Sailors Take Warning

What's up gang. I wanted to talk to you tonight about the balance of fun and pain. The thesis of tonight's discussion will be the well known statistic that for any fun, you must have pain. And as you read through this blog post I want you to be on the lookout for subliminal messaging. If you get it, you get it. If you don't, you don't. If you ask me, I won't tell you. So with that let's get started.

Everyone seems to say pretty much constantly that in order to have any sort of positive affliction, you must balance it with a similar negative affliction. This even goes back to physics, of which I'm a man of; we all know that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If I push you, you push back. If I jump up, I fall down. If I get drunk, I get hungover. This is simply the dynamic of the universe at work. It can be called cause and effect, it can be called karma, it can be called Newton's third law of motion; regardless it's inherently true in all aspects of everything.

My focus however is the aspect of life, which is a trending topic of my more thought-provoking blog posts. I chose my words wisely in my thesis: Fun & Pain. Both terms are shortened and simplified from the deeper words: Pleasure & Misery. They're easy to define--little need for explanation. Pleasure is the counterclockwise motion in which our heads spin when we're delightfully happy over anything; regardless of it's insignificance, stupidity, or consequences. Misery is the clockwise motion in which our guts twist and yaw as we stress and emote whilst struggling and suffocated for more and more relieving pleasure.

There are two ways to approach the equation. Think of misery and pleasure to be two ticks on a number line. Misery is at -1 and pleasure is at 1. According to the universal and seemingly true rules of karma, you will always average with as much misery as pleasure, resulting in a numerical value on my rhetorical number line of 0. So you can approach 0 from either the left or right; or in literal terms you could have pleasure before misery, or misery before pleasure. Even a third possibility could be introduced, alternating misery and pleasure to maintain your sanity throughout your whole life.

If you don't follow, examples are everywhere. Short term examples are incredibly basic, study before partying? Or party then study hungover the next day? Well you're going to study and party either way, and experience both miserable rote memorization and exciting nightlife. The wisdom comes in the order. Zoom out. Drugs, drinking, and sex; consistent pleasure for 5 years from age 15-20. Only brought to a conclusion by an arrest, pregnancy, substance abuse, etc. And what will follow is misery, every time. In contrast, hard work throughout high school and college would easily result in years of pleasurable income and significance.

I've been living by the rules this postulate for months now. Painful studying followed by fun fun fun nights with my friends. Typically the pleasure of post-studying nightlife outweighs the misery of studying for hours prior, and naturally the leftovers accumulate in whatever form I deserve; hangovers, guilt, nostalgia, and sometimes fleeting depression.

But there are flaws in this theory. How does this apply to happy, lengthy, loving relationships? Think back to that one elderly couple that we all know, the ones who've been together since the 1920's and are STILL basking in the pleasure. My only conclusion is that they actually die before they can feel the misery that's been building up from a lifetime of straight pleasure. But that would mean that if a couple separates before death then they are delivered the anguish to balance the empirical equation of their life. And that scares me.

Red sky at night, sailor's delight; Red in the morning; sailors take warning. All I see red, I just hope my sun is setting. And hopefully when the night is over, the sun will pop back up above the wavy horizon and the sky will be blue. And if that happens you'll see me in Hawaii enjoying the beautiful day.