Tension and Resolution, and Resolve

Humans reject resolution without tension in Music, in Art, in Science, and in life in general. The biggest pleasures for people are not the pleasures granted without struggle.

Chord progressions in music serve a clear example of this. Building tension in a melody by going to chord 5 before dropping back down to 1 provides the strong stress/relief feeling that we love so much. Of course, this particular progression has been used so much that we become conditioned to feel the relief automatically on the 5th cord, so progressions must be switched up to keep the auditory processors experiencing tension.

In science as well, the discovery of something which was not a mystery to begin with is not the most awesome discovery. When a tension and mystery has been built around a topic and great difficulty lies in exposing the truth of the matter, then the pleasure of discovery when that truth is exposed is unlike any other.

This phenomenon is crucial to all parts of a humans life. Suppose a person went through their entire life only experiencing greater and greater pain until death. This growth of tension without resolution may be the worst type of life, and the one that no person would ever like to live through. The second worst type of life is of course the exact opposite, where a person lives on the 1st chord for their entire life. Imagine someone who always gets everything they want in the blink of an eye, and always experiences only the maximum amount of comfort possible. This is the most uninteresting and boring existence that one could have. The person with the most overall average pleasant existence is therefore somewhere in-between.

Many people intuitively live their life with this knowledge, and even when they have the wealth or power to achieve maximum comfort, they reject it. Instead they take irrational risks, challenge themselves, or attempt dangerous, thrilling things.

This concept of human pleasure exists even in the most simple cases.
What would be a better way to spend 4 hours:

• Laying in bed for 4 hours and relaxing

• Going out for an intense 1 hour exercise session, and then returning exhausted to lay in bed for 3 hours.

The answer is clear. To gain most out of life, one must not lay down until after a challenge has been attempted.