On our increasingly elaborate explanations for simply liking things.
PLEASURE, WITH A PRESS RELEASE
We have become very good at explaining ourselves. Especially when we are enjoying something.
A bath is self-care. A walk is a nervous-system reset. A dinner is a ritual. A holiday is an opportunity to reconnect. A dress is an expression of identity. A novel should change us. A film should heal us, challenge us, provoke us, preferably all three. Even a pastry seems to require a small biography: artisanal, seasonal, locally sourced, perhaps made with ancient grains and enough moral virtue to make eating it feel like a personal decision of consequence.
Pleasure, somewhere along the way, acquired a communications department.
We rarely seem satisfied with simply liking something anymore. We want to know what it says about us, what it does for us, how it fits into the larger architecture of our lives. We like yoga, so naturally yoga has transformed us. We like cooking, so naturally we are “passionate about food.” We bought a very expensive cream, so naturally it is an investment in our skin. We stayed home on Friday night, so naturally we were protecting our energy.
We have developed an extraordinary vocabulary for making pleasure sound responsible.
EVEN REST HAS A KPI
The contemporary self is an ambitious little project. There are metrics, routines, habits, goals, systems, trackers, morning rituals and evening rituals. There are podcasts explaining how to optimize your sleep and apps reminding you to breathe. There are supplements for focus, supplements for recovery and supplements for whatever it is that happens between focus and recovery.
Even rest has become strangely industrious.
We do not simply relax. We recover.
We do not simply sleep. We optimize.
We do not simply eat. We nourish.
We do not simply have fun. We recharge.
The language is revealing. Almost everything enjoyable now seems to require a second function. The experience itself is rarely considered sufficient. It must improve us, restore us, teach us, heal us, connect us, ground us or prepare us for something else.
Leisure has become suspiciously productive.
WHAT DOES THIS SAY ABOUT ME?
This obsession is not confined to wellness. It has slipped into culture, fashion and the way we construct our identities. We increasingly consume experiences as evidence of who we are. The restaurant says something about our taste. The holiday says something about our lifestyle. The book on the bedside table says something about our intelligence. The obscure little gallery says something about our cultural capital. Even nostalgia comes with its own visual vocabulary, ready-made references and carefully selected objects through which to communicate that yes, you too remember 2003.
We do not merely experience things. We curate what the experience means.
Social media has only made the process more visible. An afternoon can be beautiful, but it can also be content. A dinner can be delicious, but it can also be a mood. A hotel can be relaxing, but it can also be a carousel. The experience and its representation now sit almost perfectly beside each other, occasionally competing for attention.
And somewhere between living and documenting, a strange question appears: What does this say about me?
It is a surprisingly difficult question to escape.
THE ART OF JUSTIFYING THE FUN
Even our supposedly spontaneous pleasures often arrive with a sophisticated justification. The dress is not impractical; it is an “investment piece.” The expensive candle is not indulgent; it creates atmosphere. The solo trip is not lonely; it is empowering. The afternoon in bed is not lazy; it is restorative.
We have become fluent in the language of redemption.
There is nothing wrong with any of these things. Self-care can be valuable. A beautiful dress can genuinely make you feel wonderful. A holiday can change your perspective. Exercise can improve your life. The problem is less the activity than the compulsory explanation attached to it.
At some point, “I wanted to” stopped feeling like a complete sentence.
IN DEFENCE OF THE COMPLETELY USELESS
This is where things become interesting. Perhaps the most revealing objects in contemporary culture are the ones that have absolutely no interest in justifying themselves.
Take the tiny handbag.
It is almost useless. It cannot accommodate the ordinary infrastructure of modern life. Phone, keys, cards, lip gloss: perhaps. Anything beyond that becomes an engineering problem. Yet the tiny handbag persists, glittering defiantly in photographs, parties, grocery stores and Y2K fantasies.
Its charm lies partly in its refusal to be sensible.
It does not optimize anything. It does not improve your posture, increase your productivity or contribute to your five-year plan. It exists to be tiny, ridiculous and delightful.
The same goes for the cocktail umbrella. The elaborate cake. The ridiculous sunglasses. The good plates you are saving for an occasion that never seems sufficiently important. The perfume you spray three times when one would have done perfectly well. The bow attached to something that absolutely did not require a bow.
These things are interesting precisely because they are excessive.
They interrupt the economy of usefulness.
THE HUMAN NEED FOR A LITTLE EXTRA
This is not a particularly new human impulse. Ornament, decoration and excess have accompanied us for centuries. Civilizations have spent extraordinary amounts of time making useful objects beautiful, making beautiful objects useless, and occasionally making both so elaborate that functionality becomes almost beside the point.
Humans have always decorated the unnecessary. What feels different now is the pressure to explain it.
The modern obsession with optimization has made uselessness feel faintly suspicious. Byung-Chul Han describes a culture in which the individual increasingly becomes their own manager: pushing, measuring, improving, optimizing. The pressure no longer requires an external authority. We carry it around ourselves.
Even relaxation can become another performance metric.
Are you resting correctly? Are you recovering efficiently? Did your walk reach the appropriate number of steps? Did your meditation improve your focus? Did your weekend make you feel sufficiently restored for Monday?
There is something almost comic about it.
We have managed to turn doing nothing into a skill.
THE LUXURY OF NOT GETTING ANYTHING OUT OF IT
Once everything becomes instrumental, the genuinely purposeless starts to look luxurious.
A terrible movie watched purely for pleasure. A ridiculous outfit worn with nowhere important to go. Flowers bought for a kitchen that already has flowers. A dessert ordered after another dessert. A scenic route that adds twenty minutes to the journey. Music playing while you make toast.
None of these experiences need to become transformative. They can simply be nice.
That distinction sounds almost embarrassingly modest. Yet it cuts against a culture that constantly asks us to extract something from our experiences. A lesson. A benefit. A memory. A post. A better version of ourselves.
Sometimes there is nothing to extract.
The experience can remain intact.
ENTER: THE DORITO
This is where the humble Dorito enters the conversation, wearing fluorescent orange cheese dust like a tiny act of cultural resistance.
The Dorito has never claimed to heal you. It has no wellness philosophy. It does not aspire to become a more mindful version of itself. Nobody is journaling about their relationship with cheese dust. Nobody is describing it as a transformative sensory journey.
It is a Dorito.
You eat it. You like it. The orange dust gets everywhere.
There is something almost refreshing about an object that asks so little of us.
THE RADICAL ACT OF LIKING SOMETHING
Perhaps this is the larger cultural fatigue underneath our obsession with pleasure. We are tired of everything becoming a project. Tired of turning preferences into identities, leisure into recovery, consumption into lifestyle and enjoyment into evidence.
Not every experience needs to tell us who we are.
Not every pleasure needs to improve our lives.
Not every desire needs a beautifully articulated reason.
“I felt like it” is, in fact, a perfectly respectable explanation. It might even be one of the last forms of luxury available to us.
So wear the ridiculous dress. Use the good plates on Tuesday. Buy the tiny handbag. Put the cocktail umbrella in the drink. Watch the terrible movie. Take the long way home. Order the dessert with the ridiculous name.
And if someone asks what it all means, resist the urge to provide a TED Talk.
It means you liked it.
For once, that can be the whole story.
With care,
La Séance