Deciding What You Want More Of: A Systems-Based Approach to Pleasure

The core idea here is that pleasure is not a luxury you earn after finishing your work. It is a functional requirement for sustainable living. By treating pleasure as a category separate from your responsibilities, commitments, and distractions, you can move away from the trap of time scarcity and toward time affluence. The hidden consequence of our culture obsession with efficiency is not just burnout, but the erosion of our ability to identify what actually brings us joy. Readers who apply these systems-thinking principles will gain a competitive advantage in their own lives: the ability to maintain high output across heavy responsibilities while building a moat of personal well-being that prevents the systemic collapse of their own motivation.

The Hidden Cost of Productive Pleasure

We are conditioned to believe that pleasure must be tied to productivity. Kendra Adachi notes that many people only allow themselves enjoyment if it is attached to a responsibility, like listening to an audiobook while washing dishes. While this feels efficient, it is a failure of systems thinking. By never allowing pleasure to exist on its own, we fail to decouple our worth from our output.

I want you to stop attaching your pleasures to a responsibility or a commitment and not just letting them exist on their own... every pleasure has to be attached to something productive. Just do something fun for the sake of doing something fun.

-- Kendra Adachi

When you force every moment of joy to serve a secondary purpose, you are not actually resting. You are simply multitasking your way through leisure. This eventually depletes the fuel needed to handle responsibilities, leading to a loop of resentment and exhaustion.

Why Small Is the Only Sustainable Strategy

The most common failure when trying to add new habits is over-optimization. Adachi argues that attempting to add six new pleasurable activities at once is a guarantee of failure. This is a classic systems-design error: increasing the complexity of a system beyond its current capacity.

By choosing to add only one thing, and keeping that thing intentionally small, you create an easy win. This is not just about morale. It is about establishing a baseline of success that allows for future expansion.

One thing is better than zero, and six things if you start too big, it is going to lead to zero because it is too big. So we are gonna start with one, and I am really excited about it.

-- Kendra Adachi

The downstream effect of starting small is faster integration. Once a single pleasurable activity is systemized, it becomes a permanent fixture of your routine, providing the stability necessary to add a second or third activity later.

The Feedback Loop of Distraction

Adachi identifies distractions, the things we do that we do not have to do and that do not bring us joy, as the primary obstacle to a balanced life. She notes that these are not just external, like social media algorithms, but internal, like over-planning or over-researching.

When you feel like you do not have time for pleasure, it is often because your system is clogged with productive distractions. You might spend hours researching how to organize your schedule rather than actually doing the thing you enjoy. By identifying these distractions and cutting them, you reclaim the time affluence required to prioritize your own needs. The system responds by shifting your energy away from the maintenance of stress and toward the maintenance of genuine contentment.

Key Action Items

• Audit Your Categories (Immediate): Categorize your daily tasks into Responsibilities, Commitments, Pleasures, and Distractions. Identify one Distraction to cut immediately to create space.
• Select One Pleasure (Immediate): Identify one single, small, and tangible activity you genuinely enjoy. Do not aim for more joy; aim for one specific act, such as reading a physical book or sitting on the porch.
• Remove Friction (Next 48 Hours): If you want to paint, move your supplies out of the back of the closet to a visible, accessible location. If you want to walk, place your shoes by the door.
• Systemize the Trigger (Over the next week): Use a simple, non-negotiable cue to anchor your new pleasure. For example, after the kids leave for school, I have coffee on the porch.
• The Small Win Test (Over the next 14 days): If the activity feels like a chore, shrink the scope. If you cannot find time for a 30-minute walk, commit to 5 minutes. The goal is to build the habit of choosing pleasure, not to complete a marathon.
• Resist the Attachment Trap (Ongoing): Explicitly practice doing your chosen pleasure without trying to be productive simultaneously. This builds the mental muscle required to decouple your value from your output.