Pleasure v/s Happiness

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Happiness is nice. That’s all. A dopamine pat on the head because you did something kind for a neighbor, or because someone remembered your birthday. It’s social currency disguised as inner glow. A collective nod that says: good boy, good girl, you belong.

But belonging isn’t always living.

Pleasure is different. Pleasure is not applause—it’s rupture.

And yes, you might wonder if I meant to say rapture. The answer is no—I chose rupture deliberately.

• Rapture suggests being carried away by bliss, almost divine intoxication. It’s luminous, ecstatic, and yes, very close to what we mean when we talk about pleasure as ecstasy.

• Rupture, on the other hand, carries violence. It implies a break, a tearing apart of the ordinary. Pleasure as something that cracks open the shell of happiness, splitting the polite, socialized surface.

If we emphasize pleasure as ecstasy → rapture fits.
If we emphasize pleasure as disruption → rupture bites harder.

Both are philosophically grounded. Georges Bataille, that French philosopher of excess, saw pleasure as rupture—tearing through the limits of order and utility. Mystical traditions, from Teresa of Ávila to Abhinavagupta, leaned toward rapture—pleasure as transcendence and union.

So why not both?

It’s what you feel when you binge-watch Animal Kingdom until your eyeballs ache and you don’t care, or when you walk alone in a forest and the silence begins to sound like a cathedral you didn’t know you were allowed to enter. Pleasure transcends happiness because it doesn’t need anyone else to witness it. It’s not polite, not earned, not conditioned. It’s a raw, hominic encounter with yourself.

I met a doctor yesterday who dropped something outrageous: people who never experience pleasure are the ones who get cancer. They might have had plenty of “happiness,” but if their life never cracked open into real ecstasy, the body revolts. I don’t know if the science is airtight—but the idea itself feels lethal in its clarity. Imagine: disease as the rebellion against a life too trimmed of pleasure.

Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, “Hell is other people.” He didn’t mean that literally, of course. His point was about the way our selfhood gets warped when seen only through the eyes of others. But let’s twist his line for our purpose: when happiness is only allowed in social contexts—when your pleasure is permitted only if it’s approved by the tribe—then yes, other people become hell. Because they have stolen your pleasure and replaced it with manners.

Pleasure is not selfish. Pleasure is intelligence. Epicurus (the original pleasure philosopher, centuries before consumer culture cheapened his name) argued that pleasure is the natural guide of life—not indulgence, but alignment with what makes existence worth continuing. Csikszentmihalyi, centuries later, mapped “flow” as the state where challenge and ecstasy overlap—only he had charts. Pleasure, on the other hand, has teeth.

Happiness is a photograph you share. Pleasure is the fever you remember.

So here’s a question worth asking yourself tonight:
When was the last time you felt pleasure—not happiness, not approval, not a dopamine pat, but the kind of exhilaration that made you forget time, people, and even your own name?

If you don’t remember, your body probably does. And it’s waiting.

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