try not to lie

why we're all becoming addicted to everything and how to keep the pleasure principle alive in the long dark winter ahead

I have a pretty uncomplicated relationship with pleasure. What I mean is that I’m good at enjoying nice things in moderation, in the moment, and I don’t feel much residual guilt after the fact.

In my teens and twenties things were a bit different. I used to diet, fast, cleanse, impose endless strictures on my body through exercise and food. Then I had children it was just too exhausting so I gave up and lay down for a long winter’s nap. I ate and drank want exercised as much as I felt like it and waited for weight to wash me away like an riptide. But once I stopped struggling to limit myself a miraculous thing happened: My body size stopped fluctuating and regressed to a perfectly healthy (if not quite fashionably ideal) mean-standard which I now accept, albeit somewhat grudgingly. I’d made two humans with my body and felt I owed it a degree of gratitude and respect. For years I also struggled off and on with social smoking. My husband hated that I kept a crumpled packet of Marlboro Lights at the bottom of the freezer. I defended myself vociferously but secretly I hated it too. We rowed. Then my marriage ended and I lost all interest in cigarettes — except on the very rare occasion I really, really fancy one, in which case I have one and don’t think twice.

Over the past couple of years my social drinking has crept up, becoming more habitual than I’d ideally like. So this year, for the first time in ages, I’m taking January off. The goal isn’t cold turkey sobriety so much as a sloping return to a natural equilibrium I’d lately begun to worry I might one day lose touch with if I went on gaily boozing away with abandon. As the risk of sounding dull, I now want to soothe myself in healthier and more productive and creative ways. Ways that don’t have an obvious and cumulative deleterious effect on my longterm health. I love a drink (or drinks!) for all the obvious reasons but I also want to feel my feelings honestly and vividly, not as shades of themselves. And it’s obvious that cumulatively, over time, alcohol starts to serious interfere with this. I’m not sharing this as some kind of ‘recovery journey,’ but I have been moved by the stories of others here on Substack, in particular the wise words of my friend Clover Stroud. I offer my own story as a more quotidian anecdote. Life changes dramatically and as we adjust our habits follow suit. In doing so we might veer slightly off-course. We over-correct, then correct the correction in turn.

But pleasure is still pleasure, isn’t it? I mean, fuck. You only get one life. Like the rest of you flawed mammals I have only ever really enjoyed feeling virtuous to a point. I’d be a liar if I didn’t admit that I also, on occasion, love the feeling of doing the very thing I should not. Take the guilt out of guilty pleasure, and all that remains is pleasure itself. Sound like fun but here’s the catch: Pleasure, by definition, only exists in relief. The question is, to what?

I’ll give you a clue: It’s not pain.

The antidote to pleasure; the bitter to its sweet, the shadow to its light isn’t agony but an elegant act of refusal. The opposite of pleasure is LESS.

Without choice (i.e. the ability to say, ‘no thank you’ and not think twice) pleasure ceases to work. Refusal is integral to luxury and indulgence and moderation is key to the principle of delight. If something is available all the time it loses it’s effect. We get bored. In order to enjoy it again we need to learn to live without it temporarily, change course altogether or seek more of the same. The first two options require effort and courage. The latter is a mug’s game.

Our bodies know this and so do the dopamine receptors in our brain. The substances we use to self-soothe are blunt instruments, simple chemical compounds. Over time our brains adapt to their effects and push up our hedonic set-point, prompting us to seek more and more for diminishing returns. The algorithmic internet (a dopamine-delivery machine) is built with the singular purpose of holding and keeping our attention. It does not know what we know in our cells because it has no individual lived experience, but it’s safe to say that to the extent it knows anything, it does not want us to fully grasp what we know about our bodies and brains deep down, because our not knowing (or disbelieving) this truth, is what keeps us all faithfully coming back to it for more. The internet wants to believe we can game its system. Outwit the beast by doing what we are designed to do, which is to push the pleasure principle to its limit in the hope of avoiding scarcity and starvation when the winter arrives (which it has). But this old threat is empty and misplaced. Almost nobody goes hungry online, instead we just gorge ourselves to death.

If you liked that, then you might like this even more. Customers who bought this also bought these. Almost every iteration of the online world promises us the same mirage: That with deeper research, probing and exploration, our pleasures can be improved upon. It wants us to keep going deeper, further, harder, faster, closer to the brink until we collapse or win big. But we can’t win, not by giving ourselves over to the beast. When it comes to pleasure, our bodies and brains are built for balance. Mortal flesh 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.

I’m not just riffing here. There’s actual medical 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.

Regular readers of this newsletter will know my dry January is part of a much-longer-tailed story. A couple of years ago my life was thrown into sudden, unforeseen crisis. Once the dust began to settle (which it continues to do), I managed to peer down the road ahead and found myself daunted. It wasn’t the mountain of labour ahead that frightened me so much as the lack of any obvious end or respite from the labour. The sheer, plodding uphillness of it all. The utter lack of anything sweet, sunny or soothing to look forward to beyond the awful endless grind. The animal in me starved and pined for a biscuit and a soft bed. Something, anything, that was just… nice. Was that really such a big ask?

When your life implodes, for whatever reason, people will advise you to take pleasure in little things. So I tried. Like I said, I’ve always been pretty good at small indulgences — music, food, wine, conversations with friends, time with the boys, films, swimming in lakes, walking in the woods — I did all of these things every occasion I could. I found solace in human connection, in art and books and ideas. Eventually I started running again and went to yoga and played terrible tennis with my kids. I bought the cheapest fresh flowers I could find and chucked them in a vase uncut. I looked for wholesome, permissible, healthy ways to escape and forget my situation but they weren’t quite enough, so I went on the internet and found more. I will not go into detail, because the details don’t actually matter. All of the self-destructive ways in which we seek pleasures of diminishing returns of ultimately of a piece. I will allow this: My pleasure-seeking behaviour wasn’t illegal or particularly immoral. It wasn’t pathological or serious cause for concern — 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 and needed a welcome distraction, a holiday from the crushing reality I was living in but at a certain point the fantasy began to cause me more suffering than the reality I’d initially 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 the few friends in whom I’d confided, then to myself, became increasingly difficult. My pleasure-seeking required me to operate at a further and further remove from what I knew to be truth. I was trapped.

Me having a delicious glass of bubbly as a naive young bride.

When I first started out in journalism, a senior editor at the paper I worked on took me out to the pub and gave me the following piece of advice:

Try not to lie.

It sounds head-smackingly obvious, but actually it’s not. The key to what he was saying was in the word try. This editor was presenting me with a challenge rather than a rule. He wasn’t reiterating the first commandment but advising that I examine and take stock of my choices as a writer and reporter. In essence he was advising me to stand back and look at myself, hard. I’ve always remembered it because it’s excellent advice for all aspects of life.

Trying not to lie is a more difficult undertaking than not lying, because it allows for the fact that, as a pleasure seeking humans, we are fundamentally biased and flawed. We deceive ourselves and others often without knowing we are doing so. It happens for many reasons but mostly it happens when we cleave to false logic in order to have the pleasures we want when we want them, whether we ought to have them or not. But the more we indulge in this guilty way, the deeper and further we go, the more our misery and dependence grows in inverse proportion to the pleasure we were seeking in the first place. We become dependent and lost.

Addiction of any kind destroys pleasure. It eats away at our edges, corrodes our thoughts and bathes us in shame. It turns decent, honest, otherwise well-intentioned people into monstrous liars, if only to ourselves. When I understood this, I stopped again — this time definitively. How do I know it’s definitive? I don’t. All I know is that days became weeks and the weeks became months and the months became over a year and I don’t want to go back there. Only now, nearly two years after it all began, am I confident I won’t.

It was agony at first, but giving up always is. Eventually the sting of that first deep cut passed, then for months I felt flat, which was worse. But the pain and ensuing dullness was ultimately preferable to the gut-twisting shame of continually deluding myself. Nothing is more agonising than the endless pursuit of a pleasure that will never be enough. And yes I know: self-deception is insidious. We all do it to a certain extent, we tell ourselves made up stories in order 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 scrabbling around for more at the bottom on an empty trough? That’s a special kind of hell. It’s Dostoevsky’s version: The suffering of being unable to love.

Having gone through the dopamine-reset-ringer quite recently, dry January’s not so daunting this time round. We all go through stuff. We wish we didn’t have to but in the end we can’t not. And while I don’t believe anything ‘happens for a reason,’ I do know it’s possible draw wisdom from painful experiences and learn from them after the fact. We heal at the broken places, it’s true. Endurance imparts skill. What doesn’t kill us, and all that jazz. Knowing when and how to surrender is just one of them but it opens us up and prepares us for what’s coming. Not just the long winter ahead but the unexpected bud of joy in the snow. We pull through.