Step eight: alignment
Do we experience painful and pleasant feelings at random times and at random intensities? No. Our minds try their best to align pleasure with health benefits, such that larger health benefits yield larger pleasures. Our minds also try to align pain with health costs, such that larger health costs feel more painful. This alignment helps us to make rational decisions in life when we weigh the pros and cons of various potential courses of actions. If sitting on eggs for hours at a time felt good to us, we’d all be sitting on eggs. That’s good for motivating hens to do the right thing—not so much for humans.
Unfortunately, the alignment between pleasure and health benefits, and between pain and health costs is often imperfect. Worse yet, over the centuries we have collectively found a number of ways to tamper with the alignment of various activities in order to extract more pleasure than we are supposed to receive (like with refined sugar), or in order to experience less pain than we should (such as by using painkillers). By tampering with the alignment of things, we might get what we want in the short term (more pleasure, less pain). However, the principles of sudism teach us that this always leads to getting what we don’t want in the long term: more pain, less pleasure. This is the root cause of all chronic pain and anhedonia (i.e. losing the ability to feel pleasure).