Preface

In this post we will explain you the core idea behind Hedoniac project.

Let’s admit it, we live in an incredibly beautiful and rich-of-opportunities world.
We also need to face reality: it’s far from being that perfect one for everyone of us: suffering, unfairness and unhappiness are there everyday for millions of people. 
Developed societies’ actors (ie. developed countries’ populations, banks, corporations, governments,…) are directly or undirectly generating this status.
In addition to that, this condition doesn’t affect other human beings only but also animals, our very environment and ultimately our planet.

That’s not an opinion, it’s unfortunately the reality. There are only 2 reasons why you should think the contrary:

a) you are part of “the system” that creates this condition,
b) you are asleep (regardless if you like it or not).

We are not in the ’80 anymore… (unfortunately :)). Nowadays, people CAN and MUST pro-actively search for the WHY and HOW things are like they are.

Hedoniac is based on…

…a movement called “rational hedonism”. Unfortuntately, not very known or diffused. Useless to add many words around it as its explanation from the founders is pretty clear:

“Become a Rational Hedonist means to follow your true human nature and gain the pursuit of happiness as the ultimate goal in life. Happiness and pleasure are deep internal psychological aspects, influenced by external forces but not dependent upon them. Therefore, to be self-oriented is crucial to live an happy and pleasurable life.”

In other words, this is a nice introduction of some important concepts:

a) happiness is an internal state and only with self-awereness or mindfulness we can hope to achieve it;
b) as we are dealing with internal mechanisms, those are subjectively interpreted by our mind;
c) we do have some degree of control on some external influences, we don’t for some others. Nevertheless, eventually the choice is up to us. We can make in sort to stop or weaken bad influences and maximize good ones (e.g if you hate your work, quit; if you are tired of your social circle, join anohter one).

A bit more details about “Rational Hedonism”

The explanation continues…

“We are evolved living beings interacting among each others in an intricate environment. To see things in an elemental way, free from complex thoughts and perceiving your existence as a simple flow of opportunities to experience positive emotions and live astonishing experiences, should be the main purpose in life. Also, creating positive lifespan memories that generates further pleasure when growing old. This is to be a rational hedonist or a pleasureseeker.
The sooner you start an inner selfish exploration journey, the sooner you will become a more happy and self accomplished individual, truly enjoying life.”

We love this part: in the one hand having a minimalistic way of thinking is crucial. In the other, creating positive memories that will last forever is also a way of maximizing happiness. Your most positive experiences are affecting your present, making you feel good and gratified of your existence. Also, memories from active experiences are actually shaping the way we think and perceive the world.

As we said above, not much to add to this beautiful way of thinking. Read more about Rational Hedonism.

 

The idea behind Hedoniac…

…by looking at the forest (short explanation)

Hedoniac’s idea came all of a sudden during one night. Soon we realized that if we wanted to start such movement, not only we needed a community to back it up but we needed something to help the voice to be spread. We needed an idea in the idea to attract people and at the same time that would act as a “gift” for the world.

So, we composed Hedoniac with 2 different parts in mind, but that act as one: a community and an experiences’ collection (or library).

The community

We adopt the very “rational hedonism” point of view but widening its horizons and deepening its concepts.

Happiness is not only approached with rationalism but also with practicality, pragmatism and a result-oriented view.
Hedoniac idea is a mix among the following practices, disciplines or way of thinking:

• • Rational & Ethical Hedonism
  • Sustainability
  • Healthy lifestyle
  • Frugalism
  • Buddhism

We aim to diffuse this new movement by enlarging our community and by spreading the voice.

The experiences collection

Hedoniac is also building a library of experiences. We had the idea of creating a collection of replicable emotionally-impactful experiences for every person to independently consult, enjoy and be inspired from. All of that filtrable according to various criteria.

You can read about the criteria that we used to define an and discover how it works here.  or view it here.

…by looking at the bark (long explanation)

The bottom line idea is to change the world for the better :). Hard mission, we know, but we are doing our best. Here is our roadmap milestones:

• • connect: create/join a community of people thinking the same way;
  • evolve: be flexible and steer in line with society and the time being;
  • be the change: adopt a lifestyle that maximize happiness and is also affecting the world positively;
  • share: drive the community’ members to passionately document and share their experiences;
  • build: organize those experiences with filters and search, so for everyone to browse and replicate them;
  • expand: grow the community into a large movement, into a global trend and eventually into a vastly-adopted reality.

The community explained

As said, Hedoniac is firstly a community of people sharing the same ideas and beliefs about happiness.
Here are some easy concepts to summarize that:

a) rejecting everything we think is damaging our happiness and (or) the one of other people, animals or environment (Ethical Hedonism);
b) researching what exactly, subjectively, generates our happiness;
c) pursuing the above, by efficiently maximizing each and every single step required;
d) embrace the unkown to diversify and not get trapped into the habit of the “liking’s spiral”.

We differ from the various Hedonism movements for a few points.
In our community we:

• • don’t take into account individual’s happiness only but also other people’s one, animals and nature (ie. Sustainability and Ethical Hedonism);
  • approach with mindfullness verything we do and choose to experince (ie. buddhism);
  • take into account the preservation of our health (ie. we don’t throw ourselves in an experience that may damage or jopardize it);
  • like experiences that are a result of an active, direct and practical tryout, which is the consequence of a toughtful and subjective research;
  • embrace the unkonw, it has the priority on anything we already like or do;
  • live with frugality, which ensure our lifestyle will last all life long and we don’t attach ourselves to material things;
  • study, learn and understand the WHY behind anything that involves our happiness: habit, liking, pleasure, feedback loop,… To put it differently we actively study our happiness.

Practice over theory

There are tons of unapplicable, nonsense or impractical theories about happiness.
We reject that too. Instead, we love to adopt a rational, pragmatic (with feet anchored on the ground) and results-oriented (analysing experiences’ emotional impact) approach applied to something that is… both emotional and cognitive 🙂

Instead of theorizing on concepts and ideas, we apply those in practice getting our hands dirty. We throw ourselves in any new experience that we may (or may not) like just to gather experience, feedback, challenge ourselves or to have some sort of emotional impact.

One’s personality can perfectly be determined, rational and pragmatic when dealing with emotions without being cold, apthatetic or insensitive face to them.
Remaining humble, open, flexible and understanding in regards of life’s challenges and its opportunities is of core importance. But we know also that we need to be strict on adopting this rigorous approach.

What we believe is generating happiness

We believe that happiness is “the way”, not a goal.
Believing the contrary, means risking waking up one day figuring it out and having missed a tremendously important opportunity, and it will be too late.

So, if happiness is the way, anything you practically acknowledged during your journey is generating it is to be adopted immediately, constantly and for the long run. That’s one of the foundamental ideas behing Hedoniac.

As always, without forgetting to throw yourself into the unkown too. You may not know how many more amazing and astonishing experiences or opportunities are in front of you 🙂

The meaning of the word “Hedoniac”?

It’s a combination between the words “Hedonism” and “Maniac”. Hedonism’s concepts have been thoroughly explained a few lines above.

The word “maniac” needs an explanation as people’s may misunderstood its meaning. The word maniac is often used with a pejorative and negative meaning (e.g. fanatic, addict). Nevertheless, we like to think about it as enthusiast, fan, devotee and a bit as additcted too.

To sum up and to put it simple, Hedoniac means pleasure seeker or enthusiast.

Our Manifesto

(Time² ± Money) * Meaningful Experiences = Happiness

We deeply believe that primary life’s purpose should be the pursuit of ones happiness and personal well-being. We also believe that this is happening regardless of success, power, money or ownership.

To achieve that, we adopt a simple, frugal, healthy, peaceful and meditative way of living.

We reject and stay away from anything that is distorting, corrupting and disrupting our way of thinking and feeling. Moving us away from our pursuit of happiness (e.g. religion, tobacco, medicines, alcohol, drugs, coffee, religion, TV, luxe, News,…).
Each and every of the above example, is in a way changing the perception of our own reality, hiding from conscience the real sensations we are feeling.

We want to remain anchored to each and every single small emotion and instant that life offers us. This, in the the most true, genuine and natural way as possible.

We chase all the challenges, opportunites and experiences life can offer. We throw ourselves in each and every experience we face during our day. Living each experience with mindfullness allow us to feel, introspect, understand and remember. As a consequence we are evolving, becoming more wise, acquiring positivity and are storing exceptional memories about it.

We want to experience life.
Feel and move ourselves.
Remember.
Die with a smile.

The experiences’ collection

We strongly believe that to get people involved into Hedoniac, we need to lead by example and show them practical application of its principles. By directly feeling all the beauty life can offer through active experiences, we think people will become the change we wanna see in the world.

A database of active experiences

Nothing is more convincing and remembering than something you personally and actively experienced on your skin. This is especially true if you felt that with mindfullness and awareness.
Last but definitely not least, because some of the triggered emotions will be radical, you will remember those for the rest of your life. Those stored memories will always be there to influence your perception and thoughts of the world around you.

Given this, we had a damn simple idea, yet its put in practice is incredibly hard. It’s not a surprise nobody ever carried out its achievement before. We are doing our best :).
We realized no once-in-a-life experiences’ collection currently existed or was available online so far. So, we thought of creating one and start recording, collecting and uploading experiences into it.

Quality over quantity

But… rather than creating a huge, out-of-control and user-generated content DB, we are creating a simple, clean, curated and qualitative collection.
The experiences available on Hedoniac have been felt, reported and described by community’s members only. The more our community grows, the more our DB is growing too.

We acknowlege that the idea we had is incredibly hard to realize, it’s subjective (ie. based on the community members) and probably an infinite project too. It’s clearly impossible to collect all of the experiences that human beings can try out in a lifetime. But we think we needed to at least start such challenge…

Why?

Because we think the world in the last decades is getting the more and the more towards buying stuff, consumerism and owning objects.

All turns around money, that is mainly used to perpetuate this insance circle of consumerism and owning stuff.

The paradox is that people are the more and the more unhappy and frustrated about living such lifestyle. About not having the TIME to really enjoy life and all experiences that compose it.

We wanted to shout laud “STOP that”. So, we thought of opposing this lifestyle creating a movement, a community and a reason for people to start EXPERIENCING LIFE, rather than buying and owning stuff.

Criteria that define an experience

Of course we have rules and criteria for defining an experience as such. You can read them here.
For example, we want them to be universally replicable by everyone: regardless of age, status, sex, wealth,….
Also, we want them to be active: the person needs to be actively involved.
Despite subjective, the experience must also relief some sort of immediate or short-term emotional impact on the person.
Ultimately, it should not be location-bound but replicable by anyone wordwide.

On top of all of that, we also set up some filters for people to find the experiences they like the most. E.g.: intensity scale, commercial, outside-the-box, sustainable, subjects, people involved, etc.

Any person is FREE to consult, enjoy and be inspired from the experiences in this collection.

That’s it. That’s the core idea behing Hedoniac 🙂 we hope you liked it and consider joining our community (it’s free :)).

Otherwise, you can simply start enjoying our experience’s collection here, and enrich your life of more beautiful, outside-the-box and once-in-a-life experiences.