What if alternative hedonism can save the world
How can the rush of online shopping compete with popsicles, eavesdropping, and people that look like their dogs?!
A great thing about this season is that I stock my freezer with individually wrapped frozen treats and then, a few times a week, shut my laptop and go stand in the sun to eat one. I used to do this with my older neighbor, but he's at an assisted living facility right now, so lately it's just me and the rabbit who shares my yard. This habit is more about the drop-everything-and-find-pleasure-at-3 p.m. ritual than the treat itself.
Shortly after I began working at a cooking school in Sicily after college, I was labeled a "buena forchetta"—a good fork. I loved what I was fed; I always wanted seconds. One day I asked the director of the documentary I was helping with if this name was, in fact, a compliment. "Siiiii," Giacomo told me. "You are always so happy when you eat. That makes a chef happy too." We don't have a word for this in English, but years later, a guy quipped that I was a "cheap date" because I was thrilled just going for a walk, smelling a good flower, seeing a person who looked like their dog. I felt sort of ashamed—shouldn't I want a date to spend money on me?—but he was right. If I like who I'm walking with, I don't desire anything else.
In one of my favorite Zadie Smith essays, "On Joy," she describes herself as someone who "seem[s] to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out of food." Unlike my experience of (allegedly) charming Sicilians, Smith's five-star meal reviews begin to grate on those close to her. "You’d think that people would like to cook for, or eat with, me—in fact I’m told it’s boring," she writes. Her husband is frustrated by her lack of discernment. Smith's reveling in everyday pleasure is, for him a lack of appreciation for special talent or effort. Blessedly, she refuses to alter her habits. So what if she spends all day looking forward to a fairly average pineapple popsicle? "We do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available," writes Smith. The cheap thrill wins.
I've been thinking about what, in granular terms, brings me pleasure, ever since reading novelist Helen Garner's essay about the evasiveness of happiness. Her thesis is basically that, at 80-years-old, she's learned to recognize that the feeling comes and goes and can't be chased or earned. Rather than pursue such a slippery thing, she's decided to "settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness—moments of intense awareness of things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist." She includes a list of concrete observations that fit this bill: snippets of eavesdropped conversation, her granddaughter getting a mullet, the "surprise of feeling [her own] face soften at the theme music of the Japanese series Midnight Diner."
Garner's essay crystallized an impulse I’d long felt to be true. If making a"gratitude list" gives me a sort of Goopy cringe, pursuing "random stabs of interestingness" is a dream Saturday. It's why my love-language is friends sending photos or voice notes detailing tiny moments of their day. All good writers are good observers, and though not all good writers are happy (ha ha), many good observers, like Garner, find joy in the act of witness. "My other source of daily pleasure is...I wish I had a better way of putting it—'other people’s faces,'" writes Smith. Unlike her love of mediocre food, she shares this thrill with her husband; they are both "professional gawkers."
Food brings pleasure, walks bring pleasure, people bring pleasure. My earliest memory of saying "I AM SO HAPPY" in my head is walking out of a shopping mall beside my mother while wearing an early Christmas present: metallic gold Doc Martens boots. Cocooned in department store fluorescence, we did not know it was snowing until we stepped into the parking lot. I must have been seven years old. My mother told me I should be careful so we could spray the boots at home, but I was too busy watching my toes move like gold pennies in fresh snow. Has any purchase made me so happy since?
Recently, I read a New York Magazine article about how the internet is turning us all into shopping addicts. We buy online and we return most of it, but that's okay because the thrill is not in holding the thing, it's pursuing and attaining it. So much of being alive in 21st-century America is being told that buying x or y will make us better lovers, better friends, better citizens, better at being mortals in our own skin. But does buying bring pleasure?
Consumption is very clearly bad for the earth—not just the pollution and material, but the very choreography of the supply-chain. (“One whale conservationist said to me, you know, every time you hit that 'buy now' button on Amazon, you're helping power up the ships that are running down endangered whales off the East Coast of the United States.”). Also, it doesn’t do what it promises to. Our desires are not sated by our stuff. As
recently wrote: “dissatisfaction is good for consumer demand.”Nobody wants to be told shopping is bad, because we know that: we shop because we want to forget. So how can we shop less? (I write this while sitting five feet away from a pair of jeans I bought online that do not fit and that I cannot return— I glare at them every few minutes, hoping they’ll disappear). In British philosopher Kate Soper’s Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism (Verso, 2020), she suggests that to mobilize support for radical political and economic change, progressives have to pivot from a language of alarmism to one of pleasure. We have to embrace an alternative hedonist approach.
Smith and Garner’s essays help us to realign the happiness-calibrators in our brains, reminding us what we can be attuning ourselves toward rather than running from. Both Smith's gawking and Garner's eavesdropping—their pleasures, their joys—are supported by public systems. When Smith writes of "leaving the library at the end of the day…walk[ing] a little more quickly to the apartment to tell my husband about an angular, cat-eyed teenager,” she’s writing about the joys of shared public space. When Garner writes about the thrill of listening to "One driver [talk] to another, on the 59 tram," she's talking about finding meaning from life while on public transport.
To step toward a sustainable future, we have to change the narrative: a low-carbon future will not feel like "eating our vegetables," to trade in old cliches (I love vegetables), but in "having our cake and eating it too" (I also love cake). Just think of the pleasures of eating. Though I may be tempted to avoid pulled pork to feel morally superior, that’s (literally) less pleasurable than avoiding the dish because I just adore a pile of
’s dry-rubbed mushrooms instead.
To orient our lives toward the thrills of eating a popsicle on the porch or watching teenagers learn a TikTok dance in the public park is, by nature, to put consumerism on the back burner. The new shoes are not the point. Sure, walkable dense cities lower emissions, but they're also full of giddy sensual experiences: small talk with cute strangers, blossoms on the sidewalk, watching a corgi see another corgi.
Leaning into the circular economy through Facebook marketplace and Buy Nothing groups has not only helped me clear out my house and reap new-to-me free things (mulch! baguettes! a leopard-print armchair!) it's given me the "random stabs of interestingness” I so cherish. The guy who came over to pick up my old Zion National Park poster and told me he was going to give it to his wife for their 20th anniversary because they'd been collecting NPS posters for years. The woman who took the leek dumplings I never ate in my freezer, then messaged me a photo of her toddler eating one for lunch an hour later.
My therapist is always telling me to listen to my body, so I'm getting better at recognizing that my body feels deeper joy receiving a stranger's dorky dumpling photo than it does clicking on an Instagram ad. I am trying to apply Marie Kondo's does-this-object-spark-joy prompt to how I structure my days and mental inventories, too, which helps channel my big-picture goals, too. As in: I feel happier biking than I do driving in rush hour. How can I support bike infrastructure in my city?
I see now that the euphoria I felt on that long-ago shopping mall night was less about new boots than spending a rare one-on-one evening with a person I loved. It was about stepping into the pearly silence of winter and feeling the quivering possibility that school might be canceled. I could panic, now, thinking about a future of dwindling snow days, but it's early afternoon. I’m going to eat something sweet in the sun, and then I’m out the door, in search of "random stabs."
Upcoming classes and workshops:
One of the July workshops I’m teaching at Oregon’s Sitka Center for Art and Ecology has extra spaces, and I’d love to see you there! It’s about writing animals, July 18 and 19th, from 10 a.m. - 4 p.m. No experience needed! It will be chill and generative, with conversations and readings and prompts and lots of time to write outside. Please spread the word and let me know if you have questions.
On Aug 20, I’m leading a free in-person two-hour workshop in Portland on using research to creatively jumpstart your writing, no matter your genre. Sign-up to be added to the waitlist.
ICYMI:
I hand-annotated a copy of Wolfish and it’s up for auction alongside other books as a fundraiser for the wonderful literary journal, Off Assignment. I’m on the board of this publication and am such an advocate for their work, so check it out if you are able.
It was a treat to join the Climate Change and Happiness podcast to talk about fear and joy, anxiety and curiosity.
I was interviewed for Psychology Today by renowned ecologist Dr. Marc Bekoff (who called Wolfish a “beautifully written and passionate book that deserves wide, global attention”…!).
I published an essay about the creatively generative thrill of facts, and how I conceptualized the sprawling research of Wolfish, for The Millions.
The wonderful
asked me to contribute a short essay and prompt to the Isolation Journals, so I wrote about marveling in the quotidian. She has built a gem of a creative community here:Thanks, as always, for reading. Now go eat an ice cream.
xE
Love 💚 love 💚 love
So here for the "random stabs of interestingness."