The cult of pleasure

"It’s a message that we need to counter the cult of pleasure which now dominates advertisements and lifestyle magazines. They seem to offer the promise that, if we can fill our lives with enough restaurant meals, mini-breaks, holidays and gourmet dinner parties we will get enough pleasure to have full and satisfied lives. They also promote a kind of hedonistic angst, the fear that there are great pleasures others are enjoying which we are not. To have to answer negatively the question in the title of William Sutcliffe’s satire on backpacking culture, Are You Experienced?, is to admit we haven’t lived.'"