The Rise of Hyperpleasures
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Several years ago I was in conversation with a friend of mine, a former addict, who was sharing with me how he felt after a few years of sobriety. His comments to me were unusually candid. “I love drugs — I still love drugs,” he told me. “I know it sounds crazy, but that’s exactly my problem. I wouldn’t be an addict if I hated them.”<br>I was reminded of this conversation several months ago after coming across this post on Reddit, where someone asked why it takes methamphetamine users years to feel joy again after getting clean. The top commenter gave this insight:<br>Someone once described it as follows:
regular people have a happiness scale going from 0-10. Meth makes that scale go all the way to 1000. Getting a 9/10 is amazing, a 9/1000 barely registers.<br>I have returned to that comment several times over the past few months — not because I have ever experienced anything as miserable as drug withdrawal, but because it seems to accord well with my friend’s experience in his own path to sobriety. Even after years of being clean, he still acknowledges that drugs were, in a sense, deeply enjoyable At no point has he denied the pleasure they brought him.<br>I have never been a drug user, so I cannot share any personal testimony to corroborate these observations. But I do think there’s a metaphor here which we can broadly apply to our current situation, to the experiences you and I have both felt while living in a technological era.<br>A Scale of Pleasure<br>Let’s play with this metaphor a little bit. Assume for a moment, as the comment above suggests, that ordinary happiness — or “pleasure,” as I would prefer we call it — falls on a 1 through 10 scale.<br>For the purposes of this analogy, I want us to move away from the term “happiness” and use the word “pleasure” as a way to make a distinction between the two ideas. Let’s define pleasure here in its narrowest sense; assume that “pleasure” is a short term, “feel-good” state, a dopamine hit divorced from questions of long-term satisfaction or fulfillment felt while engaging in a certain activity.<br>We understand what would fall at the lower end of this pleasure scale — pain, sickness, and grief make us all feel like a 1 or a 2. At the opposite end we find certain pleasures that have been accessible to most of humanity across time and culture. These can nearly unanimously be described as life’s great pleasures: sex, a home-cooked meal, conversation with friends, playing a preferred instrument or sport, and so on. These activities bring us to somewhere between 8 and 10 on the pleasure scale.<br>We love our 8, 9, 10 activities. But we also realize that in all these activities there exists a certain level of discomfort due to physical, social, or mental effort — which means that while all these activities are pleasurable, they are not maximally pleasurable, at least according to our narrow definition of the word. We enjoy sex in spite of its required vulnerability. A lively conversation with friends demands social poise and focus. We play sports even though it leaves us winded. Our discomfort rarely outweighs the pleasure we experience completing these activities, but we cannot say we enjoy these experiences because of their discomforts. Even experiences which qualify as a 10 do so not because discomfort has been erased, but because we have become so enraptured in the activity that any accompanying discomfort has largely been forgotten.<br>Thus, if we take a broad look at our history, the pleasures associated with the ordinary activities of life have often been capped. Humans have always had access to pleasure, of course, but our capacity to remove discomfort from pleasure has basically always been nil.<br>Drugs and alcohol may be the significant exception here. We know these can produce states of excessive pleasure. However, the reason drugs and alcohol give us pleasure is because these substances are psychoactive above all else. While other activities are pleasurable in spite of discomfort, drugs and alcohol are pleasurable because they remove discomfort. Their telos is to numb us.<br>The Rise of Hyperpleasures<br>So it may be that drugs, alcohol, and other psychoactive substances are the prototypes of what I’m calling “hyperpleasures.” If humans experience pain and pleasure on a 1-10 scale, then hyperpleasures are those activities which take us “off the scale,” so to speak. They give us experiences that make us feel like a 20, 30, 100, 1,000, and so on. The particular number is arbitrary, of course, but the principle remains — these are pleasures that go far beyond the ordinary range of enjoyment, principally by removing those discomforts we experience in our ordinary pleasures.<br>Hyperpleasures, then, are not new. Humans have been enjoying drugs and alcohol for the entirety of our written history. Plenty of people from before the modern era have known what it’s...