“Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while.” – Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1780)

“The course of mental events is automatically regulated by the pleasure principle — that is, we believe that any given process originates in an unpleasant state of tension and thereupon determines for itself such a path that its ultimate issue coincides with a relaxation of that tension, i.e., with avoidance of unpleasure or with production of pleasure.” – Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

A few weeks before my wife gave birth to our first child, she wanted to get her hair done. I didn’t particularly have anything to do, so I accompanied her and got my hair done as well. The haircut was pretty unremarkable… but then I got my hair shampooed. And the scalp massage the hairstylist gave me had me shuddering with so much pleasure I had to consciously stop myself from moaning out loud in the hair salon.

But that’s not even really the wack part of this story. The next day, I wondered if it was possible for me to approximate the scalp massage while shampooing my own hair in the shower. I tried it, expecting to have negligible effect, but to my surprise, I’d say it felt about 70-80% as good.

This was… groundbreaking for me. I’ve been shampooing my hair for as long as I can remember, but it had somehow never occurred to me to do it in a way that was physically pleasurable. My default approach to shampooing was something very utilitarian- I’d just lather up my hands, jam my fingers into my scalp, and scrub hard and fast, with the unstated goal of trying to get it done as quickly possible.

Since then I’ve made the effort to turn every shampoo moment into a kind of of pleasure meditation. I go slow and I really feel my fingers and my head, and I invariably find that there’s some tension in my head or neck somewhere that gets released.

This whole episode got me thinking about so much beyond just shampooing though. How many other things in my life am I doing on autopilot, in a way that deprives me of pleasure? Arent we supposed to be a pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding species? If I am a pleasure-maxxing mammal, why am I leaving so much pleasure on the table in my everyday life?

It turns out that what I was really optimizing for, without even consciously realizing it, was throughput. Somewhere along the way I started trying to race through my days. Slamming the coffee down and not really tasting it, already thinking about the next task.

This description of events is probably a familiar one to lots of people, but I find it surprising (and I imagine people who have known me for some time would find it surprising) that it applies to me too, because I’ve often described myself as a sort of lackadaisical wanderer who isn’t particularly trying to optimize for anything. The “ambitious” part of “friendly ambitious nerd” was always the weakest link for me; it was more of something I aspired to be than felt a natural impulse for. (And for the people who are new here, when I say ambitious I’m not talking about the careerist’s pursuit of trinkets or accolades, but rather a more full-hearted engagement with life, full-contact high-voltage living.)

But yeah I think one of my startling uncomfortable self-realizations in recent years is that I inherited some kind of covert workaholism, both from my parents (business owners who had a home office landline, with extensions in both the living room and their bedroom, who never really took any time off) and from my wider culture as a Singaporean.

The stupidest part of this affliction for me is: I was never even a good workaholic, in the sense that I never made much money. I basically just gave myself burnout and deprived myself of healthy human relationships or nourishing environments. I would squeeze in a ton of “revenge bedtime procrastination”, the equivalent of binge-eating or some other all-consuming addiction like alcoholism or gambling. I devoted a lot of it to being a poaster online, and I convinced myself it was all worth it because I tried really hard to be encouraging and prosocial, to introduce people to each other and help reduce loneliness and whatnot. I was hoping that doing community service would somehow make me feel more whole inside. And sometimes it did. I do see how I’m in a better position than I could have otherwise been if I had made even more damaging choices. Well- maybe? The deeper truth is that I just don’t know what I don’t know. All I know is that I have, all my life, lived on fumes, hopes, fantasies, self-deception, minimizing, denial. I don’t think I’ve been outright dishonest in the sense of saying things I don’t mean, but looking back, I see a man who was somehow afraid to really live his life, who kept deferring and procrastinating and made up all sorts of plausible excuses.

Well. I’m here now, I think. I have one kid who’s still young and naive enough to think of me as someone who’ll always help and protect him, and soon there will be another. And I want to do my best to be the man they think I am. And a significant part of that is going to require me to become a better steward of myself, a better father to myself really, and a better husband to my wife. And to do that I have to stop sleepwalking through life. Which… is a statement that does make me both a little weary and a little wary, because I’ve definitely written very similar statements dozens of times since I was about 13.

Well, as Mr. “focus on what you want to see more of”, I know that you can’t focus on a negative. So what’s the outcome I want to see more of? What’s the opposite of sleepwalking? I want to be more deliberate. I want to slow down. And here I think I ought to give myself some credit because I *have* slowed down tremendously in the past couple of years. But then I’m also beating myself up internally a little bit for not simultaneously being more productive. But that’s not how this works. If you have to shut down the factory for maintenance and upgrading, output is going to go down for a while. That’s why people don’t do it!

I want to slow down. I want to ask why. I want to feel my feelings. I want to take my time. I think that would please me.