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Day 62: In a world...of too much pleasure...



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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