[Spoiler alert: It’s more important than you think].
What if we were OK with what we already have?
We assume that people who are truly contented are better than we are, that they’re some kind of sages or gurus.
We also assume — unconsciously — that it’s not OK to be OK with what we already have. We believe we should “want to better ourselves.” That we should be ambitious. We always should want to be healthier, slimmer, wealthier, better-looking, more competent, or faster.
We also know that always assuming what we have is not good enough can blind us to the value of what we do have.
One way around this problem, and out of the self-perpetuating rat race, can be to connect with our own authentic feelings of pleasure.
Years ago I read a psychologist saying our feelings are the basis of our authentic selves, and I believe that’s true: having a feeling, allowing it, being aware of it, expressing it, acting on it — that’s us, who we are, the unique individual. Ignoring or denying what we feel, or acting according to something other than our honest feelings, is being fake, presenting a false self to the world. To do something or to give something inauthentically, when you don’t really want to give it, that’s an offense against honest relationships. Any friend would feel hurt or cheated to find out you’re faking it. You’d feel cheated if you discovered a friend was faking it, whatever “it” is.
If our genuine feelings form the basis of who we are, then what truly gives us pleasure is even more basic than that, because before we were capable of any kind of thought, we moved toward what gives us pleasure, and we moved away from what gave us no pleasure.
That movement toward pleasure is absolutely necessary to survival: getting out of the sun when you’re too hot, eating when you’re hungry, sleeping when you’re sleepy. The simplest organisms depend on that impulse toward pleasure to keep them alive and to procreate more generations of organisms.
We’ve formed entire social and religious systems fueled by demonizing pleasure and channeling the energies of our unsatisfied desire for authentic pleasure into other actions. Systems like this are a kind of perpetual motion machine, because in them, we’re always seeking and never finding. Not accepting pleasure causes stress, which fuels the inauthentic system, and which moves you towards something else and then something else, seeking whatever satisfaction IS permitted in the system. Since your desire is not satisfied, you’re never at rest.
Geneen Roth has explained how a perpetual motion system like this one can fuel eating disorders: anybody who’s tried to eat healthier has experienced unsuccessful attempts in which you crave chocolate, but since you think it’s forbidden, you eat some substitute instead. The substitute doesn’t satisfy your craving, so now you’re full, yet you’re still craving what you truly wanted in the first place.
Roth’s solution to this problem is to eat only exactly what you want, fully experiencing the pleasure or whatever feelings this brings, and to eat as much of it as you want, for as long as you want. You might initially binge, but if you do allow yourself the pleasure, you’ll eventually get sated and realize you don’t WANT to eat all chocolate, all the time. You really would prefer to eat veggies sometimes. And you begin to explore what kind of veggies give you pleasure.
You can look at many harmful systems — say, the rat race of conspicuous consumption driven by advertising — through this lens of infinitely deferred pleasure.
The Puritan aspect of our American-TV-culture denigrates discovering, experiencing, and valuing our own unique set of experiences that give us pleasure. One aspect of our American Puritanism is the belief that people who are wealthy are better than those who are not wealthy, and if somebody has more visible wealth than we do, it’s because he’s better than we are, and, further, that it’s never possible to be “better enough.” [This “never enough” aspect signals that the system is not motivated by authentic pleasure.] American TV culture assumes that having a certain very visible kind of wealth is always better than living humbly. Advertising thrives on convincing us that what we have is not good enough, and that pleasure is only to be found in whatever the sellers are selling. That hard to get and expensive are always better than what we already have and what we’re comfortable with.
How do we get to be OK with what we already have?
People who dress well talk about “shopping their closets”: Looking appreciatively at what they already have so they can work it like they would a new item.
Can we learn to “shop our closet” of possessions, emotional wealth, spiritual assets, everyday experiences?
I think we can.
Next: How can we begin to reconnect with our genuine sense of pleasure?
Think UP! 