Guilty Un-Pleasures

We all work hard, but is that enough?

We all love the overpriced matcha latte, the pilates class, or that piece of clothing from the hip new store downtown. We feel guilty for indulging in these pleasures and rationalize them as one-off treats. There’s a word for this type of consumption: Guilty Pleasures. 

I think my brain’s wiring might be broken. I don’t feel very guilty indulging in nice things. When I indulge, I suppress all doubt and immerse myself in the luxury. But when I finally snap out of this ecstatic state, I come to a firm realization that these guilty pleasures are not what life is about. Indulgence is short-lived, luxuries are surface-level, and real fulfillment is much more nuanced than pleasure.

My philosophy has created a new set of anxieties in my life, which I refer to as my guilty un-pleasures.

Guilty Un-Pleasure: a thing you do that doesn't feel good in the moment, but feels great after it's over.

My Senior year of college I decided that I was gonna take cold showers every day. I did it for over a year and was really proud of myself. It took a lot of self-discipline to turn the knob all the way to the left, every morning, in sometimes brisk weather, all while no one was watching, for 365 days in a row. 

After the year-a-versary, I allowed myself to relax and take warm showers when my heart desired.

But something weird happened when the water was warm. I would mutter to myself, “You fucking beta, your ancestors didn’t have access to hot water, why should you?”. The steaming hot water would hit my face and I wasn’t even able to enjoy it. One morning I turned the knob in the opposite direction, I stuck my toe in to gauge the cold, took a deep breath and stepped in.

It sucked, the palms of my hand quickly changed color from their usual red to an unsavory white. But as my heart started beating faster, and the shivers propagated down my spine, I felt good. It wasn’t the same good as the massage or the fancy croissant, but a different kind of good. Doing something hard, just cause I want to... a guilty un-pleasure.

As I dried off I pondered about the habit I’ve built and the long-lasting effect on my psyche. I put on my clothes, made my cup of coffee, and realized that these guilty unpleasures are scattered in my day-to-day life. The guilt of not working out before work, skipping the comedy open mic, or pushing off that work project is what drives me to check off my unsavory tasks.

I’m just gonna end up poor, unfunny, fat, and alone I often think to myself. Instead of going to therapy and confronting these unhealthy feelings, I rationalize them as pent-up ambition.

If you are reading this blog, I consider you to be an ambitious person. Bums don't read blogs on Substack. But as we all know, ambition can be confusing. Wanting success is easy, but what the fuck do we do to get there? For most of us, the answer is hard work. Work hard, and you’ll accomplish everything you ever set out to, our elementary school teachers told us. It was hammered into us at such a young age that now, as adults, we feel guilty skimping on our prescribed hard work. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about hard work and its importance in modern life. Lots of people work hard, but few people have good outcomes.

The barista at my regular coffee place works the opening shift and has to leave her house at 3:45 AM every morning (best cappuccinos ever btw). Her shift is 10 hrs days 5 days a week for $22/hr. I'd say she works pretty hard. But her work is nonlinear with her outcome (for now). On the contrary, plenty of people coast through their corporate jobs, making 6 figures (also for now).

It's unfair, and I don’t really have a solution for it. Our market economy, while claiming to value hard work, works solely on the principle of supply and demand.

What should such hard-working people do to get ahead? Work harder? Probably not, because from the outside in, it seems like their guilty un-pleasures aren’t serving them very well.

I like to think about the hard-work-to-success ratio as pulling levers. All of us pull a lever, and the more leverage our lever has, the better outcome our life has. Working class people pull a short lever, and their blood, sweat, and tears go into moving it from one position to another. Nepo babies have long levers. As long as they don’t piss anyone off at their dad’s investment bank, their ROI will be massive. We can complain about these levers and who gets to pull them, but I’m more interested in choosing levers.

I don’t have a trust fund, but I do have certain advantages, access to levers that other people don’t. Wouldn’t it be more useful to, instead of brute force grinding or bitching about other people’s good fortune, to find the longest lever I can pull? 

It’s scary searching for a new lever. Because levers are often hidden, and the leverage you have over them isn’t linear. Moreover, you may have to abandon your old lever to find a new one.

How does all this relate to my guilty un-pleasures? 

Our guilty un-pleasures keep us in check. They are a structure around which we do things that we might not necessarily want to. Most people (including myself) use these guilty un-pleasures to accomplish simple, hard tasks, with a clear ROI. Work out in the morning... get in better shape. Be a go-getter at work… get a promotion.

I want to try something different and use the discipline from my guilty un-pleasures to find new levers. Scared to talk at the meeting with all the executives? Do it. Scared to talk to the cute girl standing in line at the coffee shop. Do it. Scared to cold email someone for a job opportnity? Do it. Cause who knows, doing something courageous might unveil a new lever. Pushing really hard at the same lever, which hasn’t done much good in the past, is unlikely to do much good in the future. Shift your mindset, and use your discipline to try new things, because who knows, thanks to us, our kids might have the opportunity to fuck up their cushy internships by vaping in the office.

-Raj