The Merits of Hedonism

I confess, I have a few hedonistic tendencies.

Last night, with the gift card from the mother of a child M babysat, a gift from a sister in law, and a few of our own funds, M and I indulged. At Olive Garden we ate bread sticks and salad, and then wine-baked beef rib tips and a golden fish fillet. N sat on my lap or in her car seat quite contentedly until we were nearly ready to go anyway, were just sopping up the remains of the wine sauce with the last of the bread sticks.

After resting in the car a few minutes, letting N recover from the restaurant hubbub, we walked the fifty yards to a Cold Stone Creamery.

The guy who dished my large “apple pie a la mode” must know what it’s like to be a guy, because he heaped that dish so tremendously full that I felt like an eight-year-old just handed a full half-gallon box. We didn’t finish it all until today’s lunchtime dessert.

But somehow I consider taking pleasure in food in a category far distant from current trends of entertainment dependency.

For example, our teenage guest this past week kept her cell phone ever handy in order to text her friends and, meanwhile, carry on a semblance of conversation with us, mostly about what her friends were writing to her. Which was basically mind-numbing chatter aimed at funny quipping to satisfy the hedonistic use of “friends” as entertainment to fend off boredom. (We did disallow texting at the dinner table; I wonder if we should have disallowed the phone totally.)

There was, literally, no good reason for her to constantly stare at her little screen and thumb messages of inconsequence, and yet somehow that pastime proved addicting. (Well, OK, so maybe M and N and I are just boring, but at least we have some good books on our shelves!)

Now, multiply that one-person scenario by pretty much our small church’s entire youth group, and you get a church row full of bulky teenage boys, each huddled over his phone throughout a sermon they desperately needed to hear without distraction. This is perhaps hedonism in its most innocent and pervasive essence: gadgetry that isolates users from immediate surroundings while posturing as human connectivity.

Now, extend the text-messaging phenomenon to video games, personal entertainment devices, and theme parks, and a strikingly flat picture of our machine-based, gimme-gimme world jumps out like a jack-in-the-box surprised at the vibrancy of the real world and eager to be stuffed back in his case of easy thrills.

I realize I sound like an old person complaining about the young generation. “At least they’re not digging the Beatles, or swinging their pelvises like Elvis,” some of those particular old farts might have said, much to the indignation of the now-adult rockinouters who today run much of the world.

The current question remains, however: Into what will this new generation amenable primarily to thumbed messages and roller coaster thrills mature? On what sort of resume does “purely hedonistic” look good? Will these youth be fulfilled, ever?

Or even filled?