What is wrong with being pleasure-centric?

"You are so pleasure-centric," he said. It was a complaint. One I have heard from others over the years.
"What is wrong with being pleasure-centric?" I asked, genuinely puzzled. He is intelligent and articulate. Perhaps he can help me to understand.
"Nothing, so long as I don't have to be, too." Ah, I thought, finally, someone who is accepting of my hedonistic nature. But my joy faded when he added, "The whole concept of being pleasure-oriented... it upsets me."
"Why?" I asked.
"That is a very complex question to answer," he replied.
Thats not an answer, its a cop-out. "Please explain?" I asked again. Surely, he must be self-aware enough about his discomfort to explain it to me.

Silence. He did not answer. I waited. He struggled, but he could not put into words the reasons for his discomfort with my shameless enjoyment of the sensuous immediacy of every moment. I think it has to do with the Mennonite values his mother passed on to him, even though she married and raised her children outside her 'faith.' Puritanism prevails in North America, the concept that life must be wrung dry of all that is pleasurable in it, in order to be worthy of the rewards of the after-life. I was reminded of what Nietzsche had said: "The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad." And I remembered my conviction that if there is a God, there could be no greater insult to Him or Her than to shun and revile Creation. I was born into this world, I was given this life, this body, these senses, and it is only fitting that I live it to the fullest of my meager abilities.

Into the silence I said, "We all act out of our own self-interest. The fundamental drive of the unconscious is the Pleasure Principle. Read up on your Freud. I'm just more aware of it than most, and certainly less hung-up on doing what makes me happy/feel good. It is a hedonistic approach to life, and I'm unapologetic about it--and again, happier than most people as a result."



Am I too pleasure-centric? Am I deceiving myself? Am I really happier than most people? Hmm... I don't want like most people do. I don't feel the need to go shopping in order to assuage that restlessness that so many people seem to feel as a result of evasion of self-awareness. I don't experience psychosomatic illnesses. I am rarely stressed-out, and when I am, I am soon conscious of why, and of the choices I have. I rarely feel trapped. I like my life. I like who I am. I am, for the most part, comfortable in my own skin.

What is so wrong with being aware of the world, with enjoying it? What is wrong with being sensitive to shades of colour, to the subtlty of sounds like the patter of water, to the touch of someone's hand on my skin? What is wrong with swooning over my first bite into a ripe nectarine? Why is it wrong that I enjoy scents that others cannot smell? Am I too indulgent in the sensual, at the expense of something more important? I work, I pay my bills, I contribute to causes I believe in. I take time to contemplate the meaning of life. I rarely say unkind words, think unkind thoughts, do unkind things. True, I should get more exercise, I should be more spontaneous, I should be willing to risk more and fear less.

I am an experiential being in a shared experiential reality. Whatever I observe, whatever I experience, I embrace. There is nothing that is unworthy of acceptance. There is nothing taken on 'faith'. There is nothing that I cannot endure. Perhaps that is where I am so wrong... I am capable of enjoying the moment, of somehow enduring what others find unendurable by finding something pleasant in it. I can smile with equanimity and say that I never did mind the little things, and mean it. Does that make me a masochist? A realist? A hedonist? A sinner?

Whatever it makes me, I cannot evade the awareness that I sometimes make others uncomfortable with my sensory perceptions of reality. Why the sensual makes people so uncomfortable, I do not know. I do not understand. Do I need to change? Can I change? All I know of the world is what I have experienced, and I experience it through my senses. My senses are acute, not corrupt. How can I deaden them, except to retreat into myself, into the bubble-world of the life of the mind? And with my vivid, multi-sensory imagination, would retreat make me any less a sensual, pleasure-centric creature?

I do not know. I am passionately interested in knowing, in understanding the answer to that question which perplexes every person I ask: "What is wrong with being pleasure-centric?"