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The Pleasure Trap and How to Escape It
How our unique place in the history of consumerism and technology has blurred an important distinction, and how we can see it more clearly.
We are simultaneously in a great time to be alive, and an extremely dangerous one. On one hand, we have at our fingertips all kinds of stimuli — from information and entertainment, to conversation and consumption. Theoretically, we can have a desire for something, find it, pay for it, and have it arrive to us all in the same day — without leaving our homes, and using a phone that fits in our pocket. It’s a veritable buffet of goods and services that exist in order to cater to our every whim.
So not only has the sheer quantity of available pleasures increased dramatically, but also (and more importantly) the time between when we form a desire to when we can fulfill it has dramatically decreased. In this way, we live in a time truly unlike any other in history. And we seem to be taking it all in stride.
Or are we?
The Pleasure Trap
While there is an aspect of this that sounds great, you can probably see the potential drawbacks. There is a phenomenon known in psychology as hedonic adaptation, which basically says that humans have an uncanny…
