we live in a pleasure factory
thinking about the commodification of happiness
I recently read about the idea of “thrifty genes”: genes that helped humans survive in the past by making us enjoy the taste of fat and sugar. Fat and sugar were the most efficient way for our bodies to store energy, and at a time when food was scarce, humans who liked eating fat and sugar had a better chance of survival.
Fast-forward to today, and most of us don’t eat fat and sugar just to survive anymore. Instead, we have things like Snickers bars. We’ve invented ways to package as much fat and sugar as we can into the smallest form factor possible, and our food is so artificially good.
This extends beyond just food. Our bodies evolved to live in a world of scarcity, but so many of us live in a world of abundance. We’ve figured out specific arrangements of atoms that induce pleasure in our senses, and we just keep making more and more of them.
We listen to good music on Spotify all the time, we get good food delivered right to our homes on Doordash, we can entertain ourselves on TikTok whenever we want, and our cities keep getting cleaner and more beautiful (unless you live in San Francisco). If one of our early ancestors travelled in time to our world today, the sheer amount of pleasure and overstimulation would make them insane.
It makes sense that this happened: we started out as hunters and gatherers, only relying on things that were already present in our environment to survive. With technology though, we were no longer limited by our environment; we learned how to produce. From agriculture to the steam engine, technology gave us the power to keep making more of the things we like. And our markets and economies evolved to reward these things, sending us into a loop of constant pleasure-inducing consumption.
I know this is an extremely privileged take. Billions of people in our world struggle with basic survival, for whom pleasure is just a distant dream. Knowing that extreme excess and deprivation live in such close promixity makes the reality of our pleasure-filled lives even more dystopian.
Nevertheless, it seems like we're just getting started. The industrial revolution gave us an abundance of energy, and we’ll soon have an abundance of intelligence. Intelligence will bring exponential growth in the amount of beauty in our world, allowing us to create assembly lines even for something like art, one of the few forms of beauty that’s still relatively scarce today.
This makes us question: is there a limit to how much pleasure our world can accommodate? Is climate change just a sign of our world pushing back against our pursuit of pleasure?
I’m not being decelerationist here. I think an increase in beauty is a net positive for our world. I just hope that as we enter a future where beauty is increasingly commoditized, we learn to pause and appreciate it, instead of letting it control us.