What is sudism?

Step three: pleasure leads to pain

Pleasure, by definition, feels good. And we may naturally assume that if a little pleasure is good, then shouldn’t more be better? However, a funny thing happens when we try to grab a larger share of pleasure—we start experiencing unpleasant side effects. If we make our food sweeter by adding more sugar, for instance, we increase our risk of depression, body aches, and other issues, as illustrated by various studies. At the extreme, hard cocaine, heroin, or other hard drugs can make us euphoric in the short term, but the high can never be sustained for long. After coming down from the high, we are very likely to end up feeling depressed, achy and sick. With regular use, we are also likely to find that day-to-day things that used to give us pleasure are no longer enjoyable.

Generally speaking, when we try to artificially boost the amount of pleasure we feel in our lives, the principles of sudism teach us that this will lead to an equal and opposite reaction later on. That is to say, if we boost our pleasure today, we are also boosting our pain, or shrinking our pleasure, tomorrow.

Continue to step four.