The self-actualiser vs the hedonist

Discipline or pleasure? Restriction or Excess? The pressure to live correctly.

I don’t know if this is a generational thing or simply a direction the winds of culture are blowing, but it feels as though contemporary life is organised around two competing fantasies.

Let me set two scenes for you…

The self actualised life

You woke up this morning around 6:45 and went for a run because, god forbid, you check your phone before getting sunlight into your eyes. You got back, stretched, waited 90 minutes before having caffeine, added a scoop of protein to your porridge (like your Scottish ancestors intended I guess), went to work, took a nature walk, came home, cooked your low ingredient dinner, turned your red lights on, did some yin yoga and breath-work if you're feeling particularly evolved, read your book and decompressed. Your days are arranged around the altar of wellness. Health is no longer something you have; it's the vehicle through which a better life is pursued. Socialising looks like the gym, a fitness class or an early morning coffee date. Plans after 6pm are a hell no. Consumption is strictly self-help content, whether it’s the books you read, the podcasts you listen to on the long walks you take or the habits you are stacking. You don’t really go out anymore. You like your money where you can see it: in your overpriced whole food shop, matching running set and monthly class pass membership.

You protect your peace at all costs. Do Not Disturb makes you unreachable by 8pm. By 10pm you’re in bed with a herbal tea, ready to do it all again tomorrow.

There is something seductive about this life. It promises a sense of control disguised as direction in a world that feels perpetually chaotic.

Maybe it’s a response to technology making everything so easy. Our brains were made to problem solve, and now there are no problems there’s an incessant itch to scratch. When everything is handed to us on a plate the self-actualiser embodies this instinct, they actively seek challenge and enjoy discomfort. Evident in the rise of extreme fitness: marathons, Hyrox races and endurance events. You can see it in sidehustleification of hobbies, passions that quickly become identities and recreation that takes on the seriousness of work. Even rest has become productive. Flying somewhere simply to lie in the sun feels almost indulgent now. Holidays are now opportunities to improve: flying somewhere to exercise harder, eat cleaner and return home glown up.

Long-term gratification and consideration for the future self increasingly appear as the ideal way of being. There is always a fitter, more attractive, more intelligent and more actualised version of yourself waiting on the precipice of work you are avoiding. You're not burnt out, you're just telling your mind the wrong thoughts. You're not exhausted, you just haven't found the right morning routine yet.

My woes with meal prep

I’ve always been a meal-prep hater, to me the concept reflects a wider cultural logic that your time shouldn’t be ‘wasted’ as if spending an hour or less chopping vegetables and listening to music or chatting is inherently indulgent. As if you shouldn’t have time to prepare food for yourself everyday because your time needs to be spent in more productive and effective ways.

Hence why it’s normalised to prepare an entire week’s worth of food on a Sunday so that your future self doesn’t have to think about it. On paper this feels like a win I guess, it’s convenient and your mental capacity is freed up. But to me, this act is a form surrendering to your time as a productivity project.

The space for spontaneity narrows, the freedom to follow your present desires and live in the moment disappears. Your presence fades and your intuition lowers as your Sunday self decides what your Wednesday self will eat before they have even met the Wednesday version of you. The experience may be more efficient, but efficiency and richness are not the same thing.

This routine-based existence devoted to the self sits comfortably alongside ideals of capitalism: becoming endlessly productive, emulating a machine, so much so that the self becomes the ultimate project to work on. This is great for a system that can sell you the solution to your current fixation, or offer you tools to numb the pressure instilled in your nervous system from comparing yourself to hundreds of lives you were never meant to know about.

Living begins to take the shape of a continuous refinement process. There is always another layer to peel back, another habit to master, another piece of wisdom to integrate. The work is never finished because the project is you. With this comes a guilt, an internal frame that you should always be doing more.

The speed of your life seems to be increasing as weeks fly past. If all this optimisation is supposed to improve life, why does it sometimes feel as though life is slipping away faster?

There is so much discourse online and irl around self-improvement. Whether that’s your physical health, your spiritual growth, your emotional intelligence or your intellectual knowledge, everything and anything has an app, a course or a system designed to help you improve at that thing. Rather than being present and learning as life unfolds, following curiosity and allowing space for things to emerge naturally, there seems to be an invisible pressure to optimise everything all at once.

Scene two…

The hedonist

The antithesis of this archetype is the shameless hedonist.

The world is ending anyway so you may as well live as much as possible. Indulge in anything once. Pleasure is the point. Get naked, eat cheese, find the mayhem, Centre your entire existence around connection, pleasure and the immediate.

Go ahead and steal pleasure from your future self, she won’t mind, it’s in favour of living in the moment after all. Maybe a few small regrets will come, but that’s when the party is over. The point of life is to experience. Good and bad. You are a soul experiencing life in human form for the first time. You are out there experiencing, and that value is intangible and irreplaceable. It’s in experience that everything is developed. You can think and learn all you like, but without applying those thoughts to the realms of life you will never have a holistic understanding. You will never really live.

Flirt with everything in life; that’s how you become friends with everyone. Don’t take things so seriously. Trust that everything acts like water, it flows and works out for you. There is no point wasting time being anxious or feeling guilty. Stop thinking, start living. Life is something to participate in, not something to endlessly think about.

The hedonist doesn’t concern themselves with metrics. Their life isn’t organised around targets but experiences. The calendar fills with dinner plans, festivals and flights rather than productivity systems and performance goals. Devotion looks like little treats and never missing a friend’s birthday. Planning summer is taken more seriously than any work rota. They are endlessly out.

This doesn’t exclusively mean parties. It could be the decision to ritualise the mundane. Going to the post office and stopping by a café for a croissant to keep you company. Adding the mountain of extra cheese to your pasta. Following your intuition with your energy levels. What do you need? What does your body enjoy? Following that.

Rather than holding yourself to rigid standards before you feel satisfied, you indulge in self-care as sensory care. Making your space, your relationships and your experiences the centre of life.

There has been talk of a death of hedonism as wellness culture has boomed. In response to late-stage capitalism, self-improvement has become one of the dominant ways people make sense of themselves. As the self is endlessly worked on, community feels secondary.

Most experience-centred ways of life are naturally community-oriented. Most self-actualising ways of being are, at least partly, solitary. Whether intentional or not, there is something interesting about a culture that increasingly encourages people to focus on themselves. One of my recurring observations when analysing culture is that capitalism functions best when people feel isolated. Community gives people much of what they are searching for elsewhere; meaning, belonging, support and identity. I wrote about this in depth in prioritising friendship is anti-establishment.

Gen Z is particularly interesting in this regard. They have been labelled the grandma generation. They drink less, have less sex, take fewer drugs and go clubbing less than previous generations. At the same time, hobbies, wellness culture and self-improvement have become increasingly central to identity. The morning workout is framed with the same social significance that the night out once carried as the new status symbol is in the physical and aesthetic realm: the body.

The false opposition

Of course, reality is always more complicated than these archetypes suggest. People are not living entirely as self-actualisers or entirely as hedonists. If anything, what has changed is the pressure surrounding our choices. There is a growing sense that time must be spent correctly. That if you are not optimising, you are somehow falling behind. Or if you are not out every weekend, you're wasting your youth. The result is extreme anxiety around how to spend your life at all.

These archetypes are often presented as opposites when they emerge from the same cultural conditions. Both are attempts to answer the question of how to live in an uncertain world. One responds by turning inward. The other responds by turning outward. One seeks certainty through discipline. The other seeks it through experience.

What I find interesting is that our constant search for stimulation can be seen in both fantasies. The self-actualiser is stimulated by growth, optimisation and becoming. The hedonist is stimulated by novelty, experience and socialising. Both are searching for some answer the same question. How should I spend my time? How should I live?

Mark Fisher supports this idea in his theory of depressive hedonia, where the pursuit of pleasure becomes excess. It is defined by an inability to do anything other than pursue it.

“The individual is surrounded by stimulation, entertainment, consumption, nightlife, content, and distraction so pleasure becomes disconnected from any larger sense of purpose, direction, or future.”

Our constant search for stimulation is seen in both fantasies.

The issue with living an increasingly digital existence is that the internet lacks nuance. It categorises identity, rewards clear labels and leaves little room for the contradictions that make up real life. Experience becomes flattened into archetypes and aesthetics rather than lived reality.

This is important to remember in order to release external pressures and check back in with the present moment. To trust yourself a little more. To lean back from the feeling that you need to define yourself quite so completely.

You don’t have to define yourself. I find on a personal level I oscillate between self-focus and experience-focus. There’s an incongruous aspect of living in a culture that pushes a standard of perfection that forgets to highlight life is there to be lived and learned from on your own terms with your own lessons.

Before all the information was democratised, it’s not as if people didn’t figure out truths or succeed in anything. People still fell in love, built meaningful lives, they still found purpose, friendship and community belonging. There was more nuance and balance, less pressure to project an identity as one or the other. Not everything you did needed to be taken so seriously.

To cultivate this nuance once again feels drastically needed. Everything around us is heavily produced. Every choice feels loaded with meaning. Every decision feels like it says something about who you are. Yet there is still a way to anchor your life around your own choices, your own experiences and your own lessons.

Perhaps deeper forms of meaning aren’t found through constant optimisation or distracted stimulation, but through a commitment to stop stressing about whether you are doing enough of either and invest in the quality of attention you bring to the life directly in front of you.

Would love to continue the conversation on this topic in the comments, any further insights, perspectives or examples in your life experience where this shows up.

Thanks a lot for reading! If you enjoyed, I post weekly on culture, creativity and self-inquiry.