Do Drugs, Sex, or Pleasure Help us Find Meaning in Life?

I remember being told if I do drugs, I’ll become an addict, but I always thought only weak people became addicts. I didn’t like being told no, it made me feel obstinate. I needed to know the why behind the what. I needed to know about how hard addiction was to recover from, even for strong and disciplined people. I was one of those stubborn people who had no capacity to learn from the mistakes of others. Instead, I needed to try everything myself, I didn’t trust the opinion of anyone. I remember being told one thing was good and its counterpart was bad, but I wanted to know about the grey in-between. I wanted to know who called it good or bad, and why they did so. I needed the evidence and the statistics and the reasoning behind it. I don’t recall being taught the process of addiction or the reason it’s so hard to come back from. I don’t recall a discussion about how addicts are perceived by the rest of society or how the decisions I made now would start a lifelong battle with ongoing ramifications. Maybe I trusted the opinion of my classmates more than that of the intimidating offer, and they told me drugs were fun and felt good.

Counselors, social workers, life coaches, and pastors try to help people understand what is at the root of their addiction and why it may have developed in the first place. There is always something deeper going on. Most individuals do not have the intrinsic desire to be a loser, become a failure, or destroy their lives. There is something common among humans that we all want to serve a purpose. We want to live what we would define as a meaningful life. We may not know what that purpose is or how to get there, but we do know that there must be some meaning to all of this. Something more than just living and dying.

Doing drugs, having fun, and giving myself pleasure were my purpose. They were the things that felt best and therefore meant the most to me. How does one explain it when they see an addiction take away everything from a person: their family, their job, their education, their future, their trustworthiness, their reliability, their relatability, their coherency, and yet that person still keeps coming back for more? For me it was because I made these things ultimate in my life. In my own mind, nothing could parallel with the experience of getting high or hooking up. These things brought me happiness and each day I pursued them to the exclusion of all else. To be honest, I hadn’t really given any of the alternatives a fair shot.

One of the most fascinating Harvard research studies I ever read was in a book by Daniel M. Cable called Alive at Work. In it he talked about eudemonic and hedonic happiness. Hedonic happiness is “the pleasant feelings you experience when you get the things you want.” Eudemonic happiness refers to “the meaning you feel in life.” Breaking these words up helped me understand that meaning and purpose in life is not as simple as having a good feeling or getting turnt. Feelings are fleeting and temporary, they don’t last. When we’re high we feel okay, when we’re withdrawing, we feel awful. Our feelings change all the time, if our meaning and purpose in life is based on them, one moment we’ll feel like we’ve got it all together and the next we’ll hate ourselves and feel like scum.

There is a meaningful, purposeful happiness that is not dependent on feelings. Eudemonic happiness is directly connected to "our involvement in something bigger than ourselves. It is a more purposeful happiness." When we have a purpose greater than ourselves, we can find strength and hope even when our circumstances suck. We have something beyond our feelings and abilities. Eudemonic happiness helps us see past ourselves but it also helps us look into ourselves. Instead of looking at and worrying about how I feel, I can look at who I am. How my unique skills, qualities, and abilities, can contribute towards and bring me into something greater than myself. There are thousands of different purposes for which people live: achievement, acknowledgement, moralism, sexualism, materialism, Buddhism, drugs, Jesus, a religious institution, partying, prosperity, our spouse or girlfriend, the group of people we identify with, our community. We can live for any number or combination of these things.

Each of these beliefs will have both positive and negative consequences, but it is things like this that give us a since of eudemonic happiness or purposefulness. We latch onto one or more of these beliefs and they become our drive, our fuel, and our purpose. What we often fail to do is find out why we’ve latched onto a certain thing, or how well that thing is actually serving us. I latched onto my belief in partying and rebellion but the instant pleasure and gratification that they gave me did not actually lead to a better life, they were not serving me well. Hedonic happiness (how someone feels) is not a good matrix by which to measure one's well-being. You can feel great while doing something incontrovertibly stupid (like getting high and lighting a forest on fire or stealing your best friend’s girlfriend).

Aristotle said that people who only live for hedonic happiness are reduced to nothing more than an animal-like existence. The addict's life is a good example of how hedonic pleasure limits one's life and well-being. His or her life is objectively quite small. It comes down to getting or stealing money to buy that next fix, finding the next fix, acting on the addiction, and getting the dopamine, serotonin, or norepinephrine release that they trained their brain to crave. Upon successful completion, the cycle must begin again. Each time the cycle goes around, the dependence grows, and the likelihood and severity of withdrawal increases. Objectively this sounds like a menial existence, but subjectively, within the mind of the addict themselves, it is enormous. It is almost unparalleled in meaning because the feeling that the fix gives eclipses everything else. While objectively, it is eating away your health and life and preventing you from accomplishing your full potential, it simultaneously gives the deceitful subjective impression that your life is the bomb. All I could do is cling on to the hope that there must be a life, belief, and purpose that is both subjectively and objectively meaningful. If there was, I would find it!