How can we achieve happiness when work requires pain?

SHADOWANGEL · 2016-06-12T16:30:51+00:00

I've been having a few disturbing thoughts. I need someone to slap me down and explain why I'm wrong. Every value that we hold dear requires effort to gain and keep. We must fight entropy. We must fight comfort. We might struggle through the pain to get it. How can we live this way and still be happy? If every little thing that makes us happy requires so much voluntarily accepted pain, in order to escape some other pain, how can we ever see life as anything other than pain and relief from it? How can we get up each day and see a life filled with constant pain and struggle and not feel down about it? Ms. Rand said, "To a Money-Maker, as well as to an artist, work is not a painful duty or a necessary evil, but a way of life; to him, productive activity is the essence, the meaning and the enjoyment of existence; it is the state of being alive." How on earth could I live that way? How can work be enjoyment? How can work not be pain? "The form in which man experiences the reality of his values is pleasure . . . . A chronic lack of pleasure, of any enjoyable, rewarding or stimulating experiences, produces a slow, gradual, day-by-day erosion of man’s emotional vitality, which he may ignore or repress, but which is recorded by the relentless computer of his subconscious mechanism that registers an ebbing flow, then a trickle, then a few last drops of fuel—until the day when his inner motor stops and he wonders desperately why he has no desire to go on, unable to find any definable cause of his hopeless, chronic sense of exhaustion." - Ayn Rand I identify with this feeling. I don't get much pleasure out of anything I do. And I cannot figure out why anything should give me any pleasure, physically or emotionally. I can't figure out how I can value anything. If I'm meant to value my life, and my life is a drag, then how can I go on valuing it?

Thread starter SHADOWANGEL
Start date Jun 12, 2016

SHADOWANGEL

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How can we achieve happiness when work requires pain?

SHADOWANGEL

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