Owing mainly to the swinger resorts of the same name, the word "Hedonism" conjures up visions of freewheeling sexuality. . . not that there's anything wrong with that. But that isn't really what hedonism was originally all about. Shall we say that this is a perversion of the original school of philosophical thought?
Democritus (5th Century BC), probably the earliest proponent of a hedonistic philosophy, cared nothing for indulgence of appetites, sexual or otherwise, but rather recommended moderation, contentment and satisfaction with what one has.
Epicuris (3rd Century BC), founder of a Epicureanism, a form of Hedonism, defined "pleasure" as the absence of pain, and lauded the virtues of the simple life, which included sexual abstinence, in pursuit of the highest pleasure which he deemed to be tranquility and absence of fear.
Originally, hedonism was simply a view that held pleasure as the highest good, but none but a few more recent philosophers has considered indulgence in physical appetites the best path toward maximizing the ratio of pleasure to pain; in fact, quite the opposite.
It appears that both Democritus and Epicuris found peace to be the highest form of pleasure, but peace is actually a neutral state. It's the absence of fear, the absence of anxiety, the absence of depression or any other internal disturbance. Peace, being an absence, then, requires no outside stimulation to be achieved. So you could call this our natural state.
That's what both Democritus and Epicuris are getting at when they advocate the simple life, limitation of outside disturbance so that this natural state of peace might be experienced. And peace is indeed pleasurable. And it's consistently pleasurable, unlike physical appetites, which contain the seeds of pain even as they are pleasurable (e.g. you have to be hungry before you can be satisfied).
But these early philosophers seem to have overlooked the fact that there is one more state that is natural to human beings--a positively pleasurable state, and it's as consistent as peace. It's called joy--the joy of being, to be more precise, because like peace it arises out of our being.
So the early hedonists were right . . . almost. Pleasure is indeed the highest good, but it requires no outside source of stimulation. Both peace and joy are natural attributes of our being. What is required is a reconnection to that being--consciousness--and the more total the consciousness, the deeper the peace and joy that results.
The Mantra of the New Hedonism
Pleasure is the highest good because if we've accessed it in this way, it means we are conscious, that is to say in harmony with our world. No one who regularly experiences the peace and joy of being is negatively impacting his or her world. Quite the contrary, he or she is necessarily making the world a better place.
If we accept as true that our world is a reflection of our inner state of being, our goal must be to awaken to being first, thereby accessing the peace and joy that are already there, so that the world around us will reflect that back to us.
If we do the opposite, and look for peace and joy in the people and things around us, that means we're taking an internal state that is devoid of peace and joy to our environment, and we're sure to see that reflected back to us too.
"Feel Good First" (it's the mantra of The New Hedonism) by accessing your natural states of peace and joy, and then get out there and live it up. That's my advice to you.
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