Oh there is absolutely nothing wrong with intentional and controlled amounts of pleasure, undoubtedly!
I love eating good food, chocolate and ice-cream (they're a mandatory part of my weekly groceries). I love singing. I love dancing. I love exercising. I love walking in nature and admiring the tiniest details.
Nonetheless, I never use any of them as instant gratifications! When feeling hurt, or betrayed, or frustrated, or angry, or sad, or disappointed, or disgusted, I honor them and stay with them as long as required!
Somehow, my joyful and wonderous inner-child always finds her way to still live in the midst of chaos, though, which I owe to my friendly program and for which I am eternally grateful!
Here is what my legendary mentor Stephen Covey said about the "Pleasure" Center (on of the many distorted ones).
"We live in a world where instant gratification is available and encouraged. Television and movies are major influences in increasing people's expectations. They graphically portray what other people have and can do in living the life of ease and "fun."
But while the glitter of pleasure-centered lifestyles is graphically portrayed, the natural result of such lifestyles -- the impact on the inner person, on effectiveness, on relationships -- is seldom accurately seen.
Innocent pleasures in moderation can provide relaxation for the body and mind and can foster family and other relationships. But pleasure, per se, offers no deep, lasting satisfaction or sense of fulfillment.
The pleasure-centered person, too soon bored with each succeeding level of "fun," constantly cries for more and more. So the next new pleasure has to be bigger and better, more exciting, with a bigger "high."
A person in this state becomes almost entirely narcissistic, interpreting all of life in terms of the pleasure it provides to the self here and now.
Too many vacations that last too long, too many movies, too much TV, too much video game playing -- too much undisciplined leisure time in which a person continually takes the course of least resistance -- gradually wastes a life. It ensures that a person's capacities stay dormant, that talents remain undeveloped, that the mind and spirit become lethargic and that the heart is unfulfilled.
Where are the security, the guidance, the wisdom, and the power? At the low end of the continuum, in the pleasure of a fleeting moment.
Malcom Muggeridge writes "A Twentieth-Century Testimony":
When I look back on my life nowadays, which I sometimes do, what strikes me most forcibly about it is that what seemed at the time most significant and seductive, seems now most futile and absurd.
For instance, success in all of its various guises; being known and being praised; ostensible pleasures, like acquiring money or seducing women, or traveling, going to and fro in the world and up and down in it like Satan, explaining and experiencing whatever Vanity Fair has to offer.
In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, "licking the earth."
