myopia

on the misanthropy of pleasure

I have two drinks at the park at 5.30 every evening. 

‘Schedule defends against chaos and whim,’ Annie Dilliard writes. My instinct tends downwards to chaos and whim like a lemming drawn to a cliff. It’s funny; we make the lemming’s suicidality up for comfort, I suppose because it makes our appetite for self-destruction seem less lonesomely human. I like to think lemmings kill themselves, I like to think routine will kill me, I like to construct a mythos that legitimises my living. What could terrify us more than to know how we spend our days is how we spend our lives? 

A life is sculpted in the castings of routine, and so my routineless soul is clawing at some deeper quality of aliveness, one that shirks mundanity and fears obsolescence. Maybe my life becomes more beautiful when I cannot trust its regularity. So I tell myself this is my schedule: I amble to the park after work and have two drinks in the sun, and it is really no schedule at all. I am really trying to rewire time itself around my leisure. I want the universe to orbit the navel I gaze. Each morning begins for the sole purpose of my evening indulgence. 

I have written the word ‘I’ eleven times so far. 

A public park is one of the few places in which an unhoused person has the same rights as I do. They cannot be denied service; they can enjoy their right to leisure with a rarely-honoured dignity. I have a cordial relationship with some of these strangers now—we share some of the same shady spots and I politely deny them a cigarette. There is an unspoken understanding of the bond we forge in public intoxication. I don’t like to think about how many standard drinks I have in a week, but I know whatever the number is makes me the type of belligerent scum-of-the-earth that r/auckland Reddit users like to call ‘feral’. But I have a job, and my clothes are nice, and so I am a member of the public whose enjoyment of my taxes is justifiable. The man who overdoses in the public bathroom is not. His helplessness is a threat to our pleasure, an infringement upon the respectable citizen’s hedonism. I must luxuriate in a glass house that separates me from decay. 

When I found out my grandfather was dying, I was drinking a beer. I have built up a reputation as a beer-hater—it tastes horrible, and it performs a sort of masculinity I find gauche—but then it was the early hours after a night out, and I was in that limbo state of consciousness that had proceeded far past sleep or awakeness. I focus in on the taste, on how that strange yeastiness can feel almost comforting, something warm and earthy. I am demystifying something that had always been inarticulable to me, I am reveling in the great feat of accessing new dimensions of pleasure and succumbing to the numbness it brings. I don’t remember to call my family for another few days. 

In 2021, a Heineken-owned brewery was added to Brazil’s ‘slave labour’ list for subjecting 23 of its employees to slave-like conditions. In 2017, Heineken was found to be abusing the human rights of its workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo. A company scavenges the global South for its windfall profits and leaves its victims to suffer in the debris, all for me to sit here with a bottle and wax lyrical about my alcoholism. Is this our garden of Eden? Fertilised with the blood of innocents, guiltless gorging on the fruit of blissful ignorance? 

The idea of community is always so compelling to unanchored twenty-somethings, but a community predicated on the pursuit of pleasure is more an archipelago of self-contained islands than it is a home. Each actor is driven by impulse and singularly intent on their goal. That singular train of thought gives way to a type of tunnel vision, bricklayed with each empty can you consume—your empathy extends as far as your immediate line of sight, and shifts with each new image you are presented. The thrill of your pleasure-seeking deafens the cries of anything beyond these walls, whether the political catastrophe unfolding on your doorstep, or the friend you haven’t seen in a few weeks. 

I don’t think of it as narcissism in the diagnostic sense. I don’t want to attribute to malice what can easily be explained by apathy, but I can’t pretend the distinction between malice and apathy is particularly meaningful. I think it is best described as a negligent self-involvement, one that proliferates throughout the culture and becomes exacerbated by our hedonism, until nobody seems to be able to truly look outside of themselves. It is like your capacity for object permanence never developed beyond infancy. Nothing is truly permanent except your comfort and your high. And that unwavering commitment to only what is right in front of you—is that not a uniquely terrible evil? 

The Superbowl plays, Beyoncé drops, Rafah is sieged. The fanfare of the former spares no humility for the latter. The problem I have always found with Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ is its apologism; in attributing Eichmann’s crimes not to his extraordinary capacity for evil but to his complacency in bureaucracy, what we are left with is this covert removal of agency. If any person can be Eichmann, if my neighbour can be a Nazi, if I too can become a proponent of the totalitarian state, then are we ever accountable for our sins? If evil is not our active practice but just the inherent product of status quo, then are we any more sentient than puppets? 

Apathy is always justified by powerlessness. We become desensitised to horror because there is nothing we can do, and our focus turns inwards because this is the realm in which we exert some control. But these realms do not exist in vacuums; each pleasure you seek, even each egotistic attempt at self-destruction, bears the price of somebody else’s suffering. We revel in the spoils of carcasses, and our attention span does not last long enough for the body to go cold. I think it is less the banality of evil, but the evil of banality: the active cruelty of our negligence and complicity. We accept the comforts of our lives without question and can barely muster up the self-abnegation to mourn the evil it requires.

This piece navel-gazes as much as anything else. I haven’t blown up an arms factory and I’ve been a bad friend lately. But as much as I love to write about the beauty of communion and the spirituality of drug usage, I can’t help but wonder about the myopia of my perspectives, whether my desire for self-actualisation has rendered me less compassionate. I don’t advocate for anybody’s shame, but I do think I am a more evil person than I want to admit. I think we all are. And reconciling ourselves with the evil of our carelessness is perhaps the only way to consciously fend against our succumbing.