For some reason, I regularly return to a gnomic little quote from Gilles Deleuze (his book, Spinoza) that somehow seems just perfect: "ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation."
I've been meditating on simplicity. On how deliberately putting boundaries around life's possibilities might, in fact, make life more livable. Then there's my conviction that aesthetics can drive ethics. This leads me to think about the relationship between constraints and aesthetics: consider that fine art is about creating (or finding) constraints and then creating within those constraints. Unconstrained creation is just chaos.
In this way, aesthetic creation is perhaps like other ludic activity — artistic praxis as game-playing. The playful artist. So, then, if you want an aesthetically grounded (ethically bounded?) life, you must accept arbitrary aesthetic constraints, just as in poetry or painting or whatever else.
Are the legalisms of Confucianism appealing to me in part because of the fact that they represent one such tried-and-tested set of "constraints on living"? Can deliberately setting out to live inside such constraints make one mentally healthier, or does it just lead to repression? Or is that dependent on other, unrelated factors.