The Thrillseekers

My favorite word of the moment is sybaritic, which I learned from my friend Chand Sooran, who you might remember wrote the foreword to my essay collection Those Bastards. Sybaritic means fond of sensuous luxury or pleasure; self-indulgent. This started with the Boomers back in the sixties—but if you ask the average person today about their code of morality, they will probably tell you that you can do whatever the hell you want as long as you don’t hurt anyone else. That’s American ethics summed up in a single sentence.

I think there is more to it than that. The older I get, the more I think it is a virtue to deny yourself sensuous pleasure. Sensuous pleasure can mean a lot of different things: it can mean drink or drugs, or sex, or video games, or TV-watching, or anything we do as an escape from reality. This isn’t rocket science. You probably know someone who experiences a bit too much sensuous pleasure, whether in drink or drugs, or sex, or video games, or anything else. What do you notice about these people? They are very unhappy people, or at least, hollow, and unfulfilled. I don’t get the impression that whatever Hugh Hefner was chasing gave him a richer, more fulfilling life. Stories are starting to come out about the Hefner days, and it’s ugly. How would you behave in the same situation, if you had the ability to have as much sex as you want with the hottest women in the world, twenty-four/seven/three sixty-five? It was never enough. The same is true of alcoholism or drug addiction, where one is too many and a thousand is never enough. It leads you down a path of complete and utter spiritual bankruptcy. There was probably a point in my twenties when I thought Hugh Hefner was pretty cool. You may think that is cool, but it’s not cool.

The libertarians say that you can and should treat your body like an amusement park. The Republicans say that you should not. The Republicans also try to legislate away your ability to treat your body like an amusement park. I am somewhere in between—I think that treating your body like the Lightning Loops should be discouraged, but allowed—the cost of enforcement is just too high. You might have seen recently that there was a bill making its way through the Oklahoma legislature to ban adult pornography and make the mere viewing of it a felony. There is a lot of evidence that pornography is harmful, but the idea of locking thousands of people up for scrolling past a wet T-shirt on Instagram seems a bit authoritarian to me. If you legislate away the ability to be immoral, and don’t offer people a choice of whether to be moral or immoral, then people aren’t really moral, are they? They have no choice in the matter. We went through this a century ago with prohibition, and trust me on this—there should be no debate about the harmful effects on society of alcohol—but the cure was worse than the disease. Of course, drug prohibition these days is in name only—except in certain parts of the country, it is practically not enforced at all.

There is a reason why predominantly older people go to church. Sensuous pleasure is the antithesis of spirituality. The more you drink, do drugs, have a dishonorable discharge, the further away you are getting from God. There is a reason people feel remorse when they do these things, why they feel pangs of guilt after the 15 seconds of bliss are over; they know, deep down, that it is wrong, but they can’t quite articulate why. And a lot of morality and legislated morality is simply articulating the things that feel wrong, are wrong. And remember: all of these things allegedly fall into the category of things that hurt you, but nobody else. And that is a common fallacy, when people think that the consequences of their actions don’t extend beyond themselves. Addiction, of any kind, can tear apart families, and often the consequences are worse for the people surrounding the addict than for the addict himself. For the past ten years, we have been experimenting with drug decriminalization. There have been experiments with decriminalization around the world, none of them successful, not even Portugal, which we are supposedly trying to emulate.

As someone who gave up drinking 18 years ago, I can tell you that I have very few good memories of drinking. I will you one: my wife and I took a trip to Atlantic City in the summer, spent the day on the beach broiling in the sun, then headed inside the Showboat casino to play penny slots and get slowly sozzled on free gin and tonics. We were giggling our asses off. But no, most of my memories around alcohol involve puking, getting beat up, doing embarrassing stuff, and waking up massively hung over the next day. My life is infinitely better without it. Let’s put it this way—I wasn’t writing any books when I was drinking. I couldn’t spell cat if you spotted me the “c” and the “a.” In fact, my life didn’t even really begin until I stopped drinking. From age 18 to 32 was a complete donut. All I was capable of was dragging my ass out of bed in the morning, scratching my way to work, putting in a minimal amount of effort, and limping home so I could unwind with a drink. 14 years of my life—gone. There is something about alcohol in particular, which makes it unique among all drugs, in that it destroys your character in subtle, insidious ways. You find yourself doing things you never said you’d do—the unacceptable becomes acceptable. There is a reason they banned this stuff in 1920. I get it. We will have correspondingly similar, but different problems with cannabis 10-20 years from now.

By this point you probably think I sound like some uptight Tipper Gore character, some church lady morality scold, or maybe some straightedge skinhead in Sacramento. Many people think of religion and spirituality as being in conflict with the material world. Like, you can’t be rich and go to heaven. There are competing philosophies on this, but there are sects of Christianity that believe that you glorify God if you are productive, and I tend to agree with that. I don’t think that there is a conflict between the spiritual and material world. I think there is a conflict between real spirituality and fake spirituality, the kind you get at a Phish show. And now, I’m not saying that you have to spend your mornings on the back porch listening to the birds. You’re talking to a DJ here. You can be spiritual and have fun, and you can even be spiritual and have excitement. Really, it comes down to the concept of escape. And that is the funny thing about the sensuous pleasures, is that people really are trying to find a spiritual solution—they are just looking in the wrong place. I mean, look at Hunter Biden, the perfect example of an immoral, pleasure-seeking person, the running butt of all jokes in politics. That guy is trying to find God; he is just taking a shortcut. And there are no shortcuts.

You will know when you have a spiritual experience. I have had a few, if you’re speaking in terms of white light moments. You know when you are having one of those experiences; you cry. But for me, every day is a spiritual experience, showing up and doing good work, being fully present for the death of my cat Uma, being fully present for my wife and her achievements, building, growing, helping people, and slowly becoming a better person after a period of decades. Spiritual experiences don’t happen exogenously—they are earned, over a lifetime of work and effort. It is just like anything else.