 Why can't we just be happy? Why do things have to be difficult? Why can't we just enjoy life and feel good all the time? I mean it's such a simple question and I think many people will just say you know life sucks life is difficult and You can't enjoy it all the time, but Well, you know when I was younger. I always wanted to imagine Well, well, how do how do you know that life can't just be fun all the time? Why why do you have to have this suffering? Maybe this suffering comes from having the wrong attitude towards life and Really if we just let ourselves just enjoy it then life can just be fun the whole time But of course I learned that It doesn't really work that way Now they're obvious message because as much as enjoyment is of course an important part of life and We all have to enjoy ourselves sometimes, but Anytime I made Fun and pleasure the center of my life when I made it the most important thing. I'd always find it slipping away it would always Just the more I focused on it The harder it would be to get and You know on the other hand when I Focused less on having fun and more on doing Good things and you know more and what I'm doing rather than about what I'm feeling then Those tended to be more fun and more enjoyable times So Why can't we just have fun? Now well, one of the reasons goes back to the ancient philosophers And I'm not sure which ones were saying this thing. Maybe it was I think a lot of them said it Aristotle Epicurus Maybe the Stoics as well like it was just a general idea that Pleasure is something Moving pleasure is in a change Pleasure is a change of state pleasure is not a state you cannot be in A state of pleasure pleasure is the movement from one state to another So if you pursue pleasure, you're pursuing this ever Changing Thing that it's never there. You can never grasp it. You can never Rest in it. You can never keep it. It's always going to be fleeting and So the more you try to chase it you know, it's just like trying to dig water and It's just not Going to stay for example, if we're Hungry and then we eat so we feel good in that change from being hungry to being satisfied same with Sleeping with sex with achieving a goal. We are Satisfied in the Change of our state, but we can't ever rest in the state of pleasure and When we do we try to maintain that one state we try to remain in that one state then it's like We we want we want to preserve it. We want to keep that state going but instead it becomes this kind of Degeneration this disintegration where we're just sort of Crumbling or just sort of like, you know Just like collapsing into a blob gradually because we're trying to maintain some kind of State that cannot be maintained and so we're just sitting there Or it's like trying to fight against the motion of time itself and trying to like fight to keep a moment alive that feeling of Fighting against time. I want this moment to last I just don't want this moment to end and it's it's such a frustrating miserable thing because Time does keep going and whatever feeling we have in the moment always fades and so There's nothing new in this message. It's been there since ancient times, but it took me a long time to really take this message to heart and really understand that there is No point in pursuing pleasure as a central goal in life It's always it's it's something that comes as a byproduct of the things that we do and it's always something that comes in fleeting moments and So that there's no point in trying to Preserve it and instead we can set up the conditions for Future pleasure to arise and that's a better use of our time than directly pursuing pleasure and on the bright side the The other the other side of this is that just as pleasure is fleeting and momentary and Expresses a a change of state. It's the same with pain if we're feeling a sense of anxiety pain a sense of dissatisfaction all of those feelings are Feelings that are temporary that pass with time and If it is something that's being renewed if the pain is being renewed and seems to be continuing there must be something that's that's refreshing that pain that keeps bringing it back and So these things just as pleasure will not last forever neither will pain so instead It seems like these have become such central Such a central focus of so much of everyday life that we really it's easy to focus on pleasure and pain but if we can move to the next level behind them focus on the causes of pleasure and pain and Set up our lives for better future conditions and that that's the better use of our time than focusing so much on directly Achieving these fleeting states of pleasure and avoiding these fleeting states of pain