"Pleasure is a dirty word. I mean this in two ways. First are the connotations or associations of the word. If a colleague asked you, "How much pleasure have you had this morning?" you might fire off an email to HR. If you saw the title "Learning to find pleasure," or "Enjoy more pleasure," you'd probably expect it to be in the roped-off section of the bookshop. Pleasure is frequently associated with the erotic."
"De Lazari-Radek is a hedonist, which means she thinks that the only good in life is pleasure and the only bad in life is pain. We want pleasure; we don't want pain. For de Lazari-Radek, it is ridiculous to call pleasure bad or dirty because pleasure is an experience - an immediate, unmistakable signal that something is good. And here we learn how to find more of it."
Pleasure is often stigmatized as erotic, vulgar, and animalistic across religious and philosophical traditions. Hedonism claims pleasure is the sole good and pain the sole bad. Pleasure functions as an evaluative feeling rather than a raw sensation; it overlays other sensory states and signals approval. Pleasure is a basic biological feature of sentient life, comparable to warmth or tiredness. Framing pleasure as an immediate heuristic reframes seeking pleasure as rational and natural rather than base. Recognizing pleasure as evaluative feedback guides efforts to cultivate more pleasure by attending to experiences that reliably produce that positive evaluative gloss.
Read at Big Think
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