the pleasure principle of pain

on lying and truth and addiction and the internet and the importance of fresh cut flowers in a vase

For most of my adult life I’ve had a weirdly uncomplicated relationship with pleasure. What I mean is that I’m pretty good at enjoying nice things in moderation, in the moment, and I don’t feel much residual guilt. I used to diet, fast, cleanse, impose endless strictures on myself but after I had children it was just too exhausting so I stopped. Once I did, a miraculous thing happened: My weight stopped fluctuating and my hangovers dried up. For years I struggled off and on with social smoking. My husband hated that I kept a crumpled packet of Marlboro’s at the bottom of the freezer. I hated myself for it too. We fought. Then my marriage ended and I lost all interest in cigarettes — except on the very rare occasion I want one, in which case I have one and don’t think twice.

Like mostly people, I enjoy being a bit naughty on occasion. I like the feeling of doing the thing I should not. Take the guilt out of guilty pleasure, and all that remains is pleasure. Sounds like fun, but here’s the catch: Pleasure, by definition, can only exist in relief. The question is, in relief to what?

Our bodies know this and so do the dopamine receptors in our brain. The internet, which is built with the singular purpose of holding and keeping our attention, does not know this. Or to the extent that it does, it doesn’t want us to know it because our not knowing it is what keeps us coming back for more. The internet wants us to hope we can game the system, by pushing the pleasure principle to its limits. If you liked this you might like this, it tells us. Customers who bought this also bought this. It promises us that with deeper research and exploration, our pleasures can be improved upon. It wants us to keep going deeper, further, harder, faster, until we reach breaking point or win, but we can’t win. When it comes to pleasure we are built for balance. The system can’t be gamed. This is how we get addicted to substances and behaviours. We either find a way to live in balance — or we break.

There’s actual science behind what I’m saying. If you want to know more about it, listen to this fascinating podcast interview with Stanford psychiatrist and addiction specialist Anna Lembke, author of Dopamine Nation — a bestselling book about the science of pleasure and pain and how the internet is driving us all mad by making us addicted to everything.

Like most sentient humans, I’ve always been a pleasure seeker. I’m up for almost anything within reason, but at a certain point I understood my real skill was in knowing when to call it a day. I don’t take any credit for this, it’s probably genetic. I come from a long line of cocktail hour sybarites who hop out of bed the next morning at six am to play a round of golf or three sets of tennis then bang out a thousand words before mowing the lawn or painting the garage. What I mean is that I enjoy pleasure but only when it is balanced by stiff measures of hard graft, duty and pain.

Lately though, my relationship with pleasure has become more complicated. It’s no mystery why. Just over a year ago I became a lone single parent virtually overnight. My work load and responsibilities doubled, my household income was reduced to a fraction of what it was. On top of this I was tasked with carrying the suffering of my children, their bewilderment, anxiety and confusion over the sudden gaping hole in their lives. My friends and family were, for the most part, incredibly supportive — without them I’d truly be lost. But once the dust settled and I managed to peer down the road ahead, I was daunted. It wasn’t the mountain of labour I had ahead of me, so much as the lack of any obvious end or respite. All I saw was financial uncertainty and chaos and I knew it would be my job to navigate it and keep it from swallowing us whole. All I could do was plod forward, one agonising baby step at a time.

When your life implodes, for whatever reason, people will advise you to take pleasure in little things. So I did. I’ve always been good at small pleasures — music, food, wine, conversations with friends, books and films, pickling, foraging, swimming in lakes, walking in the woods — I indulged in all of these things on the occasions I could. I found solace in human connection, in art and books and ideas. I jogged and went to yoga and played terrible tennis with my sons. I bought the cheapest fresh cut flowers I could find and put them in water in the kitchen vase. I found little ways to escape and forget my situation, and then I went on the internet and found more. I will not go into detail, because the details don’t matter. However I will say my pleasure-seeking behaviour wasn’t illegal or immoral. It wasn’t even pathological or even self-destructive — at first. I did not become addicted to a substance apart from the dopamine flooding my brain. Outwardly, on the surface, I looked fine, even good (I lost weight but not too much). I did not shirk my responsibilities or go off the rails, but inwardly, the harder and deeper I pursued my chosen dalliance (this was how I thought of it at first), the more anxious and unhappy I became. I’d wanted a distraction, a holiday from my difficult reality but now the fantasy was causing me more suffering than the thing I’d sought to escape. I tried to stop, then went back. I repeated this pattern two or three times over a period of weeks, then months. Rationalising my behaviour to my friends, then myself, became increasingly difficult. It required me to operate at a further and further remove from what I knew to be truth. I was trapped.

When I first started working at a newspaper, a senior editor took me out to lunch and told me something wise, he called it the first rule of journalism but it could be the first rule of life:

Try not to lie.

I took it seriously. It’s great advice.

Addiction destroys pleasure. It eats away at our edges, corrodes us with guilt and bathes us in shame. It turns well-intentioned people into liars, if only to ourselves. When I understood I was lying to myself, I stopped again — this time definitively. How do I know it’s definitive? I don’t. All I know is that days have become weeks and weeks will eventually become months and months will become years and I don’t want to go back there. I could but I won’t.

It was miserable at first, but these things always are. Now I feel flat, which is worse. But it’s not worse than lying. Nothing is worse than habitual lying in endless pursuit of pleasure that is never enough. Yes, I know, lying is insidious. We all do it to a certain extent, we delude ourselves to survive. But when we know we are lying — to ourselves and the people we purport to care about most — and continue on anyway, helplessly, hating ourselves, self-medicating our self-loathing by seeking out more of the (increasingly empty) pleasure we are lying about? That’s a special kind of hell. It’s Dostoevsky’s version, “the suffering of being unable to love.”

If you’re struggling or anxious or feeling generally uncertain about life, I urge you to listen to the podcast. Who knows? It might help.