A person’s task is to avoid pain, not to chase pleasure.
The harm that pain inflicts is real. The joy that pleasure delivers is illusion.
Pain can ruin a person completely. Pleasure cannot make a person completely happy.
Pleasure is only a fleeting state — it isn’t real.
Take someone who buys a grand house.
If a fire breaks out and the house burns to the ground, the pain that follows can shadow the rest of their life (if they don’t work through it).
But buying the house itself only brings joy for a stretch. Soon enough that fades, and they go looking for the next hit — and each new hit is just as illusory as the last.
So the main task in life is to avoid pain, not to chase pleasure. Avoid pain, and happiness arrives on its own.
My own definition of happiness: a calm life, and a mind at peace with itself.
The same logic applies to investing. The first principle isn’t growing capital — it’s protecting it.
Happiness is reached by sidestepping pain, not by hunting down pleasure.
The idea that drinking makes you happy is a lie. For most people, drinking is what they do when something is weighing on them.
Rather than face the thing that’s eating at them, they drink to escape it for a few hours — and that is foolish, shortsighted, and eventually turns on them.