Against Achievement

Why No Achievement Can Be Better Than Pleasure

Many Stoics and online strivers preach the value of achievement as opposed to its opposite, pleasure. In their view, the truly worthwhile life is one dedicated to accomplishment rather than enjoyment. 

This doctrine has found new life in modern hustle culture, where the pursuit of achievement is elevated to almost religious status. 

These strivers, like Kyle Shepard, sprinkle their articles with quotes like these—

“Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labour does the body.”

-Seneca 

And this one 

“Comfort is the worst addiction.”

-Marcus Aurelius 

— to promote an ethic of striving. Achievement, not pleasure, is the way to lasting satisfaction.

But as this essay will demonstrate, the opposite is true. Achievement isn’t better than pleasure. In fact, it’s impossible to hold achievement above pleasure once both terms are understood. 

Before we can properly examine this belief, however, we need a working definition of achievement. Let's start with something intuitive: achievement is something difficult to do which leaves you proud at having completed it.

This definition seems reasonable enough at first glance. It captures our common understanding that achievements should be challenging and should result in a sense of satisfaction. But as we'll see, this apparently straightforward definition contains hidden contradictions that reveal something profound about the nature of achievement itself.

To expose these contradictions, consider the following scenario:

Jill is tired of her safe, happy life. She wants to achieve something. She decides she's going to climb a mountain. During her climb, she is caught in a crevasse and has to painfully amputate her own arm. She survives the ordeal, reaches the peak, and then returns home. Despite her suffering, she doesn't regret the experience. In fact, she feels that the suffering she endured was necessary to test her limits and give her a sense of pride she didn't have before.

Bill listens to Jill's story and is inspired by it. He too wants to achieve something. He's not much of a hiker though. So he decides to stay home and cut off his own arm instead. The pain is terrible, but afterwards Bill too feels proud of himself for having been able to endure it. Even though he laments his lost arm, just as Jill does hers, he is filled with a pride that he says he couldn't have arrived at without first enduring the ordeal of cutting off his arm.

And then there's Phil. Like Jill, Phil decides to climb the mountain. Like Jill, he gets caught in a crevasse. Like Jill, he amputates his arm to survive. But unlike Jill, after freeing himself, Phil decides he's had enough and turns back. He never reaches the summit.

Our initial reactions to these three stories reveal something interesting about how we conceptualize achievement. Most of us would say that Jill has achieved something while Bill hasn’t. This seems obvious – after all, Jill's suffering served a purpose while Bill's was pointless. But this distinction between instrumental and terminal suffering isn't as clear-cut as it first appears.

Consider: Bill cut off his arm knowing that it would be difficult and painful. He did something that others are unwilling to do. Moreover, Jill wouldn't have needed to cut off her arm unless she was climbing the mountain. It was only an imperative because she put herself in that situation. Both suffered terrible ordeals, and both emerged with similar feelings of pride mixed with regret. What’s the real difference? 

Phil's story complicates matters further. His suffering was clearly instrumental – he amputated his arm to save his life, not for its own sake like Bill. In this sense, his actions seem more rational than Bill's. Yet we hesitate to call Phil's experience an achievement in the way we do Jill's. His story feels incomplete, unsatisfying. But why? He survived a terrible ordeal through his own efforts. Isn't that achievement enough?

This first pass at analyzing our thought experiment suggests that instrumental suffering alone cannot be what separates true achievement from mere endurance. There must be something more to the story.

The deeper distinction between these three emerges when we consider their “narrative coherence” – how well they align with our socially constructed understanding of meaningful action. 

Jill's story follows a recognizable pattern of human striving: the hero faces challenges in pursuit of a clear goal, overcomes them through sacrifice, and ultimately triumphs. Phil's story contains elements of this pattern but feels truncated, while Bill's story seems absurd precisely because it lacks any coherent narrative framework.

This observation about narrative coherence might seem tangential to our discussion of achievement versus pleasure, but it actually cuts to the heart of the matter. When we say that Jill achieved something while Bill and Phil didn't, we're not really making a claim about the intrinsic value of their actions. Instead, we're expressing our recognition that Jill's story fits into our social framework of meaningful accomplishment while Bill's and Phil’s do not.

This brings us to a crucial insight: achievement is inseparable from social approval, whether actual or imagined. Even when we accomplish something in complete solitude, the pride we feel is inextricably linked to our understanding of what others would value. This is why we can't say that what Jill did is an achievement purely because of the pleasure she felt at the top of the mountain or anywhere else along the way. The pleasure of achievement is fundamentally social in nature.

Epicurus, in his wisdom, distinguished between natural pleasures (those that arise from meeting genuine needs) and unnatural ones (those that depend on empty opinion). The irony is that achievement, which is often positioned in opposition to pleasure-seeking, falls squarely into the category of unnatural pleasures. The satisfaction we derive from achievement is entirely dependent on social recognition and status – precisely the kind of empty opinion that Epicurus warned against.

Consider again our initial definition of achievement as "something difficult to do which leaves you proud at having completed it." We can now see that pride itself is a social emotion, one that requires an imagined audience. Even in our most private moments of accomplishment, we are performing for an internalized gallery of observers. 

The Stoics who advocate for achievement over pleasure fail to recognize that they are merely trading one form of pleasure (direct sensory enjoyment) for another (social validation).

This is why the achievement/pleasure dichotomy ultimately collapses. When we chase achievement instead of pleasure, we're not really making the noble sacrifice that Stoics and hustle culture advocates imagine. We're simply pursuing a different kind of pleasure – one that's more socially praiseworthy to those around us but no more virtuous or meaningful in any objective sense.

A Stoic reader might object at this point that our appeal to Epicurean distinctions between natural and unnatural pleasures merely begs the question. After all, why should we prefer natural pleasures simply because they're easier to obtain? The Stoic might argue that the very difficulty of achievement-based satisfaction is what makes it worthwhile. Arriving at the peak is valuable precisely because the mountain is hard to climb.

This objection deserves careful consideration, as it cuts to the heart of why we pursue achievements in the first place. The Stoic position seems to be that true inner peace and satisfaction can only come through achievement and the overcoming of difficulties. From this perspective, Jill's story represents not just a socially approved narrative, but a genuine path to psychological wholeness.

However, this Stoic response reveals a deeper contradiction. If inner peace and satisfaction are the ultimate goals, achievement-based pleasures are actually counterproductive. Natural pleasures, as Epicurus understood them, are superior not because they're easier, but because they're self-contained and self-validating. When you satisfy hunger, quench thirst, or enjoy the company of friends, the pleasure is complete in itself - it doesn't require external validation to be fulfilling. The experience directly corresponds to a real need being met.

In contrast, achievement-seeking has no natural limit precisely because it depends on social validation. There's always a higher mountain to climb, always another person's approval to seek. The satisfaction never quite arrives because it's not tied to any natural need, but to an endless game of social comparison. This is why Bill's arm amputation feels empty even though it required just as much courage as Jill's - it lacks any connection to any genuine human need.

Even Phil's story, while more coherent than Bill's, illustrates this point. His act of self-preservation responded to a real need and thus carries its own satisfaction, regardless of whether he reached the summit. The fact that we feel his story is "incomplete" reveals more about our social conditioning than about the true nature of satisfaction.

This understanding provides a more devastating critique of achievement-seeking than any appeal to ease or difficulty. The pursuit of achievement, far from being a path to inner peace, perpetually defers it. Like a mirage in the desert, the satisfaction of achievement constantly recedes as we approach it, always promising but never quite delivering the tranquility we seek.

The pursuit of achievement, then, reveals itself to be a peculiar kind of self-deception. We imagine we are choosing something higher than pleasure when in fact we are simply choosing a different variety of it – one that depends entirely on social validation. 

This is not to say that climbing mountains or pursuing difficult goals is worthless. Rather, it suggests that we should be more honest about our motivations and more critical of the supposed virtue of achievement for achievement's sake.

Perhaps the real wisdom lies in recognizing that the opposition between achievement and pleasure is false. Instead of pretending that achievement represents some higher calling beyond pleasure, we might acknowledge that both are valid parts of human experience, neither inherently superior to the other. This recognition might free us from the tortured logic that leads people to devalue simple pleasures in favor of socially-sanctioned "achievements" that are, in the end, just another form of pleasure-seeking.

The next time someone preaches the superior virtues of achievement over pleasure, we might ask them: Are you truly pursuing something beyond pleasure, or have you simply chosen a more socially acceptable way to seek it?

Ειρήνη και Ασφάλεια

Peace and Safety