Why Is Pleasure So Scary?

Three things that block everyday joy

These Spring Breakers are the sorts of people I imagine having no compunctions about pleasure. Photo by Lucas Andrade on Unsplash

When I think of a pleasurable vacation, I imagine something hedonistic: a luxury cruise or one of those big all-inclusive resorts. I’ve never taken such a vacation, never even idly Googled how much it would cost. If I’m not worrying about such a resort’s environmental impact, I’m worrying about the wages of the people who fold the towels into animal shapes.

(As you can see, pleasure is not my default orientation.)

But, after talking to some wise poets and scholars, I became convinced that there was something spiritual to be learned from pleasure. I decided this would be my “Summer of Pleasure,” wherein I challenge myself (and you, dear reader) to notice and record at least one pleasure-inducing thing every day.

My family’s latest vacation was a road trip to visit friends and family in California, along with a short stay in San Francisco, which I’d never visited before. In between DRIVING! Over 2,000 miles in a 20-year-old car with my husband and sassy tween sons and a pile of library audiobooks. Not exactly a recipe for pleasure!

The first thing I noticed was my resistance to the assignment. I seem to be oriented towards finding the annoying, inconvenient, or painful. Each time someone asked me how the trip was going, I found myself reciting a litany of motion sickness incidents, bad motels, and spotty Wi-Fi, EVEN THOUGH my overall impression of the trip was positive. Why was that?

To make matters worse, I know that neuroscience says that we subtly alter memories as we recall them. I began to wonder whether this repetition was going to freight me with bad vacation memories, forgetting the trip’s many funny and delightful moments.

When I tuned into this feeling of pleasure-resistance, here’s what I realized:

1. Pleasure is for other people—not women, and especially not mothers. Who gets to have a good time in our culture? Children at birthday parties, men at sports games, college kids on MTV’s Spring Break. America + Christianity = a double-whammy of the valorization of self-sacrifice. And if you’re a mother? Better get used to “recharging” by grocery shopping alone or folding laundry in front of the TV, aka ME TIME. Failing to live up to this ideal of mother-martyr is a one-way ticket to Guiltville.

   And yet, I know this thinking is faulty. I know I didn’t stop being a person when I became a parent. Nobody (except for narcissists) really wants someone to martyr themselves. I don’t want to set an expectation for my sons that women ought to sacrifice their happiness and well-being for them. I no longer wish to participate in my own oppression—it doesn’t mean I don’t feel guilty sometimes, it just means feeling guilty and doing it anyway.

2. Pleasure is fragile. It’s experienced in the senses, not in the intellect. You can’t talk yourself into pleasure—it’s there or it’s not. If you plan for it, you’ll likely be disappointed, but if you allow yourself to be present, it may appear, as serendipitous as a wordless conversation across a crowded room. It appears as a moment of relief or a surprised burst of laughter. The shadow side of pleasure’s sporadic nature is the knowledge that pleasure is here one minute, gone the next. What is joyful can be lost; the fear of its loss can even creep in during the moment of pleasure itself, leading to foreboding joy.

3. Pleasure is vulnerable. The most natural inclination of an excited child is to share a joy or accomplishment with the nearest grownup. But what if that adult responds not with a high-five, but by ignoring you? What if they make fun of you for taking pride in your little accomplishment? Or what if they respond with a self-pitying, “Oh that must be so nice for you;” deep sigh, “I never get to do anything.” Fragile joys are easily snuffed out by other people.

   Even if another person shares our joy, experiencing pleasure renders us vulnerable in another way, because pleasure means being out of control. It’s a momentary shut down of thinking and surrendering to the sensual. I am here now, I am experiencing this, and I love it. If control and overthinking have meant safety for you, finding the freedom to lose control can feel impossible.

   If you’ve been through a traumatic experience where numbing or dissociating from your feelings was necessary for your survival, you’ll likely find that it’s not just your negative emotions that are held at arms’ length—it’s the positive ones, too. We need to feel safe before we can connect with pleasure.

The more I’ve thought about pleasure, I’ve been remembering the book Bittersweet by Susan Cain. Part of her argument about bittersweet’s appeal is the ability to hold both the joy of the moment alongside the knowledge of that joy’s fragility. It takes strength to hold both joy and sorrow at the same time, but that’s a strength we all possess.

So here is a short list of my guilty, fragile, vulnerable road trip pleasures:

• SMELLS: storebought garlic bread in the oven. The fishy smell of Alcatraz. Buying new perfume. Walking past a dumpling shop.

• SIGHTS: small town Main Streets. Flowering bushes planted on the highway median. Redwood trees. Butterflies. The faces of loved ones.

• TASTES: brownies still gooey from the oven. Sodas brimming with ice. A crisp glass of viognier. A Cappuccino Crunch milkshake so thick I couldn’t drink it through a straw.

• FEELS: holding hands. Jumping into a cold lake on a blazing hot day. Running my fingers over different clothing textures while shopping. Sex. Desire. A shower with very good water pressure. Rubbing my cat’s belly.

• SOUNDS: the deep, even breaths of my children sleeping. Singing along to old rock songs in the car. The silence of the woods.

• IMAGINATION: pre-war Osaka in Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko. Showing my kids old movies for the first time.

Journal/Discussion Questions:

• What pleasures have you noticed lately? Feel free to share them in the comments below!

• How do you define “pleasure”?

• What’s the best thing you’ve eaten so far this summer?