Still largely arbitrary, there is too much room for subjectivity and debate. Which means that it doesn't matter what you call it, or how you approach it, it doesn't mean anything in particularly anyway. What reasons is there to even use the word, outside of historical inheritance and longing for what never was and never will be. While fun/pleasure certainly differs greatly, when one finds it, it's pretty self-contained and self-evident. The difference is that one bases itself on a real outcome, whereas the other bases itself on ideals not guaranteed to really do or mean anything.

Strike a balance, grasshopper. I have spent a lifetime being a degenerate. That does not mean I am not successful in life. Work hard, party harder. P.S. Cocaine is bad. Heroin too. Avoid hard drugs.

niggerfaggot

perfect! follow the path of hedonism! the futility will be understood once you understand it leads to no where.

It only seems like fun but when you actually get there it's boring and gross

your dopamine receptors will stop working correctly soon, anhedonia and the ensuing anomie it induces are brutal for hedonists to come to terms with. the only solution would be either to abstain, so asceticism which is anathema or worse still doing activities you wouldn’t normally have wanted to engage in for the same rush. You can let your imagination fill in what that would entail

You'll start experiencing the lack of pleasure as suffering if you devote yourself to hedonism.

I can't but eventually you will get tired of that stuff so there's no need

dopamine vs. seratonin

>being born into a society so wealthy the children go around playing as paupers for fun
Absolutely disgusting desu.

OP physical pleasure is futile because it is finite. You will die. Whether you die an ignorant animal bleating out prayers or whether you pass silently knowing for a fact in your soul that you will return to the divine depends on whether you gain wisdom in the course of your life.

As the Spartans say: know thyself, and nothing in excess. There is an argument to be made against an excess of wisdom, a paralysis before God that instills anhedonia, but I wouldn't worry about it in your case. :^)

It really is.

Not simply how do they happen to live in one place, but what they're made of, what they're features and and what the functions of those features are as well.
You go to your doctor and your doctor says "well user, your liver isn't functioning that well due to your alcoholism". At that point, do you tell him "acshually doc, there is no such thing as a liver functioning well because you can't bridge the gap from how a liver functions to how a liver ought to function"? No, you don't, because you understand that by studying the physiology of human livers, we can understand how livers are supposed to work.
>Still largely arbitrary
I disagree.
>there is too much room for subjectivity and debate
Like literally every other human endeavor into complex fields of knowledge.

Sissy hypno.

>>being born into a society so wealthy the children go around playing as paupers for fun
>Absolutely disgusting desu.
You're talking about people telling others to be ascetic, right?

Meditate and work on your overall self-awareness. Physical pleasures are cool but they stop feeling that great pretty fast. Really indulging in some pleasurable stuff that you love should reveal this. It's a cool human design feature that allows us to do "substantial" stuff without missing out too much. Also helping others and doing stuff feels good and doing "meaningful" stuff will make the parts of you fill good that pure physical pleasures probably can't.

>You go to your doctor and your doctor says "well user, your liver isn't functioning that well due to your alcoholism". At that point, do you tell him "acshually doc, there is no such thing as a liver functioning well because you can't bridge the gap from how a liver functions to how a liver ought to function"? No, you don't, because you understand that by studying the physiology of human livers, we can understand how livers are supposed to work.
That's only because you presume someone's goal it to continue living. There is a way that you would want your liver to work if you want to continue to live in health. There is a way that you would want your liver to work if you're deliberately drinking yourself to death. They way you want things to function depends on your requirements, not some sort of objective correct way of functioning.

Actually by your reasoning, if you say that by studying human physiology we can study how our bodies are supposed to work, you could actually say 'well humans all break down and die so everything is as it should be' when some patient gets diagnosed with cancer. But we don't do that, we try to fight the cancer because of the patients desire to live, even though cancer is perfectly natural.

>That's only because you presume someone's goal it to continue living
No, not at all, a heart functions well or not depending on how it is, it has nothing to do with his owner's intent.
If owner's intent is what decides whether an organ is ok or not, then someone wanting to fly by flailing his arms makes his arms not functioning correctly even if they're perfectly healthy.
Which is completely ludicrous.
>cancer is perfectly natural.
"natural" in the sense that "It happens in nature" maybe. Not in the sense that it's conforming to the purpose of the organ it's developing in, as can be seen by hte simple fact that cancer stops organs from working correctly.

>No, not at all, a heart functions well or not depending on how it is, it has nothing to do with his owner's intent.
The definition of 'well' depends on what you want it to do. If you want to die your heart beating isn't optimal. I honestly don't understand how you could even phantom that objects in the world come with inherent purposes.

>If owner's intent is what decides whether an organ is ok or not, then someone wanting to fly by flailing his arms makes his arms not functioning correctly even if they're perfectly healthy.
Which is completely ludicrous.
It's not ludicrous. If I try to kill an animal with a pointy stick but the stick breaks the stick malfunctioned, even though the tree didn't grow it for the purpose of stabbing animals with. The purpose of an object is how it's used by an entity capable of intent.

>"natural" in the sense that "It happens in nature" maybe. Not in the sense that it's conforming to the purpose of the organ it's developing in, as can be seen by hte simple fact that cancer stops organs from working correctly.
That's the point, 'it happens in nature' is the only 'natural' there is. Organs don't have purposes, they only have effects. The sun melts the ice and creates rivers that animals can drink from, but the sun doesn't shine deliberately for the purpose of quenching the thirst of deer.

You're too caught up in the metaphorical language people use to explain progresses. Evolution is blind. Rats don't fuck in order to spread their genes to the next generation, it's just that rats that happen to fuck end up spawning more rats as an effect and the ones that don't do not.

*than the ones that do not , apologies for sloppy posting

>The definition of 'well' depends on what you want it to do
It doesn't since as I've already explained it leads to absurd situations.
>It's not ludicrous
Are you seriously saying that it's not ludicrous to say that my arm is not functioning correctly because I want it to directly use it to fly, which is something that is impossible for it to do? No, you're not, in fact, if someone were to seriously tell you to your face that there's something wrong with his arm because it's not allowing to take flight, you would probably think "this person is insane".
Also, an arm isn't an object and even then, no, the purpose of an object isn't simply how someone happens to use it: if a retard were to use a hammer in order to sew, you would be perfectly right in saying "no, you're using the wrong object, hammers aren't for sewing". And you'd be able to tell that evne if you'd never encountered a hammer or the notion of a hammer before in your entire life, just by observing the hammer and studying its shape. In fact, that's precisely how we can tell what objects from the past found in archeological digs, that we have no knowledge of, were used for.
>That's the point, 'it happens in nature' is the only 'natural' there is
No, it isn't. Words have more than one meaning.
>You're too caught up in the metaphorical language
No, I'm not, you are just completely unfamiliar with teleonomy, which is why you're raising the typical layman-tier objections. And there's nothing wrong with that if you're not actually supposed to know this stuff, but it's not particularly interesting.

"You should" doesn't exist

>Are you seriously saying that it's not ludicrous to say that my arm is not functioning correctly because I want it to directly use it to fly, which is something that is impossible for it to do? No, you're not, in fact, if someone were to seriously tell you to your face that there's something wrong with his arm because it's not allowing to take flight, you would probably think "this person is insane".
It is certainly out of the ordinary. That person might have unrealistic expectations, but not because the arm is 'meant' for a certain purpose, but simply because it's not suited for his goals. Neither berries not flint are made to cut throats but the latter gets the job done where the former doesn't.

>Also, an arm isn't an object and even then, no, the purpose of an object isn't simply how someone happens to use it: if a retard were to use a hammer in order to sew, you would be perfectly right in saying "no, you're using the wrong object, hammers aren't for sewing". And you'd be able to tell that evne if you'd never encountered a hammer or the notion of a hammer before in your entire life, just by observing the hammer and studying its shape. In fact, that's precisely how we can tell what objects from the past found in archeological digs, that we have no knowledge of, were used for.
Hammers don't work very well for sewing but it has nothing to do with inherent purpose, it's because it's not good at getting the job done. You can sew perfectly well with a piece of bone and tendons even though they weren't designed for that purpose. You can use a rock to hammer things. Purpose only comes in play when something is used according to a certain intention.

>No, it isn't. Words have more than one meaning.
Sure, but the other meaning in this case is nonsensical.

>No, I'm not, you are just completely unfamiliar with teleonomy, which is why you're raising the typical layman-tier objections. And there's nothing wrong with that if you're not actually supposed to know this stuff, but it's not particularly interesting.
As far as I know teleonomy only deals with apparent purpose/evolutionary """"design"""", not the almost religious teleology you seem to imply.

I use to think it was a bad argument too but then i look back and realise how naive that was.

Nah, OP's pic. Smart catch but I wasn't suggesting OP be more ascetic, just better read.

this, it's so simple