There simply are not enough hours in the day to enjoy all that life has to offer. Or, perhaps, there is, and I just have very poor time management skills. Who is to say? I think it’s safest to conclude that, in reality, it’s a bit of both. 

I have hundreds of books I want to read, yet I always struggle to find the time to read them. My therapist told me recently that he thinks I read performatively, and I found it hard to disagree. His theory is that I read books that I think one supposedly interested in politics, history, philosophy etcetera ought to read, rather than ones I might actually enjoy, and I read shallowly rather than deeply, in order to achieve arbitrary reading targets. That is to say, I read to hit my Goodreads target, rather than reading to actually enjoy and understand the book. He proffered that, if I were to let go of any pre-supposed notions of what the activity of reading should look like, I would spend more time reading less books to gain deeper insights into the opinions and arguments of their authors, or the meanings of the books themselves.

This then translates to the rest of my leisure activities. What is it that I actually enjoy doing? Going further than that, what do I do that I actually enjoy doing, and what do I do because I enjoy the outcome of it? Do I really enjoy trying to write philosophical ‘essais’ in the style of Montaigne, for example, or do I enjoy the idea of being someone that writes philosophical ‘essais’ in the style of Montaigne? I honestly do not know. I don’t think I’ve ever really spent any time considering how I actually enjoy spending my time, because if I did, I worry the answer would be wrong, or underwhelming, or beneath me. 

John Stuart Mill puts forward the idea that there are two types of pleasures, higher or lower. Firstly, I must acknowledge the irony of delving into philosophy when the whole point of the piece is to suggest I might not even like reading or writing about philosophy, but bear with me. The argument can be surmised as such – there are higher pleasures, which are generally intellectual and mentally stimulating, such as reading, art, philosophy etcetera, and lower pleasures, such as eating, drinking, sex etcetera. Mill suggests that anyone who has experienced higher pleasures will understand and argue that they are more pleasurable and worthwhile, but since the lower pleasures are easier to obtain, the vast majority of people opt for those, and as such, never experience the higher pleasures. 

I shall quote Stuart Mill here: “It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question.”

So, on that premise, the question I pose of myself is thus – am I forcing myself to seek the higher pleasures because I know they will bring me more pleasure even if they leave me dissatisfied, or am I a fool that only knows my own side of the question, therefore unnecessarily denying myself the only pleasure I could realistically obtain? 

I think all I’ve really achieved here is to overcomplicate what should be a relatively straightforward question – what do I enjoy? Well, I enjoy the process of drinking because being drunk is fun, but I definitely don’t enjoy the outcome, because I feel sick and exhausted for two or three days afterwards and drive myself insane with anxiety and overthinking. On the other hand, the process of writing essais makes me feel stupid and incoherent, and it takes a huge amount of mental effort, but the outcome is absolutely fantastic, and I feel as though I’ve spent my time doing something interesting and worthwhile. Is that a good enough answer? 

Ironically, “Mill believed that for the majority of people (those with a moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment), happiness is best achieved en passant, rather than striving for it directly. This meant no self-consciousness, scrutiny, self-interrogation, dwelling on, thinking about, imagining or questioning one’s happiness. Then, if otherwise fortunately circumstanced, one would ‘inhale happiness with the air you breathe.’”

I feel like this is ironic coming from someone that came up with the idea of having higher and lower pleasures, and therefore must have spent considerable time considering what makes one happy, but I shan’t get into that. As Nietzsche said, “I mistrust all systematisers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”

Perhaps there are enough hours in the day after all, provided I stop spending so many of them wondering what to do with them.