The Pursuit of Pleasure

I just finished reading a book by Christian psychiatrist Dr. Archibald Hart, entitled Thrilled to Death. The book dealt with one the most prevalent psychological disorder in modern society that we have never heard of. it is called anhedonia, which means the inability to experience pleasure. People with anhedonia no longer enjoy the little pleasures of life. Hart's thesis is that almost everyone today is experiencing a measure of anhedonia. We just don't enjoy life the way our ancestors did. We don't even enjoy it the way we did as children. The problem, he said, is getting worse all the time.

Do you remember the taste of ice cream when you were a child? Didn't it seem to taste better then? Do you remember the thrill of your first kiss, the feel of grass under your toes, the laughter you experienced watching cartoons? Why don't the things we set out to enjoy feel the same way to us now?

Hart lists five causes of anhedonia--depression, physical ailments. anxiety, addictions, and over-stimulation of the pleasure centers of our brain.

Are we overstimulated for pleasure?

Let me give you an example.

Years ago, Joy and I were visiting her parents. Her father read in the paper that the circus was coming to town, and that they were using circus elephants to put up the big top. They were very excited about this. Joy's father could recall growing up in a small town in Michigan, and all the children going down to watch the elephants put up the tent. It was the highlight of their week. Wouldn't it be great, he said if we went down to watch the elephants?

My kids didn't share his enthusiasm. What are elephants in a world where they can go to the movie theatres and see 3D dinosaurs rendered in CGI perfection? What Is the excitement of elephants doing slow-moving work when they were raised on video games and rock concerts?
The problem wasn't with the old folks, but with the young folks. We had just been raised in an overstimulated atmosphere. Our pleasure centers had become broken, so that we could only experience big thrills. We had become like the hard of hearing, who can only hear the biggest noises, or the partially blind who can only see blaring lights. Nothing but the biggest, loudest, and grandest registers any more as pleasure. If we are not overwhelmed we are bored. We have become jaded to the small miracles all around us, and are only impressed by big ones.
I wonder sometimes if that isn't the reason that God doesn't work more overt miracles. If every day began with a miracle, how long would ti be before we would complain that yesterday's miracle was so much better than today's? We would lose our appreciation of the common.
We read about the excesses of the Roman emperors--their orgiastic sex parties, gory spectacles, and wildly exotic feasts, and we think of them as depraved. But we do not think how they got to so debauched. They were cursed with-overabundance. Ordinary things had lost their pleasure, so they had to seek pleasure in excess.
The problem with thrill seeking is that it disappears when we find it. Pleasure begins to disappear the moment we attain it, leaving behind a dreary ash of regret. It becomes like all other addictions, a diminishing return on our investment, leaving us empty and unfulfilled.
Hart' premise seems to me to be sound. In a world where the average person watches more than six hours of entertainment a day on television, and listens constantly to expertly performed music, how could it be possible that we would not become jaded to it all? We have hundreds of channels and nothing to watch. We have multiplex screens but nothing to see. We have closets full of clothes but nothing we want to wear. We have hundreds of Facebook friends, but nothing to say. If it were not for our national retreat into unreality, we would be as cruel and debauched as the Romans. As it is, we are not that far behind them.
Fortunately, as grave as our situation is, Hart does not see it as hopeless. There are ways to regain our pleasure. Here are three of them.
1. Stop. Just stop. Quit the madness of filling every moment with over stimulation. For once just turn off the TV and the mp3 player and notice the quiet pleasures around you.
2. Simplify. The less we actually have, the larger the things we have become to us. The lily in our own window box is much larger to us than the thousand in the field. The more we have the less we notice what we have. If we want to notice the pleasure around us, we need to pare down our pleasures, so we can truly appreciate the ones we have.
3. Be grateful. All good pleasures are a gift from God. We need to stop and thank Him for what we have received. Gratitude is more than an obligation, it is a way of changing our outlook on life.
In this day of recession and diminished expectation, we need to kick our addiction to continual pleasure seeking. For many of us, we can no longer afford it. We really didn't need it anyway. If we stand still long enough, and wait before God, sooner or later pleasure will find us