Pleasure vs Pain in Ufology

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I know that a few readers here eschew Freud, but they’d be (very) wrong to do so.
 
(But that for another time.)
 
Freud developed what is called The Pleasure Principle(which also is for another time and place).
 
But the gist of Freud’s principle is “seek pleasure, avoid pain” – a suggestion that is obviously sensible on the face of it.
 
But Freud was beat to the punch by Greek philosopher Epicurus [341-270 B.C.]
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurus

Let’s just stick to the “seek pleasure, avoid pain” rubric.
 
I’ve noticed, lately, that UFO long-timers have abandoned their UFO searching and, maybe, interest in the topic, the phenomenon.
 
A cursory breeze through the Facebook UFO domains shows a raft of excursions by UFO lifers that have nothing to do with UFOs or anything close in anomalous substance to them.
 
One-time UFO biggies – Scott Corrales, Rich Hoffman, Lance Moody, Zoam Chomsky (under another name), and many others – have slipped into “foolishness” or activity that incurs pleasure, and not the almost decimating pain of a phenomenon they once loved but have abandoned now because that phenomenon incurs psychological or mental pain – an unforgiving mystery without solution or explanation.

One can see how small pleasures are sought and invoked by the great unwashed: football fans who “die or live” according to how their teams do on the field, the grandparents who dote on their children’s kids as if happiness for those kids will supply happiness to them in their waning lifetime, authors of UFO books with meager sales who are just pleased to say they’re published, singers and performers who have the spotlight for a few years only to fade into nothingness later in life, and so on – you get my drift.

 
In the UFO crowd, lie a slew of one-time enthusiasts who now have to resort to Facebook “Likes” or “LOL’s” to gain a momentary bit of pleasure to assuage the demise of their one-time pleasurable hobby, now only bringing a subtle but palpable pain to their psychological condition: an awareness that they have spent oodles of time and effort to no avail, none whatsoever.

Even those who have achieved accomplishment and/or fame in their lifetimes end up in the pain of knowing that their efforts are, in the great scheme of things, without endurance or meaning.
 
UFO people come to that conclusion late in life also, but they sink into elements of pleasure that assuage their pain of knowing that they’ve wasted their time on a phenomenon that is unforgiving and, maybe, without any meaning or existential worth in the first place.

David Haith gets it, perhaps, as do I; the difference being that I don’t give a damn, refusing to seek momentary pleasures and suffusing myself in the pain of not knowing lots of things, UFOs among them.

What Freud would say about that might be interesting…..

RR