Anti-hedonists from Plato on have suggested that most people who devote themselves to pleasure-seeking are living a lie. Either they deny their own truest longing — in Plato’s case, for eternity — or they deny how austere (and spiritually unfulfilling) a life devoted to pleasure really is. If someone truly feels no sign of dissatisfaction at the prospect of pursuing one pleasure after another until both the desires and their satisfaction simply wink out of existence at the moment of death, then such a person might be a consistent hedonist, might really consider pleasure the highest good. But how many people truly, honestly feel that way? How many will truly, honestly experience no flood of regrets when faced with the prospect of annihilation?

Plato’s prediction? Not many.

It’s true: The immortality afforded by procreation is an ersatz immortality. We won’t really be around to go on living through our children’s lives, and the lives of their children. But we can imagine those lives, and the ones following from them down through the ages, while we are alive, and know that something intangible about us will live on through them. Just as something equally intangible promises to live on from someone who devotes his life to the goods of honor or glory, or sacrifice for a noble cause.

There is no such comfort for the hedonist.