When I saw this headline -- "The pursuit of pleasure is a modern-day addiction -- I thought the piece might be some kind of joke or parody.
I mean, I know some people have expanded the scope of "addition" so that it includes things like shopping and carbohydrates, and I know other people can get agitated about that expansion, as if it implies that a chocolate habit and a cocaine habit are somehow on a par. But at least shopping and carbohydrates are actual specific things. And there's no question that these things can be "addictive" in the sense that the more you get the get the more you want.
But pleasure? I mean, that's not a thing you do or ingest, it's more a part of the human experience. How can you be addicted to a part of the human experience? Plus, isn't pleasure the mechanism through which those other things become so habit-forming? What does it mean to reduce the addiction to the very mechanism that makes them work?
I'm no expert on human psychobiology, but isn't pleasure supposed to be one of the main motivating forces of life? Isn't the pursuit of pleasure one of the central reasons people do things? How could it also be a pathological addiction?
And finally, what's a life without pleasure? The author of the piece, Robert Lustig is famous for his view that sugar is a poison. So is the idea that anything pleasurable is also bad? So .. even healthy food shouldn't be consumed because it is enjoyable to eat? WTF?
When I read the piece, it didn't seem quite as absurd as I thought it would be. When you get past the headline, there are more specific examples of ways in which particular pleasures are out of control. A fondness for soda leads to the "big gulp"; the love of likes leads to chronic Instagram checking. Constant stress and anxiety create the backdrop in which we're in constant need of the feel good chemicals in our brain, just to feel OK. To get the feel good chemicals, we do more and more of the "pleasure things," and get less and less out of them, and so on and so on. I guess you could describe that as being addicted to pleasure.
As regular readers of this blog may expect, I can never read things like this without thinking of the ways that these effects are sort of built into the whole capitalist system. What's more successful in capitalism than a commodity that the more people have of them the more they want? Armies of food technologists work day and night to bring about exactly this state of affairs. Whole university departments exist to train people how to do it. How is it surprising that this is where we've ended up?
Later in the essay, Lustig goes back to the more general idea that somehow it's pleasure itself that is the problem, and there he says that to live the right way we should seek "happiness" rather than pleasure. It's funny, because I was just getting ready to teach Mill, and we were going to talk about his "greatest happiness principle" where he says that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness pain, and the privation of pleasure.” So maybe Mill things happiness and pleasure are the same, or at least that he thinks we can use the words interchangeably. On the other hand, Mill famously distinguished between "higher" and "lower" pleasures so who knows.
Lustig says that "the more pleasure you seek, the more unhappy you get and the more likelihood you will slide into addiction or depression" and that "our ability to perceive happiness has been sabotaged by our modern incessant quest for pleasure, which our consumer culture has made all too easy to satisfy."
I see what he's getting at, but there seems to me something strange about the formulation. People have always sought pleasure, haven't they? So it's the world that's changing, not human nature. It seems to me like we just have a lot more easy sources of pleasure. As we've long said on this blog, easy sources of pleasure are difficult for humans: you think you want treats, but by definition a treat is a thing you don't get all the time. So.. how do you keep it in check? Before you know it, it you've cascaded into a misery of self-denial, living both as tyrant and supplicant, begging yourself for those treats that you yourself decided you can't have too much of.
But again, I think people have always been like that. It's OK to love pleasure. It's our modern surroundings that are the problem, not us.
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