Pleasure is easy to experience. Experiencing happiness, by contrast, is not so easy. Happiness, unlike pleasure, cannot be pursued directly. Happiness is the result of living a fulfilling life. It results from actualizing our potential as human beings.
Happiness may be experienced when we live life with a sense of purpose. Each of us has a potential within us, just as an acorn has the potential of becoming a tree. Exactly what that potential is, differs for each of us. As we discover and develop those potentialities within ourselves, happiness results. The more we fulfill our potential, the happier we will become.
Perhaps because it is so difficult to achieve happiness, many people take the short-cut to experience more immediate, albeit temporary, pleasure. They accept hits of pleasure rather taking the longer road to happiness. This road requires forgoing immediate satisfaction, and even enduring pain, for the satisfaction of living life well, completing a difficult task, or actualizing a potential.
Perhaps because it is so difficult to achieve happiness, many people take the short-cut to experience more immediate, albeit temporary, pleasure. They accept hits of pleasure rather taking the longer road to happiness. This road requires forgoing immediate satisfaction, and even enduring pain, for the satisfaction of living life well, completing a difficult task, or actualizing a potential.
People who have undertaken a difficult mountain climb, for example, experience the satisfaction of having made the summit for years to come, while those who go for short pleasurable experiences can barely differentiate one pleasure from the other a week afterwards.
In short, then, pleasure is immediate, happiness is long term. Both are integral to being human. Pleasure gives us the short term respite from our daily grind. Happiness, on the other hand, refers to developing our full potential as human beings. It requires that we think beyond the immediate seeking activities that promote our growth as persons. Seeking pleasure simply feels good, but it does not promote our growth.
Happiness results from growth, expanding our knowledge, actualizing our potential. Just as the acorn mentioned earlier will strive to become the mighty oak, human beings, to experience happiness, must strive to reach their full potential.
Author and Credits: Dr. Dreyfus