Balancing pleasure.

Freud distinguishes between two main principles: the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The first concept describes a search for all things pleasant and an avoidance of pain, which drives us to do whatever makes us feel good. The counterpart to this is the reality principle, which puts duty before pleasure. Culture obeys economic mental necessity, as it expected to take away from sexuality a large part of the mental energy needed for its own consumption. For Freud, culture does not mean intellectual training or illustration; rather it is a set of rules restricting the human, sexual or aggressive impulses required to maintain social order. There are thousands of positive values in the cultural world, such as the mass coexistence of multiple social relations or the production and enjoyment of art, yet these same values come from sublimation and, more generally, from a refusal to satisfy the libidinous desires that always cause an indefinite concern. A relationship can be established between guilt and the progress of culture: both increase in the same direction. The statement is inevitable; the more guilt progresses, the less happy man will be. The relationship between the pleasure principle and the reality principle is formed through a mental process known as sublimation, in which unsatisfied desires reconvert this energy into something useful or productive. Taking sexual desire as an example, as putting this into continual practice would mean an abandonment of other productive activities (work, art etc.), man sublimates his desires and uses his energy to perform other actions (sport, reading, playing). According to Freud, without sublimation of sexual desires, civilization would not exist. Through this defense mechanism, the ego unconsciously and involuntarily directs the mental energy associated with a desire or unacceptable idealization to activities that are uncensored by its moral conscience. For Freud, activities that are highly valued by society, such as science, art and religion, are often a consequence of sublimation of underlying and unacceptable interests and passions. Nevertheless, sublimation does not eliminate sexual desires. If these sexual desires are not satisfied, they become repressed in the mind known as the unconsciousness, which is by definition the part of the mind that is inaccessible to our conscious thought and brings together all the repressed desires and impulses.
In conclusion, people have been functioning this way since the beginning of humankind and will continue to work basically the same way with only one constant change; the scenario.

Embraceourmadness.