Enjoyment and pleasure…

Usually, enjoyment and pleasure are used interchangeably in vocabulary. Just if we look at the dictionary meaning, we see the funny loop regarding these two words, pleasure = a feeling of happiness or satisfaction and enjoyment = a feeling of enjoyment or satisfaction. Apparent from the definitions, pleasure and enjoyment define each other which does not really help.

In the seminal book ‘Flow’, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly (Me-high Cheek-sent-me-high) creates a psychological distinction between the definition of these two words. He stipulates that pleasure is more like a state of ease, where you are basically going with the flow(and not in ‘flow’), not actively engaged in a task. This can be exemplified through someone watching television. The television is doing everything for you. It is providing enough information at a steady rate to keep you engaged but demanding nothing from you in return. You can define that as a pleasurable state.

On the other hand, you enjoy the state of ‘enjoyment’,(see what I did there! 😉) you are actively engaged to the enjoyable task that you are doing. There are a few requirements for a task to be enjoyable. The most important quality is ‘challenge’, but to a certain degree. If you are a person who struggles to draw an apple start to draw a self-portrait to set yourself a challenge, that is definitely not going to be enjoyable. But if you draw a banana instead trying to perfect the edges, shades, colours and observe it coming to life in front of your eyes, that should be a properly enjoyable task for ‘you’. So, what is enjoyable varies from person to person, task to task. The perfect balance of challenge and ability is struck in the Goldilocks zone, as some people like to say. Another important factor is constant feedback. Every stroke you make in the drawing of the banana provides you visual feedback on your progress towards your goal. Which brings in the final condition, an existence of an aim and an idea of how to reach there.

Okay, fair enough, you say, enjoyment is harder to achieve according to you. So, why should I go through all the trouble to reach the same goal described by the dictionary? Because, I say, the dictionary does not understand you! It has been seen that the enjoyment you get from such an activity is so much superior to the so-called pleasure sensation that the struggle is well worth it. You can draw examples from your life if you look back a little. Try to think of some of your favourite moments in life: the day you suddenly started cycling at full speed, the afternoon you scored a goal in football, the moment you had the aha moment while solving a math problem, the instant you climbed that mountain and reached the peak. These are all enjoyable tasks, after each of which you came out to be a bigger person than you were before and you built some new neural connections in your brain to build complexity. That! That, I would say is most definitely worth striving for!