When the meaning of life centers on the pursuit of pleasure, human survival hangs in the balance.

In the 1930s, Sigmund Freud wrote Civilization and Its Discontents. In it he laid out his views on how society was a frame for controlling the two main motivators of human behavior  - pleasure and pain. Civilization both provided access to pleasures, but forced people into painful, unnatural situations. Given that he wrote this while living in Europe during the uneasy peace between two world wars, it makes sense that he places such a strong emphasis on the distorting influence of society. Duty, obligation, and strict social mores would have been pressing tightly on all sides. The pursuit of pleasure, frowned upon even in the most peaceful times, is relegated to the backseat during times of crisis.

But since the middle of the 20th century, we have gone through an enormous transformation. Society is no longer organized around opposition to an external enemy - there are no nazis, no communists. We are richer than we’ve ever been, with all the pleasures of modernity available to us. The social frame that Freud saw standing between humans and their search for pleasure is weaker than ever, hanging by a thread. If the function of civilization is to stand between humans and pleasure, what happens when that instinct is no longer held in check?

The Pleasure Principle

Pleasure is nothing more than a neurochemical reaction that activates the reward centers of the brain. Evolutionarily speaking, it’s the feeling that you get when you accomplish something that’s going to help you survive for another day. In the modern era, it has been effectively disconnected from survival - and has become a pursuit in and of itself. If in pre-modern times the meaning of life had to do with survival and procreation, the meaning of life can now be conflated with seeking pleasure.

In most times and places on earth, it would have been almost impossible to live a life suffused with pleasure. During those times, individuals with a strong pleasure response would have devoted a greater share of their time to pursuing things that translate to greater reproductive fitness. Over time, this reproductive success would have caused pleasure seekers to account for a larger share of the population. In the present era, the pursuit of pleasure is no longer clearly linked to reproductive success, but the descendants of pleasure seekers are widespread. This is what has allowed the industrial market to be so effective - from fast food to the NFL, we are bombarded with supercharged versions of ancient stimuli whose sole purpose is to be consumed for momentary pleasure. 

The chemical carrier of pleasure, dopamine, is a powerful motivator that’s conserved across multiple domains of life. Even bacteria that live in the human gut have gotten the message. They produce significant amounts of the stuff. Eat something that supports their growth, and you get a spurt of pleasure. Eat something that doesn’t sit so well, and suffer the consequences. But trusting your gut in the modern age isn’t always the best choice. 

It would be easy to point to some shadowy actor, inspired by Edward Bernays, who was standing in the wings and manipulating people into desiring things that weren’t good for them. But it’s much more complicated than that. Moral directives against the axiomatic pursuit of pleasure were historically associated with religion - and in the last hundred and fifty years, the threat of eternal punishment in return for overindulging has faded into the background. At the same time, society has shifted in the direction of the individual rather than in the direction of the group  - especially in Europe and North America. Centering one’s life on the pursuit of one’s own goals, passions, and interests is a given - and so is rewarding oneself for a job well done.  Combine these larger social shifts with the emergence of a market society that’s more than happy to sell whatever the consumer wants, and a perfect storm arises. Instead of acting like a stricture that prevents the pursuit of pleasure, as it was in Freud’s time, civilization instead caters to the most fleeting reward-seeking whim.  

To be clear, there are huge positive outcomes in a society that prioritizes pleasure. First and foremost, for the first time in history, a great number of people are able to self-actualize without being hemmed in by tradition. This sort of freedom drives the “weird” factor, the one that produces massive innovation in art, science, and technology. Pursuit of pleasure creates fertile ground for paradigm shifts. There’s also higher levels of egalitarianism, since the shift away from duty and towards pleasure helps restructure society towards a progressive moral framework. Revolutions have served this role in the past, but they have generally been vicious and bloody, with high costs even to the revolutionaries. 

But on the other hand, losing one’s way is a real risk. Walking along the well-trodden path is very different experience than wandering into the underbrush, where even experienced hikers can lose the trail. And without a well-trodden path or some external way to navigate, it’s possible to live in a low-grade state of anxiety, since feeling like you’re “on the right track” has a lot to do with being able to see some kind of marker. Without some reference frame for getting your bearings, it’s possible to walk in circles while growing more and more fearful about the situation at hand. 

And in modern society, fear abounds. It’s hard to tell exactly why. Maybe it always did, and we just didn’t have a word for it. Maybe we were just more comfortable with death, since everyone was dying all the time before there was modern medicine. But even so, our society is bigger and more atomized than ever in history, with none of the transcendent rituals that were used in the old world to induce the feeling of a human super-organism, an emergent state of becoming part of a group. 

One possibility is that the anxiety comes from the pursuit of pleasure above all else, from the transmutation of consumption into a meaningful act. The sorts of things that people speak about bringing meaning and satisfaction are the ones that require massive devotion for long periods of time - without immediate rewards. Nurturing an orchard, raising livestock, starting a company, taking care of a house or a piece of property - these are all things that can bring satisfaction, but are unlikely to bring pleasure. Orienting towards long-term goals, and finding ways to pursue them even when they’re painful - especially when they’re painful - is likely the only way to prevent devouring existential dread. 

When life sucks, and things are difficult, there’s a certain comfort in knowing that it sucks because there’s a deferred reward on the other side. But when life just has this empty, rice-cracker taste to it, the next day will look similar to this day and all the ones before it - or it sucks because your relationship has fallen apart, your parents are dying, or you’re trapped in a situation you can’t escape - it’s understandable why many turn to readymade pleasures. If the storm is vicious enough, it’s possible that the varied emotional landscape that encompasses suffering and joy gets overtaken by abundantly available pleasures.

Should we be worried?

Yes and no. Worrying isn’t really useful, it’s a neurotic cycle of living in a future that hasn’t been consummated, in fear of consequences that aren’t necessarily apparent. But we do live in a time of great change, and there are things that are worth worrying about. Our food supplies are fragile, the soil in which we grow our food is becoming depleted. Fertilizer and pesticides help secure a food supply, but the externalities of runoff and maybe cancer make it a hard bargain. There are famines looming in Africa that, if they actually happen, will destabilize the entire world for a generation.

Absolute worst case scenario is that humans go extinct. One could be argue that it’s actually the worst case for all of life on Earth, since we’re the likeliest species to actually leave the planet and spread life across the galaxy. 

Best case scenario is that we develop a society that is focused on individual responsibility without coercion. No eternal damnation, no government regulation. We find a way to make it fashionable to be a good, hard-working person that looks out for others. It’s hard to imagine that this could actually happen. There’s a lot of hunger, poverty, and abuse that prevents people from being able to think anywhere beyond their next meal or their next paycheck. 

Realistic scenario is that we awkwardly push and pull between these two extremes and attempt to find some way to reconcile that we live in a society that prioritizes pleasure but is insanely dependent on someone else doing the dirty work. Trash is taken to landfills that are out of sight, our food is made somewhere far outside the city and trucked in brought to us. Someone else works the factory, the assembly line, the rare-earth mineral mine. No one in their right mind would ever take one of these jobs. They’re hard, they don’t pay well. There’s no time off, and no one thanks you for them.

At the same time, our society is technologically advanced, and the best minds of our generation are not starving, hysterical, naked - they are at work, refusing to opt out of a system that could be better. As long as there are strong minds, occupied with the question of “what is good” rather than “what is easy,” we will be able to steer the ship in the right direction. 

The most interesting thing about this kind of slow-motion crash is that each and every one of us has the ability to change it’s course. Nature takes a long time to unfold, evolution happens over the course of generations. We are heading into the age of robotics, artificial intelligence, even more mechanization. The mind-numbing work of assembly lines and recycling plants will eventually be taken over by the machines - which will only increase the urgency of finding a meaning of life that has nothing to do with either pain or pleasure.

 Instead, the future generations of humans can occupy themselves with a production of meaning that transcends the self, that manifests in community and environment. A way of life that recognizes we are not above nature - we are equal to it. That death is a part of life, that pain and pleasure are a path to satisfaction. These are not industrial transformations - they are psychosocial, spiritual ones, that can be worked on without a single dollar spent, without leaving the house. But in breaking with the consumptive cycle of pleasure, they are the most revolutionary actions any one of us can take.