Chapter 39 1993 2 Consumption = enjoyment?

I hate asceticism of all kinds.People live a lifetime, birth, old age, sickness and death, suffering enough, why not enjoy it when you can?Enjoyment is a matter of course in life.Montaigne even called being good at enjoying life "the highest and most holy virtue". According to him, Caesar and Alexander regarded enjoying the pleasures of life as their normal activities, and regarded their all-powerful war career as abnormal activities. . However, how to truly enjoy life?Different people have different opinions on this.In my opinion, one of the misconceptions of our time is to think of consumption as enjoyment, when in fact the two are not the same thing at all.I don't want to get involved in the debate about whether high consumption can promote prosperity, because that is the business of economists and has nothing to do with philosophy of life.I also have no intention of objecting to cars, villas, high-end furniture, four-star hotels, KTV private rooms, etc. I just want to point out that all these belong to the category of consumption, and luxury consumption is not a necessary condition for enjoyment, let alone a sufficient condition.

Of course, consumption and enjoyment are not absolutely mutually exclusive, and sometimes the two overlap.However, the difference between them is obvious.For example, pornographic activities purely to vent desires are only sexual consumption, and the love shared by soul and flesh is the true enjoyment of sex; traveling to see fancy tourist attractions is only tourist consumption, and being in the mountains and rivers is the true enjoyment of nature; 1. Books to relieve boredom are only cultural consumption, and enlightening reading and art appreciation are the true enjoyment of culture.To put it simply, real enjoyment must involve the participation of the soul, which must include the so-called "pleasure and sublimation of the soul" factor.Otherwise, no matter how much money is spent, it can only be called consumption.The difference between enjoyment and consumption is equivalent to the difference between creation and production.Creation and enjoyment belong to the category of spiritual life, just as production and consumption belong to the category of material life.

It is a foolish idea to think that the quantity consumed will be directly proportional to the quality of enjoyment.Socrates looked all over the stalls on the streets of Athens, and exclaimed: "How many things I don't need here!" Every reader with a little savvy can't help but smile knowingly when they read this story.Seneca said it well: "Many things, we discover how unnecessary they are only when we can do without them. We have used them in the past, not because we needed them, but Because we own them." On the other hand, just because we have so many things we buy, we neglect the enjoyment that we don't have to buy. "The breeze and the moon don't cost a penny", but how can we remember them when we watch the TV every night? "Where is there no moon, where is there no bamboo and cypress, but there are few idlers like our ears." Today when everyone is busy making money and spending money, where can we find such idlers?

Is there not, then, purely physical, material enjoyment?Yes, humans have a body, and this body also likes to enjoy, and it also needs material means to enjoy.However, if we think about it carefully, we will find that human physical needs have limits determined by its physiological structure, so the purely physical pleasure obtained from the satisfaction of such needs is almost unchanged through the ages. , is nothing more than food, clothing, food, clothing and health.King Zhou of Yin "used wine as a pool and hung meat as a forest", but he himself had only an ordinary stomach.Qin Shihuang built the Afang Palace, "five hundred steps from east to west, fifty feet from north to south", but he himself was only five feet tall.What a passionate gourmet, there must be intervals in his feasting, otherwise he will suffer from indigestion.What a hard-working apprentice, his bedtime pleasure must be restrained, otherwise he will suffer from kidney deficiency.Every physical desire is satiated and strictly obeys the law of excess and deficiency.Delicacies from mountains and seas, spending money like water, is more about showing off.Hidden beauty and concubines, beautiful women like clouds, more for vanity.The greatest happiness brought by wealth is not direct material enjoyment, but the joy of a miser when he counts his property, and the joy of a prodigal when he squanders his property.All of these are beyond the scope of physical satisfaction, but it would be disgusting to call them spiritual enjoyment, they are at most just a kind of psychological satisfaction.

I believe that people must have a soul, and the soul must belong to different levels from psychological phenomena such as feeling, thinking, emotion, and will.The soul is the dwelling place of the human spiritual "self". What it seeks is sincere love and solid belief, and what it focuses on is the realization of the meaning of life.Happiness is only a matter of the soul. It is the fulfillment of love and a distinct feeling of living a meaningful life.The body can only have pleasure, not happiness.A luxurious lifestyle brings at best a superficial sense of superiority, not to mention happiness.It is the sigh of his soul that he hears when a lucky man who enjoys the riches and riches of the world still suffers from the emptiness of life.