Pleasure and Pain
Diseases of Civilization
It’s quite possible we live in the most pleasurable time period in all human history. For billions of people on this planet, tasty food and drink is abundant, relatively inexpensive, and deliverable in minutes - often you don’t even need to leave your couch. A vastly diverse variety of sexual pleasures is on offer both in person and virtually for all tastes and budgets, from free all the way to a large percentage of your paycheck - but I promise you it will be worth it! And if you desire even more pleasure, there are a myriad of readily available chemicals both from nature and from the lab that will make you feel so good, that you won’t care any more about your favorite food, or even your favorite hooker or porn star!
But our stately pleasure dome is not turning out to be Paradise is it? We derive so much pleasure from our food that we are obese, malnourished, weak in body and mind, and we die early from the extremely painful and debilitating diseases of “civilization”. Our pursuit of sexual pleasure has been so successful, that we no longer talk of love but of lust, we hook up rather than build long term relationships, we transmit disease instead of healing one another, and we have so much sex that, paradoxically, our birth rates are plummeting to zero.
Could it be that endless pleasure is not good for us? But how can that be? Hasn’t Nature designed us to feel pleasure so we would survive and procreate? And you are right. However, in nature, obtaining pleasure takes time and effort, and is not readily available, and, I know you don’t want to hear this, it only lasts for short periods of time. It turns out, unfortunately, that endless pleasure is a death trap. And yet most of humanity not only fall into this trap, but willingly and enthusiastically jump into it head first with a big stupid grin on their faces.
And now here it comes - you are going to say what is the point of living, if we can’t have pleasure, or experience it only a very little bit? What else is there in life worth living for?
Well, I’ll tell ya….
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Well stated.
Progress has not been our friend.
In the past (let's just jump off the human timeline, at the hunter gatherer era), pleasure, as you pointed out, came from hard work and effort. The pleasure of eating and having water was labor based. If you didn't walk your primitive feet out into he fields and gather berries, grains, or chase that wicked fast gazelle down after you were able to spear it, then you weren't getting any pleasure.
Today, that is as opposite the case as you can get. No need to do anything resembling physical labor for the food based dopamine hit. Nope, you don't have to do the prep and planning for the coming effort to procure the items needed, no need to go procure them, no requirement to prepare them, however, you do have to eat them and digest them - so there is some labor.
All sarcasm aside, the majority of the western world doesn't have to move from the couch to have highly flavored, nutrient empty "food" and liquids", so long as they or a friend has a cell with a delivery app. And of course the underlying, ignored price is the crumbling of the organism and larger society on many levels.
As you rightly point out, the implications stretch across all sectors of societies and virtually all aspects for daily existence.
We're collectively like a dog, set loose in a storage room full of dog food, that eats itself to death - pleasure being the mouth watering mounds of kibble, we humans gorge on constantly.