The thought that overabundance of certain resources in our
culture is both a blessing and a curse isn’t an original one. In fact, the
issue is so pervasive that it’s become a political weapon (“How can we say that
the poor in America are poor when their biggest problem is obesity, not
starvation!”)
Not having been the first person to think of it, or about
it, hasn’t changed the fact that, over the past few days, I’ve been moved by a
realization that the easy availability of things that we once would have
considered indulgences for rare occasions or for the very wealthy (meat, sugar,
fat, oil, salt; the ability to sit still all day and be entertained; the
constant access to gossip, news, music, and stories; sex, with anyone, at any
time; the ability to be lazy AND STILL EAT; the ability to consume
mind-altering substances) COMBINED WITH a tacit societal permission to indulge
in them at any time without guilt or judgement, is a huge problem.
And I don’t just mean a problem in the sense of the natural
outcomes of these things (obesity, disease, distraction, accidents and so on).
I mean a problem in that when you can have something at any time you want, it
loses its value as a pleasure.
Take a Double Whopper, for instance. It’s the perfect food:
a fat/salt/sugar bomb that you don’t even have to make yourself. Our ancient
ancestors would have, literally, killed for a Double Whopper, and had to
somehow grind the beef by hand, and grow wheat for a whole season to make the
bun and then figure out how to get the grit and chaff out of the flour to
create white bread, and then, at least in the case of MY ancestors, traveled
to another continent to get the sugar and the tomatoes…and we can drive through
any of 13,000 locations and have it handed to us in minutes.
I’m sure that my 100x great-grandparents had some caveperson
equivalent of a double whopper, but I be they couldn’t get it so easily. And I
bet they had access to alcohol, or psychedelics, or smokables, or something,
but I bet they didn’t use them every evening to unwind.
We, on the other hand, not only can, but DO eat like kings
at practically every meal. If we drink, we do it regularly. We’re entertained
in our homes, in our cars, while we work out, which we don’t actually have to
do.
And here’s the problem: because all of these pleasures are easily
accessible both in the sense of being available and in the sense that there are
no real cultural barriers to over-indulging, they’re not special. And because
they’re not special, we have fewer small things to which to look forward. And
because we have fewer SMALL things to which to look forward, I think we get a
sort of societal ennui that leads us to all sorts of grasping for
stimulation and excitement: risky sex, risky sports, all manner of addictions;
trying to fill the pleasure gap with things and people; and, of course,
doubling down on food and gossip and laziness and entertainment and drugs in an
attempt to make them ‘feel good’ again.
In other words, when small things aren’t special, we have to
look to bigger, more expensive, and sometimes more harmful things to make us
feel the way looking forward to a feast day probably made our 17th-century
forebears feel.
Ennui is definitely an affliction of a people whose basic
needs are more than satisfied. I doubt that starving humans, or humans who don’t
have a dry place to sleep or who aren’t safe on a day to day basis, feel that “I
want something, but I don’t know what it is” boredom. So ironically, I think
that maybe the solution to that bizarrely discomfiting feeling of dissatisfaction
is to take it upon ourselves to CREATE the lack of instant gratification, so
that when the thing we like DOES happen, it’s both a big deal and a thing to
which to look forward. In other words, to give up the day-to-day thing that
doesn’t really satisfy so that, when the rarer thing DOES happen, it’s uniquely
pleasurable again.
If I stop trying to entertain myself every single night by
re-watching movies for the umpteenth time or flipping through the channels
looking for a show that’s actually engaging, then the thought that I’m going to
get to see a movie that’s coming out soon that I’ve really been looking forward
to becomes a pleasure in itself. If I eat only to fuel my body, and not in an
attempt to ‘feast’, on a day to day
basis, then the real ‘feast days’ (maybe a holiday, or a party, or even a
dinner out at a great restaurant) become anticipated breaks that, one hopes,
are truly pleasurable because of the marked departure from my day to day life.
Asceticism is never going to take hold as a widespread ‘thing’
in a culture that has too much of practically everything. Restraining oneself
seems old-fashioned and unnecessary when I can eat whether I work or not, where
I can have a job whether I try to do it well or not, and where I can have
affairs, bankrupt other people, and say any damn thing I want and still hold
the highest office in the most powerful country in the history of humankind.
But I bet I’d be, and that most people would be, more
productive, healthy, and, most importantly, HAPPY if they purposefully gave up
their little pleasures a lot of the time in favor of enjoying them more on
rarer occasions.
I also wager that if we could go into projects like diets,
or like Lent, or like workout regimes, with the attitude that I am giving this
up most of the so that I can enjoy it a lot more on fewer occasions (instead
of, “Crap, I have to give this up, I’ll white knuckle my way through all this
horrible loss and deprivation until my cheat day when I’ll totally lose control
and probably never be able to get back on the wagon, this sucks, I want a
Hershey bar and a Corona, stat!” I’d be
more successful at doing them.
It’s a way of looking at our ‘vices’, whether they be
substances or actions (too much TV, too many video games, too much sex with
strangers, too much facebook or gossip or whatever) in the reverse. I’m not
avoiding too much sex with strangers (never been a problem of mine, BTW)
because I think it’s “bad” or I “shouldn’t”, but because if I deny it to myself
most of the time, it’s better when do indulge. I assume. Again, never tried it.
But cake is definitely that way, so I assume anonymous sex is, too.
Trading the immediate pleasure for the later pleasure is
pretty much the definition of self-discipline, right? But trading the immediate
pleasure for the GREATER pleasure created when we refuse to indulge in
half-assed attempts (that, let me point out, don’t even work) to feel good all the time is something
else altogether. It’s self-awareness. It’s paying attention. It’s being present
to the fact that binging on junk food didn’t actually make the bad relationship
or the feelings of inadequacy go away. It’s trading feeling ‘better’ all of the
time for feeling great some of the time—and for the anticipation of that great
feeling, which is pretty great in itself.
I wonder what 21st century America would look
like if we all did this. I wonder what my life would look like if I did. I’m curious
to find out.
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