It's a Pleasure
No guilt, just joy
I was thinking about the concept of guilty pleasures recently. I honestly can’t remember what brought this to mind, but I’m going to guess it was something like hearing a song that I might have felt embarrassed to admit how much I liked at one time in my life. Something that felt somehow not enough in the midst of a conversation about things that felt more artsy, more angsty, more esoteric and cool. And so there was the pressure to explain that this thing I like is just a little guilty pleasure.
Which means what, exactly?
When you really break it down, when we say that, what we’re actually saying is: I feel ashamed of this thing I really like or my taste in things just isn’t good enough. Which is a lot to heap on ourselves over a personal choice about a song to listen to, or movie to watch, or book to read. An even more egregious act when you remember that reading and listening to music and watching movies are typically thought of as things we engage with in our leisure time; so we’re heaping guilt on something meant to bring us rest and joy.
I’ll admit that guilty pleasure is something I’ve mostly been able to eliminate from my vocabulary and self-narrative (which has plenty of other things it likes to be judge-y about). This may be related to age and the natural caring less about being cool that comes with that. Or from spending quite a bit of time writing in a genre that people love to call their guilty pleasure and unpacking why as a society we view reading and writing stories about relationships and love as somehow less than and something we have to apologize for.
But regardless of this general moving past the need to qualify or apologize for what I like, it still crops up occasionally. Like when the conversation turns to movies and everyone is talking about a sure to be Oscar nominated film they can’t wait to watch and I question whether I should bring up that I’m pretty excited about the upcoming Netflix holiday offering, Hot Frosty.
When I was thinking about this recently it occurred to me that while not worrying about being cool or pushing back against what society deems as worthy of critical acclaim are both very solid reasons to eliminate the concept of a guilty pleasure, the real crux of the thing is that we should just lean in to celebrating whatever brings us joy. And how lucky we are to live in a world where so very many varied ways to find a few moments of that.
There is so much to feel concerned or anxious or uncertain about. Let’s not let what we choose to read, listen to or watch get added to that list. Perhaps it can just be fun, yes? And we each get to define fun however we want.
Just the pleasure, please.
Hold the guilt.
This Week Last Year
I was in England visiting friends and attending a beautiful wedding!
Squirrel of the Week
My Mom picked this up for me recently! I especially love that the squirrel is drinking hot cocoa with marshmallows! The detail! (It’s one of those Swedish wash towel things— have you used them? They’re wild- super soft and spongy when they are wet and then dry rigid like this.) Perhaps this will help me allow washing dishes to be a pleasure . . .
What are you reading, listening to, watching? Have you ever edited your answer to this? Apologized for a guilty pleasure? How might we just lean into the pleasure and leave the guilt behind?