Pleasure and Satisfaction

6 May 2026

Drawing a Line

Pleasure and satisfaction are two concepts which are frequently interchanged but must be distinguished. Although something may give you great pleasure, it may or may not give you satisfaction. For example, eating an entire bowl of delicious popcorn ought to please you but quickly you are dissatisfied because of the lack of substance of the popcorn.

Pleasure is a response to stimuli. Food is one such stimulus, slot machines (if you are of the persuasion that enjoys them) are another, listening to music is an aural one, video games and so on. Inasmuch as the reaction we find pleasurable, the stimulation always proceeds from the exterior. To certain extents, our wills are responsible for putting us in the pathway of such stimulus --putting on the headphones, biting the food, kissing your beloved-- but pleasure, it seems, always lies outside of ourselves.

On the other hand, satisfaction, it seems, always is self-generated. Taking pride in a job well done, writing a masterpiece (or even solely putting your thoughts on the page), doing your life's duty or purpose; all of those spawn from an action taken and exist within our intellect. Of course, all of those involve interactions with the outside world; were it that the world was one with ourselves, it would be impossible to distinguish oneself from one's surroundings.

Pleasure is able to be predicted and follows somewhat regular patterns. All of the aforementioned examples of pleasure are common human experiences and generally speaking are universally pleasurable. Granted, there are occasions where they fall out of pleasure: you may have eaten the same popcorn for the past month and you are sick of it, you may not enjoy a certain genre of music, you find yourself overstimulated and under motivated so the slot machine's economic cost comes to the forefront of your mind. All of these predictions are somewhat regular. It is because of this characteristic of predictability that pleasure is marketable and too-frequently is exploited by external sources for psychological manipulation.

Satisfaction is not so predictable. Those archetypes of pleasure above look wildly different from one person to another. One may find life as a writer incredibly fulfilling and another may find it terribly boring. That same person could be fully satisfied as a soldier while the first is terrified of such a life. Although the pathways are so radically different the result of satisfaction is the same.

I would interject that there's a certain pleasure --in the broader sense of the word-- in the quiet desperation of working a job that is tolerable and pays enough but is not satisfying. That pleasure makes the lack of satisfaction altogether more painful than displeasure and dissatisfaction.

It would be wrong to assign a moral character either to pleasure or to satisfaction, or to displeasure or dissatisfaction. But ontologically and teleologically speaking, man's nature was not to be dissatisfied but to be satisfied in its fulfillment. Pleasure is a cheap substitute for long-term satisfaction. The substitution of satisfaction with pleasure violates man's telos of satisfaction. I would venture to say that contributing to the long-term substitution of satisfaction with pleasure is morally wrong, yet the lines which define such an act are too nebulous.

Satisfaction's problem stems from its individuality. Two problems arise as a result of each of us having a unique path to satisfaction: that it becomes impossible to market a panacea of satisfaction and that so many are lost. The first, as discussed above, is only a problem for those who wish to sell something that tries to be such a panacea. Insofar as people fail to recognize the impossibility of such an achievement the gullible will buy and be left pleasured but dissatisfied. I, too, am frequently one of those fools, but in moments of clarity growth becomes possible. So many times, though, I find myself lost and dissatisfied. And that experience is surely not unique tome. Why is it so hard to find? How can one live such a dissatisfied life? When will I at last find such a golden elixir?