in defense of pleasure
resisting resignation to a hateful world
“The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need—the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfilment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.”
— Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic (1978)
What is worth saving in a world where so many systems we organize our lives around are devoid of meaning? To be quite honest, American “democracy” is not among the things I particularly care to protect. Neither is the “economy,” the “family,” the “border.” There are so many ways to organize a world, and so many ways that we have tried and seen fail. I’m not precious about them.
Some things have been here much longer than we have. Water, soil, air, and living things. The way they have evolved and coevolved is not replicable. It also isn’t over, never static. Everything we do shapes the future of humanity and our oldest companions. Thinking on this scale, on the scale of time passed and time to come, is daunting. It can make everything we do feel tiny. But it also gives us agency. With all of the time in the world, what will we do with our little bit? And for the purpose of this newsletter, how can we find pleasure in that time?
Pleasure is a good motivator, but this is not, on its face, a particularly pleasant world. How could it be? Pleasure is a complex sensation, a combination of liking, wanting, and learning.1 I don’t like watching genocide or ecocide or epistemicide unfold. I don’t like living under capitalism and honestly don’t want many of the things that the system promises those who uphold it. I don’t know what one would call the dismissal of knowledge about the threats we are facing (for instance, the livability of the planet is in decline, continuous and ever-growing profit margins fueled by extractive practices are unsustainable, and simple but life-saving disease prevention methods are dismissed), but I certainly wouldn’t call it learning. And yet, there is pleasure in it still because we can use our time, however short and however constrained, in pursuit of things we want, learn, and like.2 We do this by fostering connections with ourselves and bringing the whole of our wants, likes, and learnings into our connections with others.
“That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of our capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife. This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”
– Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic (1978)
The responsibility to not settle for the conventionally expected includes eschewing mass-marketed “pleasure” in favor of keen awareness of what brings you joy and satisfaction. Excessive pleasure seeking isn’t just “anything that increases your threshold for what is good” as some people on the “dopamine detox” train would have you believe.3 In fact, expanding our sense of what feels good and what doesn’t is necessary in this political moment. We have to be able to imagine that experiencing joy and satisfaction is possible, accessible, and worth pursuing if we are going to create a world that is pleasurable to exist in.
There are entire industries dedicated to “pleasure” that have no interest in us ever being satisfied—most of them require our continual and ever-expanding engagement to increase profits. In Sally Rooney’s third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, a woman trying to choose one of the countless plastic packaged meals at the grocery store is struck with the nauseating recognition of how many resources went into these products to give her all of these options, which she doesn’t even want.4 It’s not wrong to buy a packaged lunch (it’s not categorically right either), but there is no pleasure in making a choice that comes at the cost of suffering for another. When one is awake to this fact, participation in systems that cause suffering becomes undesirable, making room for one to feel desire for something better.
Desire, in itself, is not enough to push us forward, but it is a start. When we feel the pull toward a utopic future, we should heed it. We should do what we can to give ourselves even a taste of that future, knowing that most of us will not live to see the fruits of our labor just as our radical ancestors did not. The voice in our heads that says pleasure is the domain of the privileged is a liar. The sentiment that this shitty world is all we deserve or all we have the capacity to create is intentionally seeded within us— we have to question it. We will not have the capacity for this all the time, but like stagger breathing in a chorus, there is space for all of us to take the breaks we need while those around us carry the tune.
“Most of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self-loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our wellbeing. No wonder then that we have become a nation where so many workers feel bad. Jobs depress the spirit. Rather than enhancing self-esteem, work is perceived as a drag, a negative necessity. Bringing love into the work environment can create the necessary transformation that can make any job we do, no matter how menial, a place where workers can express the best of themselves. When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth. It’s not what you do but how you do it.”
— bell hooks, All About Love (2000)
When I ran the first iteration of pleasure studio as a co-working space, the intention was to use a small amount of time, 45 minutes twice a week, to do something purely for the sake of pleasure and immediately juxtapose that with two hours of focused work while trying to find pleasure in it, even just small glimmers of it. As the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles said “Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.)” and yet she saw the artistry in “noodling maintenance work” and through her art encouraged us to find beauty in the work of survival.5 We don’t have to “love the work,” but I’ll be damned if anyone tries to take finding the beauty in it from me. This is what I want to save: the pleasure of living on this planet and the capacity to make sure others can experience it too.
Kringelbach ML, Berridge KC. The functional neuroanatomy of pleasure and happiness. Discov Med. 2010;9(49):579-587.
For an in-depth analysis of time and the many ways we can experience it, see Jenny Odell’s book Saving Time (2023)
writes a great newsletter that often includes updates on this crowd.
Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021), p. 18-19