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This article is filled with death and despair. Truly. Too many different types to list all the different trigger warnings. If you aren’t in the mood for some serious sad stuff, just jump to our next article.
There have been Hedonists for as long as there have been humans. Not just the passive Hedonism that we see all throughout the animal kingdom, where animals move toward pleasure and away from pain, but active, thoughtful Hedonism.
Eight men own the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world's population. Inequality is higher than it has ever been, and it would only take a modest wealth redistribution to raise billions of people out of poverty.
There are completely mundane things that each of us deals with on a day to day basis, that make our lives a little more hellish, and can even harm us in the long run. If we wish to decrease the silly, potentially life-threatening, and often unnecessary suffering from these sorts of banal experiences, there are two tools that often come in handy.
Every thought or experience, no matter how cerebral or mystical it may seem, is intricately tied to feelings that are felt in the body.
Perhaps this archetypal story is why we can’t get our shit together in order to solve issues like climate change. Perhaps our ability to react to villains comes at the expense of being able to proactively solve issues.
For the first time, we had an overwhelming experience of seeing people really resonate with our work. So many people came to our booth and exclaimed: “YES, I AM A HEDONIST.”
Cults have a pretty terrible track record for beginning with some beautiful utopian idealism and ending with very real-world violence and abuse.
If the purpose of traditional schooling is an attempt at preparing children for the real world—a world where they will be coerced or forced into activities that they’d rather not do for most of their waking hours—then today’s school is at least helping them have realistic expectations about their future.
A huge part of the “spiritual but not religious” vibe might be the idea that we don’t have to look beyond ourselves and our environments to experience the divine.
Once people realize how much they have lost, they will want it all back. Our call is to reforest this land. The only thing standing in our way is public opinion.
Helping others and doing things we love should obviously be better motivators for contributing to society than the bleak alternative of trying to make enough money to not starve.
Drugs play a huge role in society. When we think about a drug critically, we must ask ourselves what sort of effect it might have on our society and what sort of society we want to create.
When we experience any work of fiction, we always ask ourselves how a Hedonist might act if they were presented the same issues as the characters in the story
We must come to realize how lucky we are to be alive and conscious—to have this amazing planet that we are perfectly adapted to. We need no air scrubbers, no protein synthesizers, and no laser cannons.
The Hippies had a “groovy vibe, man”, but no clear philosophical structure within which to ground that vibe.
Of course, if we believe there is no way out, we are pretty fucking unlikely to find a way out.
In an effort to facilitate more people (including us) leaning into new sensations that lead to pleasure, we are compiling a list of sensations worth exploring so we can turn it into some kind of epic art project that we can pass out to our friends, strangers, people soliciting merchandise or religion at our door, and more specifically, you (our readers).
I like to think of it like this: if my life were a work of fiction and there were an author writing the story, there must be small parts of my life that act as foreshadowing to the important events in my future.
My main resolution for 2019 is all about pleasure; it rejects the expectations that society, my friends and family, and even I have put on myself. It is the resolution that has been hidden underneath every resolution about weight loss or changing my body that I have ever made:
Slowly I have come to know that the magic of Harry Potter isn’t in the wands, it’s in a group of people living their lives together. Fighting together. Failing together. Learning together.
It turned ten minutes of would be pee anxiety into ten minutes of quiet chuckling and a fun conversation.
The gift of the founding fathers was not the constitution; it was the spirit of revolution.
If we don’t know how to enjoy ourselves, we certainly won’t know how to create paradise.
If plants didn’t get a free lunch every day, we wouldn’t have anything to eat.