I Don’t Need to Be a ‘Good Person.’ Neither Do You.

We live in a culture that glorifies pleasure without even actually teaching us to feel it. Pleasure becomes a fetish and a status symbol, not an embodied experience.

The thing is, freedom and energy can become confusing, morally or ethically speaking. If you are handsomely rewarded for giving in to some of your impulses, doesn’t it begin to seem like all your impulses ought to be honored?

Ironically, greed and consumerism dull our delight. The more we indulge, the less pleasure we find. We are hedonistic cynics and gluttonous stoics. In our consumerist society we spend endless energy and money seeking pleasure, but we are never sated.

This helps explain why stuffing your life with pleasurable activities so often proves less satisfying than you’d expect. It’s an attempt to devour the experiences the world has to offer, to feel like you’ve truly lived—but the world has an effectively infinite number of experiences to offer, so getting a handful of them under your belt brings you n

To live entirely for oneself in private is a huge luxury, a luxury countless aspects of this society encourage, but like a diet of pure foie gras it clogs and narrows the arteries of the heart. This is what we’re encouraged to crave in this country, but most of us crave more deeply something with more grit, more substance.