An anon speaks about the difference between seeking pleasure vs happiness, and how they create different mindsets in people that manages to permeate through to politics:
Because leftists don’t understand happiness. Leftists are pleasure-seekers. They live for dopamine rushes. You ever see how they attempt to demean their opposition?
They often refer to them as virgins or incels and they tell them they “need to get laid” as though an orgasm will completely fix everything.
They assume that carnal pleasure is the ultimate reward in life. They confuse pleasure with happiness.
A study from Cambridge University has found that the brains of compulsive pornography users react in a similar way to stimulus as alcoholics or drug addicts
Pleasure is more akin to a drug. You will need more of it over time in order to feel the same level of satisfaction, and it is never long-lasting. Its why people become sexual degenerates or over-eaters or drug addicts even. In the case of pornography, normal porn eventually stops scratching the pleasure itch, so they move on to more and more degenerate porn. Its a downward spiral of trying to match the last dopamine hit.
Contrary to pleasure, happiness is a strong and long lasting sense of contentment and peace. It mostly comes from exploring your own mind; asking yourself sometimes very difficult questions. Like when you have a knee-jerk emotional reaction to something, you explore why that is, and what is at the root of that feeling. When you find what’s at the root of it, you will come to understand yourself just a little bit better. Eventually, you’ll understand your strengths and limitations so well, that you’ll know exactly where you fit into the world.
I cannot understate how important understanding your place in the world is. It’s largely what determines whether you’ll be happy in life.
People who go through life feeling things without knowing why it is they feel these things, exist in a confusing fog.
People who don’t know themselves will almost always end up being pleasure-seekers.
I’ve often seen happiness described as something that results from doing productive or creative endeavors, be it at a job or a hobby. That has certainly been true in my experience. This anon’s analysis stating that happiness comes from understanding one’s self is very interesting, however, and much less frequently talked about.
From my own personal experience on learning how to play a musical instrument, achieving accomplishments such as learning a difficult song can provide happiness, for sure. The urge to achieve, though, can lead to introspection and eventually more understanding toward one self. This can subsequently lead to, for lack of a better description, a deeper level of contentment.
Just to elaborate further as an example, for a while in the past I’ve noticed myself with the tendency to play music a lot quicker than I ought to when I practice on my instrument. When I do that, I’d make more mistakes and become noticeably more frustrated in the process. Paradoxically I would also play even faster in an attempt to make up for the mistake and to catch up on my progress. I would then be caught in a negative loop (play quick -> make mistakes/be frustrated -> play even quicker -> repeat ad nauseam) for the rest of the practice session.
Eventually I noticed this tendency and mentally stepped back to observe myself. I realized the urge to play quicker came from a subconscious complex that I nicknamed “work ethic”. “Work ethic” wanted things done, and it wanted them done under budget and ahead of schedule. It wanted whatever task at hand done yesterday. It wanted perfection. It was oddly angry. Failure to meet its demands and expectations resulted in both anger and fear coming from my subconscious to further drive myself at whatever task at hand, regardless of whether anger (source of my frustration) & fear (which motivated me to play even quicker) were appropriate or helpful at all.
Further analysis of myself made me realize that “work ethic” came from my childhood interactions with my father, who was a high strung man with a temper. Doing a task or chore he assigned me and making mistakes would often result in an outburst from him that made my childhood self afraid. “Work ethic” was actually the distorted understanding of what it means to work hard, created by a fearful child and combined with a similarly twisted mental image of an angry father figure. It didn’t matter that my father had mellowed out long ago or that I got along fine with him as an adult. “Work ethic” continued to stay in my subconscious, frozen in time as it influenced my behavior and dictated my moods.
Knowing what “work ethic” was and where it came from, I was able to deal with it by explaining to it that with music, taking your time and be slow when you need to makes for better results than fearfully rushing ahead. I told it that it was not being helpful, in fact, it has not been helpful in a long time. For good measure I also explained that my father is now old, and has mellowed out a lot, and that the two of us gets along fine nowadays.
The exact steps I took to accomplish the above goes into new agey emotional/energy release techniques, which I won’t go into here as this post has gone off track enough as it is, but they essentially dissolved “work ethic” from my subconscious. My tendency to play quicker than I ought to when I play my instrument is now greatly diminished, as well as my tendency to grow frustrated when I do make mistakes playing it. This is a very simplified summary as there were other mental complexes I also discovered through my musical hobby, some of which had to be dealt with in different ways.
Working with “work ethic”, from discovering it, observing it, understanding how it influenced me, where it came from, and eventually ridding myself of it, gave me more understanding of myself and a great sense of contentment when I was done with the process. This is something rarely described by people who talk of the link between happiness/contentment and productivity/creativity, but it’s indeed true. Seeing the anonymous author of the above quoted writing touching on it simply made me want to mention my experience related to it, as well.
I’ve often seen happiness described as something that results from doing productive or creative endeavors, be it at a job or a hobby. That has certainly been true in my experience. This anon’s analysis stating that happiness comes from understanding one’s self is very interesting, however, and much less frequently talked about. 
Further analysis of myself made me realize that “work ethic” came from my childhood interactions with my father, who was a high strung man with a temper. Doing a task or chore he assigned me and making mistakes would often result in an outburst from him that made my childhood self afraid. “Work ethic” was actually the distorted understanding of what it means to work hard, created by a fearful child and combined with a similarly twisted mental image of an angry father figure. It didn’t matter that my father had mellowed out long ago or that I got along fine with him as an adult. “Work ethic” continued to stay in my subconscious, frozen in time as it influenced my behavior and dictated my moods.
Temple of Zagan 