Lessons from the All You Can Eat Tandoori Buffet

Sometimes, I wish I could sit down with my younger self and explain that pleasure isn’t happiness. It took me a long time to understand the difference between the two, and to be honest, I still get them confused. Seeking happiness by chasing pleasure, I inevitably, invariably found myself with neither.

It's such a big reveal that you'd think, having realised it, I would never make that mistake again, and yet I have to remind myself of it every day.

Most mornings, I start the day with an hour’s walk, usually with my dogs, sometimes by myself. Three days a week, I follow that walk with a heavy strength training session. Then I have breakfast—high protein, high fibre— before heading to my office to start writing. It's a simple schedule, as unvarying as I can make it because if I vary from it at all, I don’t just stumble into pleasure-seeking and indulgence; I strip naked, smear myself in Nutella and break all sorts of land speed records in sprinting towards gratification.

For me, it's not enough that I should miss out on hitting my 50 or 60 grams of lean protein, and a solid chunk of bowel-scraping fibre? I mean, if you're not going to hit those goals, why not just throw yourself onto a mountain of donuts and pastries washed down with a whiskey barrel’s worth of full-cream cappuccinos?

And having enjoyed that guilty pleasure, what’s seriously the harm in a little five or six or eleventy-seven-hour scroll through the algorithmically generated timeline of your most indulgent dopamine dreams?

The harm, of course, is grievous - but delayed.

I know this. I understand it intimately. I learned the lesson not over years, but rather decades of hard and bitter failure.

Seeking my pleasure does not bring happiness. In fact, given time, and not that much time, it all but ensures the opposite. Just a couple of hours of abandon guarantees many, many more hours of recrimination and self-loathing. How many times have I done this? I dunno. How many Groundhog Days did Bill Murray endure before his moment of enlightenment?

The hell of it is, we’ve known this for as long as we’ve known anything. The Greeks and Romans understood that happiness was more often found in the hard work of the sterner virtues than a really epic toga party - and those guys knew how to party.

The secret, I think, lies within the transience of everything.

Pleasure is a physical sensation. We feel it and enjoy it with our senses. But that enjoyment can never last. We exhaust the source, or we exhaust ourselves in consuming it. We tire, we habituate, and finally, we might even sicken of it.

Trust me. As a man who was once barred from an All You Can Eat Tandoori Buffet, I know of what I speak.

Happiness though, is different. Like pleasure, it can arise in an instant but is felt more powerfully over time. To be truly happy is less fleeting, and weirdly, it can even involve sitting with discomfort or even some measure of misery.

I get a lot more pure pleasure from eating a chocolate croissant than I do from completing a set of deadlifts or heavy squats. And the heavier the lifts, the less like pleasure completing them feels. It can, in the final extreme, become a very difficult and even frightening exercise.

And yet…

I know I will feel much happier at the end of a day that began with walking dogs and lifting weights, than I will after a morning of pastries and Facebook scrolling.

My old, unused psych degree tells me it’s just the subjective difference between pulling the levers on a couple of different neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin.

But I’m gonna go with old mate Aristotle who taught us that happiness is an active state of the soul most often found when in accordance with virtue.

I'm sorry if this reads as a form of self-indulgence, but I just needed to remind myself of it this week.