Guilty Pleasures
The term guilty pleasures may bring to mind various things, most of them probably luxurious, extravagant, or slightly selfish: ordering from the 24-hour takeout cookie store, sleeping in and then taking a nap later, getting a cab to the subway, smoking when you don’t smoke; reading trashy magazines, listening to trashy bands, watching trashy TV. The usual meaning of the term covers things that we enjoy but might not own up to enjoying. Here part of the pleasure comes from getting away with something that feels a little bit naughty.
I want to suggest taking the term a bit more literally and seriously, in order to describe a class of behaviors that many people struggle with. These are voluntary things that people do that are pleasurable but which make them feel guilty.
For example, I have worked with people who like to shop, particularly for clothes. They often buy things that they cannot quite afford and do not quite need. Typically, shopping is conducted in a low mood state in order, partly consciously, to raise their mood. The lift is short-lived and often followed by a further dip as guilt sets in about their latest purchases. They may suffer buyer’s remorse (another word for guilt) and return the items. Or they may just stuff them in a closet or drawer, never to be worn, and try to hide the next credit card statement.
As another example, anything that can be consumed, such as food, alcohol, other drugs, may generate a brief experience of pleasure followed by a longer experience of feeling bad (guilty). The Nathan’s cheese fries, the second slice of cake, besides causing heartburn, can bring about a moral dyspepsia which is every bit as nasty but less easily dispelled by taking Tums.
Watching porn and playing video games are surprisingly similar. Each allow some limited experience of pleasure related to basic human desires, sex or aggression, or often both combined. They have in fact been shown to be closely related behaviorally, with video games sometimes being the only thing that can substitute for porn in committed users*. People can feel ashamed and guilty about these activities, which can be enormously time consuming, and draw people away from potentially more satisfying interactions with other humans. Becoming an aficionado of pornography or very highly skilled at killing zombies are also prime examples of the danger handily referred to by Tony Robbins’ phrase majoring in minor things.
Guilt, as I have suggested in a previous post (https://medium.com/self-and-other/how-to-stop-feeling-guilty-586c5505d0bf), is an odd emotion in that we can experience it for no good reason. We should feel guilty when we have knowingly hurt someone, but otherwise not. Are the guilty feelings that follow engaging in such guilty pleasures justified or unjustified? One could go to work in two different directions.
In one way, we could say that one should not feel guilty about doing something as innocuous as shopping or shooting zombies, and work on just noticing and putting aside guilty thoughts and feelings that follow those actions. That is, we could call those cases of unjustified guilt caused, more or less, by an overactive conscience.
In another way, we could call the guilt that follows such behaviors justified if we take ourselves as someone who is harmed by our voluntary engagement in them. Is trying to change our mood with shopping or eating actually bad for us? Is spending a lot of time on porn changing our sexuality in a negative way? Is investing a lot of time and energy getting really good at killing zombies or binge watching TV actually squandering our shorter-than-we-think lives?
Life can be hard enough as it is without making it harder for ourselves. Trying to change our moods with things that ultimately make us feel worse is an ineffective symptomatic treatment that can cause more problems than it solves, and leaves the underlying problems unaffected. Finding ways to change our moods that do not have those consequences is a better short term goal. This could be followed by a better longer term goal of figuring out what is up with our moods that we need to change them so much.
If we think our values and conscience are basically intact and generally point us the right way, then we should not in fact be doing things that make us feel guilty, even if they seem merely a bit embarassing or quirky. The pleasures are usually transient and not worth the costs, which may compound within us, eventually becoming the most expensive investments we can make.
- Bothe, Beata; Toth-Kiraly, Istvan; Orosz, Gabor. (2015). Clarifying the links among online gaming, Internet use, drinking motives, and online pornography use. Games for Health. Vol.4(2), pp. 107–112.
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