Pleasure Activism

Traditional marketing is playing with the pain that comes with being an imperfect human and uses that (“let’s solve our customers’ pain points” )to strip people of their agency, and their ability to make meaningful, well-considered decisions for themselves.

The organizing principle of the modern world is pain.
To build a world that is truly sustainable and just, pleasure needs to replace pain and become the new organizing principle of our future.

Lots of pain at work comes from being someone else. It’s only when we find or create a job in which we can truly be ourselves, that we realize how much time we actually lost or wasted trying to be (or become) someone else. And once your job is all about being you, becoming better at your job suddenly turns into becoming better at being you. Consequ... See more

Non-self-coercion basically says “just do what you intrinsically want to do”. That might sound very simple, but it actually isn’t, because in today’s world of overchoice and social competition it becomes evermore difficult for an individual to understand what they actually intrinsically want to do.

To ‘sell’ a sustainable future to the people, we need to show them the pleasure that comes with that future rather than the pain that comes with it. From solving pain points to solving pleasure points.

if we’re already living in a world organized by suffering then what we currently have or desire is detached from our actual intrinsic motivations, from our true selves, from what makes us truly happy. This means that giving it up is not an actual sacrifice but a first step toward reconnecting with one’s true desires.

Non-self-coercion is therefore all about self-awareness and -acknowledgment and consequently locking in life goals and hobbies that are driven by pleasure rather than pain.