Why is hedonism considered bad? Is it just that it upsets Christfags?

"Being a man" is a spook. :^)

If you're a hedonist it certainly is

Read some Kierkegaard. Hedonism is too unreliable.

You need to define exactly what you mean by hedonism.

Hedonism has been criticized since long before the birth of Christ. The most accurate argument of it is the Stoic one: You cannot control the world around you. You cannot get everything your animal appetites desire. It is not possible to get "enough" to be happy and everyone who is older than 12 knows this.

Therefore which is a more realistic, more workable strategy: To dedicate your life to mindless consumption of pleasure, or to put your appetites in order such that you are happy with what you can realistically have, and your appetites do not rule you?

Hedonism is surrender to the most basic and pathetic instincts of man. Self control and self-discipline are superior in every single regard. There is nothing admirable or respectable about a hedonist, and that is not something that only Christians believe, anyone who has ever looked with revulsion at a morbidly obese man or a crack addict knows it.

You cannot and will not ever get what you want if you define what you want as "pleasure." Human happiness is chemical and relative. Rather, what you should do is to sort yourself out and redefine what you want as what you can plausibly achieve. Take joy in your work, in healthy activities, in thought, and suddenly you will find that your life is full of joy. Take joy in excess and degeneracy and you will find that your life is degenerate--but at least it will be short.

No, it isn't. Spooks are things external to you that you allow to impact your life. "Being a Man" in the sense that it is uniformly used--being in control of yourself, being disciplined--is 100% internal. You have actually managed to call a Spook the one thing that is NOT a Spook: Will.

Isn't saying something is hedonistic the same as saying grass is green or the sky is blue?
Everything we do is hedonistic. When you consider the super organism that is our interconnected species. The invention of the internet has destroyed all concept of individuality. Now what is good for one is in the hopes that it is good for all regardless of the truth as to whether or not it is.

>everyone who is older than 12 knows this.

>If you were a REAL adult you would know this! Don't you want to be an adult?

Why does everyone keep appealing to this.

Hedonism just sort of breaks when you realize maximizing pleasure would mean to go to school and study real hard for a decade

Who said it was bad?

isn't shitposting your life away on cartoon forums hedonism? practice what u preach op and gtfo

Not what I meant. There is nothing wrong with being a child or with lacking adult experiences, but children are different from adults. A child can actually be hedonistic because that is what childhood is for--they exist to grow into adults. But an adult must confront the reality that once he is grown and his flesh is no longer malleable he can no longer endlessly consume, he must begin to produce.

So a child may look at a fat person and not realize that that person is the result of the exact behaviors children engage in--but continued indefinitely. An adult must be capable of looking at such things and recognizing them. I am saying that because everyone reading this is an adult, everyone reading this understands exactly what I am saying.

Because you're an overgrown manchild who doesn't get the Hedonic Treadmill.

Its the first divergence of further thought.
Thoughts work the same as electricity in that they follow the path of least resistance. Many people are able to break the first barrier, but then they lax their thought train and end up porting in the first dock they see which is
>You're not a REAL adult
As though age has anything to do with someones actions. If that were the case then the voting age should lie in the latter median ie 60+ years old. Its a revision of the childhood idea that adults know best because we as children know nothing. So adults MUST know how to live correctly, which is entirely false.

>valuing happiness that much
I'll conjure my boys Nietzsche and Jesus Christ to fuck your shit up nigga.

Happiness defined as pleasure is simple not the measure of the Good. Pleasure is neither necessary nor sufficient for the goodness of an action. Nor is pleasure a lowest common denominator to which all other values can be reduced, as hedonistic utilitarianism seems to require.

Even if we could calculate alternative states of happiness, it seems clear to most people that doing the right thing is not always a matter of maximizing happiness or pleasure. Imagine a state in which we could all hook ourselves up to machines that would sustain us all while providing us with enduring and fully maximized states of pleasure throughout our lives. Suppose we could even propagate ourselves, thereby ensuring that we continue to maximize pleasure by ensuring that the next generation is born. If this could be achieved only by giving up all external activities so that we merely sat in a comfortable chair and experienced this maximum pleasure for the rest of our lives, fully nourished and cared for by some cadre of machines, would this really be the exalted pinnacle of ethical achievement? It hardly seems to be a life worth living at all, yet it would be preferable, on utilitarian principles, to the lives we actually live.

There is, moreover, a second aspect to this problem. Values such as trust, altruism, fidelity, civic-mindedness, courage, compassion, and so forth do not seem to translate directly into pleasure, and vice versa. They may sometimes lead to pleasure and sometimes to its opposite, but they cannot be reduced to, or measured by, pleasure states. This is called the incommensurability of ethical values. In other words, there is not lowest common denominator (pleasure or anything else) by which all values and all states of affairs can be measured. Diverse values are apples and oranges with one another. The world is simply more complex than the ethical hedonist assumes. This is why ethics is a matter of practical, not theoretical, reasoning.

Maximizing pleasure
Minimizing pain

What exactly is wrong with this philosophy, other than memers conflating it with mindless consumption?

Wow those girls are not very attractive

>Maximizing pleasure
>Minimizing pain
>not mindless consumption

you are retarded

Because you hurt others by maximizing your pleasure.

Christ, basically every major section of the Bible

I'm aware of every purchase i make during the day.

It misses the point. It's basically saying "be happy." Well no shit, but what this translates into is a philosophy of materialistic gratification without analyzing WHY things make you happy, and whether or not you can CONTROL the things that make you happy.

And the answer is, you can. Physical pleasure is not synonymous with happiness, nor is it the greatest good. It is not a worthwhile philosophy to study because it teaches you literally nothing of value.

not defending the hedonists but you guys sound like you hardly know what hedonism is about

So what is hedonism about?

Things make us happy because we are biologically predisposed to find happiness in things.
The statement:
>Physical pleasure is not synonymous with happiness
adds nothing of merit to the governance of people. Which is what ethics and a large part of philosophy (excluding the study of logic, linguistics ect ) is about.
The question is: How can we MAXIMISE material wealth without reducing other forms of happiness ie social, intellectual. The resources for social and intellectual wealth have already been conquered, the only thing that matters now is maximising material wealth. It's the only form of philosophy that matters now again excluding the aforementioned outlying categories.

It's like utilitarism but for one person.

Whats utilitarianism about?

But utilitarianism is hedonism for all people.
(Just kidding, of course, but you're still dumb.)

Read Phaedo, a book written before christianism

>The resources for social and intellectual wealth have already been conquered

...que?

you need 2 be smart to actually enjoy it but no 1 likes to sex smart people...so it's just a fucking waste braindead normies having "fun" they can't comprehend

Internet. Wealth of human knowledge as well as social media. Also we need little more than 4 friends and alcohol. Not even mentioning (almost) world wide travel and things like krazy golf, bowling, pub games, chess, video games, speed dating, actual dating, raves, clubs, book clubs, anime clubs, movie societies. There is enough out there for someone to state their social needs as well as their intellectual needs. All we need now is to fulfil material needs.

min-maxing is for shitters

Hedonism is living life like it was an MMORPG, you live for the "CLING" sound of the level up and know the best endorphin farming spots, like all MMOs it gets hollow and boring.

Because most of the people on this board fail to accomplish the basic goals of hedonism, let alone even a first kiss. You can't love something you can't do. There'd be no point. The only thing that would happen if we loved hedonism is that we would be miserable.

THIS user has the most valid point in the thread.

There are lots of other facets of life that don't directly relate to happiness or pleasure, but are considered necessary.

Sadly, I'm sure there are lots of people browsing Veeky Forums that would gladly be hooked up to a pleasure machine just to avoid real life. They have already done it.

>he wouldn't sit down in the eternal pleasure chair

>only four Veeky Forums tabs open

What a fucking pleb.

Because pleasure can be good without being the goal of existence, or the only good.

>unironically reading threads you did not create yourself

>not creating at least 15 bait threads per day

Seriously underrated metaphor

You're using a hedonistic argument, though. When you say,
>it gets hollow and boring
you're arguing that the reason hedonism is bad is that it doesn't maximise pleasure in the long run. But that's not an argument against hedonism at all. That's just arguing that prioritising pleasure in the present will lead to less pleasure in the long run, which is a purely hedonistic argument.
It's perplexing how often people try to use hedonism to refute hedonism.