The Importance of ''Efficiency'' in minimizing suffering

Well, to put it simply, in a nutshell, this means that if a person is pursuing any other goal in life than maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering, he or she is wasting his time and life, by doing ''inefficient'' things and actions. Now we must define ''efficient'', because it is very important, most important, that we maximize our efficiency in our lives.
Here is the reason why: The definition of ''efficient'' is ''to be acting in such a way as to be minimizing waste of resources, including time, money, and work, as well as physical materials. And we can define ''waste of resources'' as that use of resources which doesn't go directly toward minimizing suffering and maximizing pleasure.
Any behavior other than acting in such a way as to minimize suffering and maximize pleasure is a waste of resources which could be used better if used to maximize pleasure and minimize suffering, and therefore such waste is an ''inefficient'' use of resources, including time.
You can see then why ''efficiency'' is not only much more important than commonly recognized, but in fact it is the most important thing of all, properly defined, since the most important thing of all is minimizing suffering and maximizing pleasure.
In fact, that is the only important thing that there is, in the whole universe, because all other ''useful'' activity is useful only to the degree that it serves to minimize suffering, and to maximize pleasure, by definition of ''useful''. This philosophy is known as Eudemonism, from Aristotle.

Time to get very basic and simple: The ABC's of this

It is time to get very basic and simple, and to start out from scratch, with the ABC's of all this, about ''how to improve your thinking and life''. So here we go, and of course anybody is welcome to add to this, correct it, or improve upon it in any way they choose.

First, I will start out with the basics of Eudemonism. This was a strategy for living and enjoying life, invented by Aristotle of ancient Greece fame, but actually coming from Macedonia, where Philip of Macedonia also came from the great ruler of Macedonia and father of Alexander the Great, also a Macedonian.

But enough of history. Eudemonism teaches us that everything we do is for one purpose only, and that is: to get pleasure while avoiding pain and suffering. In fact, we could even say that we do everything we do for the purpose of maximizing pleasure, not just getting a little of it, and minimizing suffering, as much as possible, throughout our lives. Even religions are all based upon this eudemonism principle, because they all teach what they claim is the best way to go to heaven or paradise, and the best way to avoid pain and suffering in hell, whether the particular religion teaches that this paradise will be in this life or in some putative life after we die.

So instead of bothering with any particular religion, and all its various idiosyncratic rules and fears and guilts and rituals and wastes of time and energy, Eudemonism teaches us to eliminate that middle man of religion, and go right to the main crux of our life, which is to focus on, and to concentrate on, exclusively, optimizing conditions. That is the main duty and goal of life.

Optimizing conditions means to arrange our lives and everything that we can in such a way that we will have the minimum of suffering and the maximum pleasure possible throughout our lives. Some people say, oh no, happiness is more important than just having pleasure, which they see the pursuit of as somehow evil or greedy or dirty or selfish, and so on, since most people think that pursuit of pleasure is somehow evil, based upon religion's telling us to sacrifice ourselves for God and other people and for the earth, and so on. But actually, this is a bad use of language, a bad imprecision in language, which is a bad imprecision in thinking. I'll tell you why.

Happiness itself, whether for humans or for a god, is defined as ''having pleasure and not pain''. In fact, perfect happiness is ''all pleasure and no suffering''. And vice versa: perfect unhappiness is ''all suffering and no pleasure'', and this is true whether we think of happiness as some kind of spiritual or emotional or mental state, or whether we think of it as also physical as well. It is not possible to define happiness in any other way, without destroying ''precision in language'', which is the same thing as precision in thinking, accuracy of thinking, and this precision in language is the necessary basis of happiness and of improving one's thinking and one's life.

The main thing about improving your thinking

The main thing about improving your thinking is ''precision in language''. It helps immediately to be aware of the fact that we think in symbols, and the symbols are language: words and images and numbers, all of which are symbols for those things that they represent, outside of our brain. And thinking is manipulating and arranging these symbols in our brain, to come to a conclusion, without the need for manipulating and arranging the real things that the symbols represent, in the world outside our brain, in order to be able to come to conclusions about these things.

But this will make more sense later, after we have done a lot more analysis of these concepts.