Would you enjoy your favourite meal if it were the only thing you could eat for the rest of your life? If not, is it the food you enjoy or the variety, novelty

Would you enjoy your favourite meal if it were the only thing you could eat for the rest of your life? If not, is it the food you enjoy or the variety, novelty and choice? After a strenuous workout would you prefer to sit down to a heavy meal or have a glass of water? The pleasure you derive from something is not an intrinsic property of that thing, the sense of pleasure comes from within your own mind. That is why pleasure is illusory, it is a state that exists only within your mind. The idea behind a practice like Buddhism is not to nullify everything, it is to draw the attention to the fact that all we know of the world is an illusion produced by our senses, we can never truly know the world outside of our consciousness since no matter how closely we examine it we are really just examining its representation within our own mind. It is meaningless in that all of these sense perceptions are essentially the same, the meaning we assign to them is once again something that originates from within us. This doesn't negate the external world, it is just a different way of viewing it and a useful one because it puts into perspective many of the frivolities and aimless paths we trace through it. You don't have to be an ascetic but you don't have to let the world subsume you completely either.