When is enough pleasure and instant gratification enough?
Oh, maybe never, I hear my readers thinking.
I put the word "addiction" in quotes because I am not referring to physiological addictions such as to narcotics or alcohol, but to the pop culture use of the word, as applied to chocolate, food, sex, money, power, buying, etc. The casual use of the term, of course, refers to the difficulty in stopping the behavior when it doesn't make sense.
I opened the topic earlier, in The bad news: Eating less keeps your brain younger and more vigorous (with comments on satiety)
Some people are studying the brain to try to understand satiety. Some, interested in overweight, are studying foods. I think they are barking up the wrong tree (Yankees might not realize that that is a reference to coon hunting with coon hounds).
I believe that most of these "addictions" are more subcultural and psychological than physiological. Returning to the topic of food, the well-respected scientific journal Elle points this out in Satisfaction Guaranteed:
As a child, were you encouraged to clean your plate and then go back for seconds? If so, you probably didn’t grow up in France, where children are taught to savor the feeling of longing, or envie, for their next course (just think of the cheese!). Our differing notions of satisfaction were examined in a 2006 study of 133 Parisians and 145 Chicagoans published in the journal Obesity. While the French paid attention to an internal cue, the feeling of fullness, the Windy City-ers relied on the external: when their plate was empty; when their companion had finished eating; or when—quelle horreur!—the credits started to roll on the TV show they were watching.
Many Americans ignore the body’s subtler signals of hunger and fullness, hearing only the clanging gong at each end of the pendulum—Starving! Stuffed!—and rarely pausing to enjoy the much more pleasant midpoint: Ahhh, satisfied.
Some subcultures believe in big eating, some in savoring, some in minimalist eating, and, for some, food is just not a central part of life at all - Northern Europeans, for example. I was raised, for example, to learn that a lady always eats slowly, and never finishes the food on her plate. Not in public, anyway. It's not considered ladylike.
However, we humans love our easy pleasures, and our Western cultures are so filled with prosperity, freedom, opportunities, etc. that our indulgent "pleasure addictions" have free range - beyond the dreams of the kings of old who didn't even have central heating. Even the poorest American can stop in for a Big Mac or two, grab a Happy Ending at a massage parlor, have some beer and pizza delivered to the door, turn on the tube for some pleasant mindless distraction, order a new iPhone on Amazon, walk nude through Zucotti Park and get famous on TV - all at the drop of a hat.
Access to pleasure is all so easy for everyone today that we, in my field, need to re-think our notions which have been based more on pleasure-scarcity rather than on pleasure-abundance. We are all like kings and queens now, able to command whatever pleasures we desire and with jaded capacities for satiety - for satisfaction. It's difficult to be satisfied or content with anything if we left our sense of satiety and moderation many miles down the road behind us. Once past the "Stop and Wait and Savor" sign of satiety, of the Sufficient, comes the highway of Insatiability on which any consummation is a fleeting thing.
Without wanting to sound like a prude, I need to add that cultural change has rendered the Cardinal Sins of old as culturally-sanctioned, if not applauded. Who talks much about the Deadly Sins - Greed, Sloth, Lust, Envy, Irresponsibility/Unreliability (the Greek "Acedia"), Vanity, Pride, Wrath, Gluttony, etc. as if they were truly potentially deadly to the soul? Does anybody still believe that they are, besides me?
Is Life all about pleasure, or other thngs? Fortunately, we in the free world get to decide for ourselves and are free to construct our lives to be about whatever we want them to be about.
My Shrink Message is that it entails decisions, whether active or passive.
More later. Photo is from the Elle article.
One interesting aspect of modern life in the Western World is the pathologizing, or "diseasifying," of moral and character failures. Putting such failures into the disease category is a popular conceit for a number of reasons, not the lea
Tracked: Jan 17, 18:44