Am I being a snob?

[TinCow]

I am starting to get Hemingway´ish vibes from you TC.

I am of the opinion that people can make themselves unhappy by trying too hard to be happy. Intellectuals often try to analyze and control everything about their lives, but emotions cannot be controlled. Even if you are able to understand why you feel the way you do about something, such understanding does not allow you to change your feelings about it. So, I think it is pointless to even try. Just enjoy what is pleasurable and avoid what is not. Trying to change what you enjoy is a largely futile exercise. The only intellectualism to apply to it is figuring out what it is that makes you happy, and then orchestrating your life so that you will get as much of that as possible. I have two rules in life: first, enjoy yourself; second, don't stop anyone else from enjoying themselves.

I wish to emphasize that I advocate maximization of happiness, not hedonism. 'Enjoy yourself' does not mean that you should do whatever you want whenever you want to do it. The point is to maximize happiness throughout your lifetime. Often times we must do things which are unpleasant in the short term to be able to do things which are more pleasant in the long term. An example of this, for most people, is work. Today, I would have had more fun if I had stayed home and played games, but instead I went to work. I did this because in the long term I need money to do many things which make me happy. While I could enjoy a few days of entertainment by not going to work and losing my job, that enjoyment is heavily outweighed by the things that my salary enables me to do. It is relatively easy to apply a similar analysis to almost any situation. The objective of all this, for me, is that I want my last thought in life to be "that was fun" rather than "I wish I had done X." Regret is a horrible thing.