Exploring the Pleasure of Displeasure

Below is the full podcast episode and a shortened blog summary. I encourage you to listen to the full podcast for depth and inspiration from my human (non-AI) voice. It’s also available on your favorite podcast apps here (Apple, Spotify, etc.).

A Personal Story: The Kolkata Cycle

Every few summers as a child, we’d visit my grandparents in Kolkata, India. These were the golden moments of my childhood—family, food, chaos, laughter. But my grandmother once said something that stayed with me:

“The best part of your visit is when we hear you’re coming. Once you arrive, it already feels like you’re leaving.”

That sentence captures the five-phase cycle of emotion I now see in so many areas of life:

Anticipation – The news of an upcoming visit.
Peak Joy – Reuniting and immersing in the experience.
Diminishing Return – The joy begins to fade.
Emotional Crash – The painful goodbye.
Longing and Craving – The emptiness afterward.

This emotional cycle isn’t unique to my childhood summers. I’ve seen it unfold in every major milestone of my adult life: medical school graduation, my wedding, book launch, big speaking engagements, etc. Each peak is inevitably followed by a trough.

We’ve been trained to chase the peak experiences, but most of us have never been taught how to sit and learn from the troughs.

Dopamine, Maya, and the Matrix

The pursuit of constant pleasure is wired into our neurobiology.

Dopamine rewards us for achieving goals, but the goalpost keeps moving, so what once felt “extraordinary,” quickly becomes ordinary.

In Eastern traditions, this constant chasing is called Maya—the illusion of fulfillment through the outer world. In the Matrix film, it’s the “blue pill.” In modern life, it’s the pressure to keep padding our resume, our LinkedIn profile, our social media posts, etc.

The red pill—the hard truth—blows the lid off of Maya and exposes the game we have been playing, shaped and designed by early conditioningand inherited expectations.

The Gift Hidden in Displeasure

What if the discomfort we feel after joy fades is not a flaw in our emotional circuitry—but a signal from deep within? Do we listen, or reflexively numb and distract ourselves?

Painful as it was to leave my grandmother in India, that pain was the other side of the deep love and respect I had for this remarkable woman.

Modern Escapes vs Ancient Integration

Most of us don’t want to feel displeasure, so we self-soothe—some of us with sugar, some with scrolling, some with exercise, achievement, or “noble distractions” like working more hours or parenting more intensely so we experience more pleasure through our children when our own sources of pleasure and achievement fade.

Great art, music, and even scientific breakthroughs are often born not from euphoria, but from discontent, which forces often longer periods of silent introspection which most modern humans don’t have the tolerance or attention span for.

Avoidance, even when it’s polished and productive, robs us of the wisdom on the other side of discomfort.

Emotions Influence Metabolism

This isn’t just psychological. It’s metabolic. A major premise of my current work and the shift in my podcast content.

Some of my most stable glucose readings have occurred when I’m in an emotionally grounded state—even if I’m not eating “perfectly” or exercising intensely.

Conversely, my CGM often shows erratic patterns when I’m too regimented, over-restricting caloric intake and exercising too hard and too often.