Is life only meant for enjoyment?

Isn’t life meant to just have fun? Isn’t life meant to enjoy?

The world thinks this way, but why did a prince, who lived several centuries ago, think differently? Siddhartha Gautama, a rich prince in ancient India, had all the riches, all the pleasures that the world could offer him. Why did he give it all up? Why didn’t he think that life was just meant to be enjoyed? What inspired him to seek the truth? He found the true meaning of life - that life couldn’t escape suffering, that this gift of life given to us is checkered with pain and misery; we cannot escape it. Think about it. - we all have to face death. We grow, we get diseased, we decay and we die. We all face misery in life and while there may be pleasures, joy and happiness, eventually, we are going to face unhappiness and be miserable. Therefore, if we just close our eyes, have fun and enjoy life, we may escape the minor miseries of life only to be hit by that big misery finally. But, if we start living and realizing the truth of who we are, what we are and why we are here; if we come face to face with the truth, then we will not have to face that ultimate suffering. By realizing the truth and living a life of liberation by achieving Nirvana, we would attain the highest state of bliss and happiness, ‘ananda’, and move to Nirvana, Liberation.

Therefore, we have a choice. To escape life by just having fun, or realizing the truth of life and reaching that state of ultimate bliss, which is what Buddha chose. What would you choose??

AiR

Like it or not, to facilitate survival and continuation of the next generation, ALL humans has inherited a pain or pleasure circuit embedded very deep in the brain.
The purpose of the pleasure circuit is to induce humans toward whatever favor survival and continuation of the next generations. The pain circuit is designed to ensure all humans avoid threats that are likely to bring premature death, hinder survival and continuation of the species.

The above algorithm that triggers either the pain or pleasure circuit is rather crude and thus generated unwarranted pains that at times overwhelmed the person.

I don’t believe there was a real historical person as Gautama Buddha. Rather the Story of the Buddha is merely a myth of represent those terrible existential ‘pains’ that overwhelmed the majority of humans which even the pleasure circuit cannot contra.

The pleasure circuit is vulnerable to addiction which lead to more pains which lead to greater and compounding addiction, sex, drugs, alcohol, etc.
Along this line, life is not solely for enjoyment as this may lead to addiction and its compounding pain.

As the Buddha eventually advocated, life should be led via the Middle Way, i.e. avoiding extremes and bearing with whatever unavoidable pains and being artfully satiated by mindful moderate [not extreme] pleasures.

It still doesn’t explain why the Consciousness actually senses pleasure as pleasure and pain as pain.

Life isn’t “meant to be” anything specific. There are multiple, nay, there is an infinite number of possible patterns that lifeforms of any sort can exhibit. One of them is hedonism, or the pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of pain. Moreover, patterns aren’t fixed. They change, they evolve or they devolve, through time.

With that in mind, it becomes apparent that your topic is a question, not of “what is”, which is to say of factual matters, but of “what ought to be”, which is a question of values, of what is better.

You are basically asking whether hedonism is the right – the best – way to live. And my answer to that is ABSOLUTE NO.

The scientific type is quick to make a naive mistake of discriminating between two different types of hedonism while thinking he is discriminating between hedonism and non-hedonism.

Hedonism refers to a category of patterns of self-directed behavior that are characterized by striving to maximize pleasure and to minimize pain. It does not matter whether one is merely interested in short-term pleasure (hedonism of the present moment, instant gratification, or irrational hedonism) or whether one is ready to sacrifice short-term pleasure for the sake of long-term pleasure (hedonism of the future moment, delayed gratification, or rational hedonism.) In both cases, we are dealing with hedonistic pattern of behavior, which is to say, with a form of self-directed behavior that strives to maximize pleasure and to minimize pain.

Don’t make a mistake of trying to prove that every human pattern of behavior can be reduced to hedonism. Subordinating one pattern of behavior (e.g. non-hedonism) to another pattern of behavior (e.g. hedonism) in order to make it become another pattern of behavior (e.g. reducing non-hedonism to hedonism by showing how non-hedonism can be subordinated to hedonism) does not make it become another pattern in reality. It only does so in one’s imagination, which is to say, it merely shows that it is possible for a pattern to be non-hedonistic in it’s appearance but hedonistic in its core. But it does not demonstrate that that’s the case in reality.

That would be an example of intellectual levelling. The denial of differences by reducing them to something that is common.

There is a difference between avoidance behavior and pain. Avoidance behavior requires no pain.

Living equals experiencing the gamut of sensations bound together by thoughts and emotions.

Wrong understanding of my point.

I mentioned the relation between pain and threats to the well being and survival of the individual and therefrom the species.

Primarily all sensations of pain [manifested as various physical and mental sufferings] at the fundamental levels are for the purpose of avoidance of threats to the well-being of the individual and therefrom the species.

There are exceptions, e.g. pain could be pleasure in the case of the masochist, etc. These are exceptions where the pain circuit is triggered away from the norm.

I think when you introduce the very highly controversial concept of ‘consciousness’ it sort of messed up your proposition of ‘why’?

Thus you need to reframe your hypothesis from a more tenable and realistic perspective.

The straight forward framework is all human experienced the sensation of pain, i.e. physical or mentally.

The next question obvious is how to deal with [eliminate, prevent,] such pains.
To deal with such pains we need to trace it to its root causes.
Once we have identified the ultimate root cause, then we find solutions and corrective actions to resolve [eliminate, prevent,] such pains where possible.
If we cannot eliminate it at present, at least we understand how it arise and thus keep striving to find solutions.

The concept of ‘consciousness’ is very controversial [the hard problem] and very wobbly and to introduce such an unstable variable it will destabilize your overall question, hypothesis and proposition. The concept of ‘consciousness’ [hard problem] should thus be left as an independent issue itself to be resolved and understood.

Youre missing the point altogether.
Why do certain chemicals cause pain in the first place?

You may be looking at a limited definition of pleasure and an expanded definition of Hedonism.
Pleasure as in, eating candy and potato chips every day 24/7.
But is not a well-balanced and healthy life of growth also a pleasure in of itself? Yet striving to such a thing is not hedonism.

Who “escapes Life by having fun?” Life is also, not only, meant for enjoyment.

There are feelings of great pleasure involved, true, but they are not the aim, thus, it’s not hedonism.

I wasn’t correcting you.

I don’t think it thinks so.

Pleasure is in the brain. With meditation, you can feel pleasure regardless of the circumstances. (You can achieve the same with drugs, but meditation is much more powerful as it gives you much more control.)

Pleasure is a sign that mental activity is within limits. Pain, on the other hand, is a sign that mental activity is exceeding the limit.

Meditation is reduction in mental activity (volitional restraint, as I called it in another topic.) It’s very useful to know how to meditate.

Excess mental activity, which is to say pain/stress, is undesirable because it makes it difficult to coordinate one’s actions. Thus one has to deal with it by reducing some of the mental activity.

You can manage stress irrationally, by randomly choosing which mental activity to deactivate, or rationally, by employing reason to decide which activity is to be deactivated (this involves general deactivation in order to create enough mental room for reason to be activated.)

Hedonism is either irrational management of stress or rational management of stress that is subordinated to pleasure (long-term pleasure, I suppose.)

Pain is related to the pain circuit in the brain.
When this pain circuit is triggered by whatever means, then ‘pain’ waves exists within the brain.
By default the pain circuit is connected to the ‘feel’ sense organ so that pain can be felt as a sens[e]ation.

If the feel-sense-circuit is not connected to the pain circuit then the person will not feel pain even though if pain waves reverberate or emerge within the brain system.
Also if the feel sense is inhibited by drugs [e.g pain killers, etc.] then one will not sense pain.

These certain chemicals must have triggered the pain circuit to cause “pain” waves that are supposed to be sensed by the “feel” neural circuits.

It is not only chemicals, even thoughts can trigger the pain circuit and cause one to feel pain [mental or even physical-liked pains]. Note the feel neural circuit generate a wide range of pain sensations ranging from mental to physical.