Enjoyment Over Pleasure
What’s the difference between pleasure and enjoyment? One’s basic, one’s complex.
Pleasure is a limbic response that requires next to no effort. It’s the biological equivalent of pulling the lever and getting the chemical cookie.
Enjoyment, however, demands effort. It’s active and requires friction – it asks us to wield a skill we’ve built or overcome a challenge.
The philosopher Slavoj Žižek notes a grim shift in modern psychology. People rarely seek help for indulging in a surplus of pleasure. More often, they drag themselves to therapy because they feel entirely crippled in their ability to find enjoyment. Žižek uses the Kinder Egg as a metaphor for this: the cheap chocolate shell delivers an immediate hit, whereas the toy inside represents the longer lasting value.
Contrasting pleasure and enjoyment is nothing new. Plato used the word agalma to describe the thing that makes something worthwhile, whereas the contrasting eidolon has evolved to mean nothing more than a hollow illusion. The knowledge that the immediacy of pleasure pales in comparison to the fulfilment of enjoyment has ricocheted in the greatest human minds for thousands of years.
Modernity as we all well know is a conveyor belt of hollow chocolate shells - eidolons that generate fleeting pleasure. It’s our job to cultivate the agalma in order to strive towards human performance.
Digital Bloodletting
Human beings default to the path of least resistance. Willpower rarely survives the night. It’s a lovely idea to believe we have the wherewithal to make the right decisions. But as anyone knows who buys too many snacks when their friends visit on the weekend, only to savage them on Monday night, we’re flawed.
When we only rely on passive input to unwind, we sap our finite attention unknowingly. The pleasure of an elongated doomscroll cannot match the enjoyment of bettering ourselves in some sport, skill or practice. That experience is the agalma we’ve been seeking for millennia.
Twenty minutes on the FYP won’t derail our entire day, but cumulative chunks wasting concentration siphon our limited capacity towards mindless hits of dopamine instead of being saved to direct towards something more meaningful.
The Mimetic Hijack
Attention dictates reality. What we focus on truly shapes the way we see the world. Just imagine that person who only gets their news from social media, and you’ll understand immediately. Our beliefs and actions follow our attention in lockstep.
The philosopher René Girard identified this vulnerability as mimetic desire. We rarely generate our own wants. We subconsciously mimic the desires of the people we stare at. A dysregulated system diminishes the clarity to filter out these parasitic signals. We end up carrying the crushing load of chasing goals belonging to absolute strangers.
Using the rapid uptake in Hyrox as of late is an easy shot to take, but it demonstrates the point.
The Antidote of Savouring
Anything we can savour is a good sign of it being worthwhile. Any time we can proactively extend a good experience, even if it’s pedestrian, we’re likely on the right track. This cognitive effort anchors the nervous system in the dirt and air of our environment.
How often has your head hit the pillow at night only for you to think “I’m glad I spent so much time binge-watching content today”? In the moment, it feels like a way to relieve stress. After the fact, it’s an eidolon of pleasure. Quick hits of dopamine that merge into nothingness.
The Greek philosopher Epicurus understood this biological tax centuries ago. He wrote: "No pleasure is a bad thing in itself, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail disturbances many times greater than the pleasures themselves."
And we know it to be true. Undoubtedly, we’ll falter. Perhaps this piece will nudge a behavioural change for a day or two, but we need to keep catching ourselves. To remove all the food we shouldn’t be eating from the cupboards – literally and figuratively – rather than trusting ourselves to make the better decision.
We build capacity when we swap mindless consumption for active engagement. Not always, but more than we currently are. The initial bruising friction of effort is necessary to reach the agalma on the other side.
If there’s nothing inside the chocolate shell, don’t waste your time eating it.
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