No civilized man ever regrets a pleasure, and no uncivilized man every knows what a pleasure is. So the first step in improving the quality of life consists in engineering daily activities so that one gets the most rewarding experiences from them. This sounds simple, but the inertia of habit and social pressure are so strong that many people have no idea which components of their lives they actually enjoy, and which contribute to stress and depression. Have always the idea of pleasing before you, and you cannot fail to please.  Sweet pliability of a man’s spirit, that can at once surrender itself to illusions, which eat expectation and sorrow of their weary moments! Keeping a journal or reflecting on the past day in the evening are ways to take stock systematically of the various influences on one’s mood. After it is clear which activities produce the high points in one’s day, it becomes possible to start experimenting—by increasing the frequency of the good experiences, and decreasing that of the others.  

When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. A somewhat extreme example of how this might work was reported by Dr. M.R Harris, when he studied mental health in the Netherlands. In his hospital, patients were routinely given the electrical stimulation mapping (ESM) to find out what they do all day, what they think about, and how they feel. Every pleasure worth a wish is in the power of almost all mankind.  One of the patients, a chronic schizophrenic woman, whose name I cannot release for privacy concerns, had been hospitalized for over ten years, showed the usual confused thought patterns and low effect of severe mental pathology, which means she had distortions of perception, delusions, hallucinations, and usual behaviors, such as thought disorders. Basically, she reflected a loss of contact with perceived reality, which is sometimes known as a psychotic disorder. 

However, during the two weeks of the ESM study, the female patients reported quite happy moods twice. In both cases, she had been taking care of her fingernails. Thinking that it was worth a try, the staff had a professional manicurist teach her the skills of the trade. The patient took eagerly to the instruction, and she was soon caring for the nails of the rest of the patients. The disposition of the young lady changed so drastically that she was released into the community under supervision; she hung a shingle on her door, and within the year she was self-sufficient. No one knows why paring nails was the challenge this woman needed, and if one interpreted this story psychoanalytically, perhaps one would realize that when people are trusted, and allowed to care for themselves, and are taught with care, they can recover.  

The moral of the story is for that one lady, at that particular stage in life, being a manicurist allowed at least a pale semblance of flow to enter her life. It is painful to be frustrated in what we propose as our pleasure. I have known a good man wish to have bad news true, merely because he had related them: and we may conceive a saint vexed at not finding a man dead, when he had digested a funeral sermon in his mind, and was ready to bury him. Every pleasure worth a wish is in the power of almost all mankind. To make life pleasant, we must have our trifling amusements as well as our sublime transports. Pleasure given in society, like money lent in usury, returns with interest to those who dispense it. Anybody’s life may be just as romantic and strange and interesting if one fails as if one succeeds. All the difference is that the last chapter is wanting in the story.