Our culture's simple pleasure.
Photo: Oneras

In American culture, we are bombarded daily with the marketing of innumerable products, television shows, and even people.

These are pleasures that can be isolated, packaged, purchased and consumed at will in order to fulfill our every desire.

Car dealers promise the pleasure of status; soft drink companies promise happy memories with good friends; make-up manufacturers promise sexual desirability. All of these promised results (if they ever happen) may certainly be pleasurable, but they are also often fleeting and misleading.

By habitually satiating ourselves with purchased pleasures, we miss out on the fulfillment of other, more life-affirming pleasures.

Pleasure begins with desire—one of the most powerful forces in human nature. In his Four Noble Truths, the Buddha identified desire as the source of all suffering.

Yet the desire, and suffering, that Buddha spoke of was a denial of “what is”: the craving for things to be different, or to fit into some ideal of a life without pain or other unpleasantness.

As Within, So Without

There are other desires we experience from within, not as a result of marketing or temptation, but as a result of our own souls leading us toward fulfilling pleasures. These pleasures, though, have more to do with the enrichment of our communities and service to humankind.

The desire that leads to such purposeful pleasure is not a source of suffering, but a source of life. These desires are not a denial of what is, but a persistent witness to what truly is, found underneath life’s material illusions of wealth and happiness.

Unless we are able to make room for purposeful pleasures amidst the bombardment of media-endorsed pleasures, they can be difficult to identify, nurture, and realize.

Purposeful pleasure is not about consumption as much as creativity. It requires using our gifts, talents, interests and delights to contribute something back to the world beyond ourselves (even if it’s just to the neighbor next door).

For the sake of clarity, I will mention here that I’m talking about everything from the humble to the ecstatic, with pleasure being simply defined as any experience you would want to repeat, if you could.

Ethical parameters require the mutual consent of everyone involved—so don’t go picking all the sunflowers from your neighbor’s Victory Garden and claim I put you up to it.

The Relative Versus the Internal

Some types of pleasure depend on a comparison to someone else, while other types of pleasure maintain their value regardless of any external circumstances.

Life's little emotional wheel.
Photo: Rob Hogeslag

Consider the pleasure you might feel when your boss hands you a bonus check for $1000, and thanks you for all your diligent work during the last quarter.

You are elated about this unexpected recognition—until you overhear one of your co-workers congratulating his entire department on their $5000 bonus checks! Your sense of pleasure spirals down the drain.

Maybe you and your new romantic interest finally share a much anticipated, electric first kiss. You’re walking with your head in the clouds, until you find out that three others also shared intimate moments this week with your until-recently-significant other.

You get the idea. A great deal of our daily sense of pleasure may rely on how we think we are doing in comparison to others. Am I more successful than most? Do I have better luck? Am I sexier than others my age? Are my kids happier than most? The comparisons can be endless.

Now let’s consider experiences of pleasure that originate from within. This type of pleasure, at its core, requires self-confidence. We must believe that we know ourselves, and that our senses and intuition are trustworthy. We have to pay attention to what we like and don’t like, what we’re drawn to, what brings our bodies ecstasy and bliss.

We must trust that we know our truths better than anyone, and sometimes in spite of what others may say.

Once we know what we like, we must value it, and act on it. I may perceive at some point that hearing classical oboe music feels particularly pleasurable to me; but unless I take this pleasure seriously, and act on it, I may never realize that I would truly love to play the oboe myself.

Purposeful pleasure connects us deeper into ourselves. Its treasure is boundless, but we are the sole owners who determine its worth.

Pleasure as a Process

A holistic approach to purposeful pleasure tells us something that, were it not for our pre-packaged pleasure consumption, should be obvious in life: pleasure is not something we can truly isolate and experience at will, apart from all other aspects of life.

Photo: iscari0t

Pleasure is, in part, defined by aspects of life that are not necessarily pleasurable—limits and boundaries, budgets, disappointment, unexpected events…the list goes on.

In contrast to the single, isolated, pleasurable moment, the pursuit of purposeful pleasure can be understood as a process.

Part of what makes that late-season playoff game so memorable and unbelievably precious are all the losses and mistakes, unanswered hopes and dreams that came before it.

Part of what makes that perfect painting such a great pleasure is all the hard work, failed efforts and repeated attempts that finally complete the process.

Pleasure is born of desire, but also includes effort, failure, learning, persistence and achievement. Not all of these aspects will be part of every pleasure process, but all these steps can be embraced as celebrated aspects of pleasure.

So the good news is, a large portion of our everyday lives is part of the pleasure process. Why do we work? Why do we build relationships? Why do we plant gardens and raise children? It’s all in the pursuit of purposeful pleasure; it’s all a part of the process.

Pleasure in Relationship

I mentioned above that pleasure may be defined in part by limiting variables that are not necessarily pleasant. What these “negative” aspects reveal about the nature of purposeful pleasure is its dependence on relationship.

The pleasures of friendship.
Photo: prakhar

As part of a pleasure process, the individual acts in relationship with others, in relationship with resources, in relationship with herself or himself (self-awareness). Note that the more profit-promoted commodities of pleasure most often do not acknowledge such forms of relationship—it’s all about mindless you and your fabulous product.

The process of constantly bumping up against the limits of relationship gives us a valuable gift: perspective on how we fit into the bigger picture of life. We feel and embody our own place in the world.

Pursuing pleasure, we learn how our lives are interdependent with everything around us. We feel the limitations and freedoms of what it means to be human. We enter into the cycles of giving and receiving, birth and death, failure and success. Pleasure delivers us into the hands of our finest teachers, and pushes us into challenges that define our ultimate success.

Purposeful pleasure shows us how our own boundaries, and those of the world in which we live, are not simply obstacles to be overcome, but finite realities that render our beauty ageless and inimitable. The more we intentionally practice noticing and creating experiences of purposeful pleasure, the more we recognize our intrinsic desires to fulfill our pleasures through processes in relationship.

Give it a try; after all, how bad can a little pleasure be?