A hedonist is a person who is highly motivated to seek pleasure. This may seem like a tautology. After all, pleasure and motivation are closely linked in human psychology. If you’re motivated to seek something, when you obtain it, you’ll feel pleasure, right?
Actually, human motivation is more complex than just the mere pursuit of pleasure. Sometimes, people are motivated to pursue experiences that cause them pain. It seems strange to those with bright and bubbly personalities, but people can also find pleasure to be unworthy of pursuit.
Anhedonia is the realization that experiences that once brought pleasure no longer do. It can expand to the point where nothing in life seems capable of eliciting pleasure. Anhedonia can be associated with feelings of profound sorrow, but it doesn’t have to be. It can simply be experienced as a kind of emotional flatness in situations that once excited feelings of joy.
The terrible thing about anhedonia is that it tends to reinforce itself. When people feel low amounts of pleasure in experiences that generally make people feel good, they lose their motivation to seek out new experiences in general. Thus, anhedonia leads to physical and social withdrawal, making an encounter with a source of unexpected pleasure even less likely.
The downward cycle into anhedonia became a widespread concern with the global coronavirus pandemic in 2020. As a wide range of pleasurable activities became unexpectedly unavailable for long periods of time, many people began to notice that they took less joy in the small range of activities still available to them.
Researchers Sarah Hagerty and Leanne Williams explain that, “Cruelly, COVID-19 sets the perfect stage for the propagation of social anhedonia cycle. Due to social distancing ordinances, exposure to usual sources of rewarding stimulation, including sources of human connection, are markedly reduced in our current reality… Reduced exposure to rewarding stimuli seems to fuel a cycle of anticipatory reward deficits, diminished motivation for engaging in social interaction, and blunted reward.”
The way out of anhedonia is, ironically, no fun. The only chance to find something that makes us feel good again is to purposefully place ourselves in situations where new experiences are possible, even though doing so feels unrewarding right now. Coming up with ways to re-engage with the world is crucial, especially when the old and easy paths to pleasure have been closed off.
