In my personal experience, I agree, it's a misunderstanding of what happiness is, that causes people to miss the mark when trying to find it. Happiness isn't something you find, it's something you make. The universe is meaningless, it exists, devoid of any reason of its own, and yet, it exists. Your job, when trying to become a happy person, is to find your own meaning, and work at that, until you master it.
I've always liked that last sentence. May I suggest an edit to the second sentence? I've always though, Happiness is something you make. But happiness is something that you don't make directly. Its something that naturally arises, by making life choices, that allow happiness to occur naturally.
In what way? Are you sure, based on what the parent wrote? Perhaps he was not clear about the difference between "finding meaning" and "finding your own meaning", but few people are clear about that. A search for meaning, personal or otherwise, does not necessarily lead to hedonism--to get there you have to throw out all kinds of useful things, and it doesn't really get you very far, and eventually life loses meaning and you go somewhere else.
In short, I don't think telling someone to find their own meaning would necessarily lead to hedonism.
No, he's right. If you abandon the notion that there's anything which possesses an intrinsic or higher meaning, it's almost inevitable you'll end up gratifying your most basic instincts first because they're the strongest. At least until they're sated.
The only thing I don't get is why more people don't do it. People walk around with all sorts of hangups and narratives about why they're denying themselves and they take these to the grave with them. I'd much rather overindulge until I'm bursting at the seams and then having learned where my limit is, dial it back from there. Much fewer regrets in the long run.
I think this issue arises from fundamentally western ideas about what it is that are our most basic human instincts. We have certain instinctual needs, which, I'll agree, would seem to imply a hedonistic lifestyle when considered alone. However, many of these things balance themselves out. As an example, we have an evolutionary need to be healthy, viable mates, but we also have an evolutionary need to consume delicious food. Overindulging one need would inherently cause the other need to not be met. I would also add that the need to express kindness and compassion, and the need for positive social interaction seem to also be instinctual, and do drive us to act in ways that would not necessarily fit with a hedonistic lifestyle.
The problem for me personally is that hedonism, while fun for maybe a couple of hours, inevitably leads to more complications and suffering than happiness over the next day, the next week or the next year.
A more measured, but peaceful life with many smaller (not big enough to be disruptive) happy moments has been my solution and I've mostly been satisfied with that.
This doesn't sound like a problem to me at all - you found your sweet spot and dialed it back to a place that you're happy with, presumably with less regrets about it than if you had never gone a bit too far in the first place.
The answer to the "why" is mostly fear, real or imagined. Why don't most people talk to a another person they find insanely attractive? Why do they not take time to understand a religion or philosophy very different from their own? etc.
In Aristotle's view, there was a meaningful distinction between pleasure, which led to hedonism, and happiness, which is fairly abstract and depends on virtuous conduct performed with the right mindset. Edit: if I recall correctly. This is from The Nichomachean Ethics.
What if pain, in the traditional sense, makes you happy. I get pleasure from rebelling my hedonist parents in a way reminiscent of puritans. It has nothing to do with comparison to others - I just like denying myself pleasure (abstaining from alcohol, sugar, caffeine, drugs, sometimes sex, etc.). I get a lot of meaning from it.
Whatever floats your boat. As long as you don't force it upon others, I can't see why there should be any problem. The personal freedom for any individual to live as one finds the most happiness without harming others should be the goal of any fair/just society.
There's all kinds of ideas about the word the Greeks used for this, eudaimonia. The translation has shifted, and they tend to not even call it happiness anymore.
The new translations seem to mean something more like what you note here, rather than what we, westerners would call happiness.
