Pain always leads to pleasure, if you are making a sandwich and accidentally cut yourself the body gives you feedback through pain for the tissue damage that just accorded. After a period the pain is going to gradually reduce and stop, before the wound is completely healed. This happens because your body starts to secrete endorphin's which masc the pain so your hand is going to feel normal before it is healed.
Endorphin's is just fancy medical term for internal morphine which is a hormone that we all secrete that is associated with pleasure and has the capacity to mask pain. This is behind everything you ever enjoined in life. I guess you could say that all what we do in life we do for morphine. This is also why people that do drugs do them, they put in their body substances that mimics the effect of morphine, well of course and then you have all the bad side effects.
We have this mechanism to help us avoid things that are damaging and pursue the things that are good for us. We get rewarded for good thing like: food, sex etc. and feel pain when we are injured, deprived or put our social status in danger etc.
The problem with this is that in order to grow you need to take risks and do things that can be painful. When this pain is being avoided you end up with degeneration and agony because there is no growth and everything changes if you are not improving and refining you are decaying. So you are going to end up in a place of agony or chronic pain because of all the degeneration.
This is why hedonism is problematic by putting pleasure as the top priority you are going to avoid the pain that is necessary to make you grow. Which makes it almost impossible to be happy.
My definition for happiness being: happiness is the emotional reward for the effort in the pursuit of pleasure. The effort part is key, but sure effort is unpleasant it is painful. And what happens inside your body when you fell pain? You guessed it endorphin's, it is a natural high that makes the work pleasurable.
When i said masochism i didn`t meant like whips and latex i meant deriving pleasure from the natural pain that comes in your life. Which is a natural thing we all have i know it is a taboo, but if it exist this have to has a purpose which means that there is a balance and healthy way to express it.
And the purpose of it is to make human beings more resilient, which is an important precursor for happiness. If in order to be happy you would need that everything in your life to go right, than happiness is impossible. I don't know about you, but i never experience that and never saw or herd of anybody without problems. This is why happiness is almost synonymous with resilience.
