Hedonism gets terrible press.
Mention that you’re pursuing pleasure as a life priority and watch how quickly people assume you’re irresponsible, selfish or morally bankrupt. The word itself conjures images of excess, decadence and people who’ve abandoned all sense of responsibility in favour of immediate gratification. It suggests someone who thinks only of themselves and who prioritises fleeting satisfaction over meaningful connection or contribution to other people and society.
But what if our cultural disdain for hedonism is actually doing us harm? What if the vilification of pleasure-seeking is keeping us from experiences that are essential for wellbeing, connection and authentic living?
After years working as an intimacy provider, and watching how people relate to their own desires and pleasure, I’ve come to believe that our suspicion of hedonism is deeply misguided. Not because excess and self-destruction are admirable, but because we’ve conflated mindful pleasure-seeking with harmful indulgence in ways that prevent people from accessing joy, sensuality and genuine aliveness!
What is hedonism
Let’s start with what hedonism actually is, because the definition is important.
At its core, hedonism is simply the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It’s the philosophical position that pleasure and happiness are the most important intrinsic goods and that experiences which bring joy and satisfaction are worthwhile in themselves.
This doesn’t mean excess, irresponsibility or harm and it doesn’t require abandoning commitments, using people or destroying yourself through overconsumption. These associations have been layered onto hedonism through cultural conditioning, not because they’re inherent to the concept itself.
Genuine hedonism, the kind I’m interested in, involves pursuing experiences that bring genuine pleasure and wellbeing whilst maintaining awareness of consequences and care for yourself and others. It’s about valuing joy, sensuality and aliveness as legitimate priorities. Plainly speaking, when we reject hedonism entirely, we also reject the pursuit of pleasure itself. We end up believing that wanting things that feel good is somehow wrong and that prioritising our own joy is selfish and pleasure should always come last (if it comes at all).
Why pleasure became an issue
The cultural disdain of hedonism has been cultivated through religious teachings, the demands of capitalist productivity and social structures that benefit from people who suppress their desires and accept a lack of joy as a normal part of life.
Many religious traditions have positioned pleasure, particularly bodily and sexual pleasure, as morally dangerous. The flesh is weak, desire leads to sin and denying yourself is virtuous. This created generations of people who learnt that wanting pleasure made them bad and that suffering was somehow more spiritually pure than joy. Capitalism added another layer by positioning productivity as the highest virtue. Your value comes from what you produce, simple as that. Taking time for pleasure, rest or enjoyment became laziness instead of something that is essential for self-care.
The message is clear: work hard, delay gratification and maybe, possibly, you’ll earn the right to enjoy yourself later ( though probably not because there’s always more work to do).
Cultural messaging around responsibility added yet another angle which is that good people sacrifice themselves for others. Selflessness is admirable, whilst anything that prioritises your own experience is selfish and bad. For women, who are taught from birth that our purpose is caring for others, pursuing our own pleasure can feel deeply transgressive and absolutely not okay.
The result is a culture where pleasure itself has become suspect. We’ve learnt to feel guilty for enjoying ourselves and to apologise for wanting things that feel good. We are taught that virtue requires suffering. If you’re having too much fun, you must be doing something wrong.
The price of perpetual self-denial
When we reject hedonism entirely, we don’t just avoid excess and irresponsibility. We also reject essential experiences of joy, aliveness and connection that are fundamental to our wellbeing.
I’ve met countless people who have never given themselves permission to pursue pleasure. They’ve spent decades doing what they should do, meeting everyone else’s needs, living responsibly and denying themselves experiences that would bring them genuine joy. The result isn’t virtue, it’s often deep resentment, disconnection from themselves and lives that feel heavy and joyless. Depressing, right?
This rejection of pleasure shows up in sexual relationships strongly. People feel guilty for wanting sex, ashamed of their desires and convinced that prioritising their own pleasure makes them selfish lovers. It also shows up in how people relate to their bodies. They deny themselves rest, push through pain, ignore signals of hunger or tiredness and treat their physical needs as inconveniences. This eventually leads to burn out.
When we reject pleasure-seeking entirely we disconnect from our bodies, lose touch with our authentic desires and create lives that are stagnant and unhealthy.
Awareness is essential
One legitimate concern that comes up is that unchecked pleasure-seeking can become destructive. The fears are related to addiction, overconsumption, using people and prioritising immediate gratification over long-term wellbeing. The thing is, these aren’t inherent to hedonism itself. They’re what happens when pleasure-seeking becomes separated from awareness, responsibility and care for consequences.
Healthy hedonism involves pursuing pleasure whilst remaining aware of how your choices affect yourself and others. You must ask whether this pleasure serves your genuine wellbeing or whether it’s a way of avoiding something uncomfortable that you really need to face. It is integral to distinguish between experiences that bring lasting satisfaction and those that provide temporary escape.
This requires deep self-awareness. You need to know yourself well enough to recognise when you’re pursuing genuine pleasure versus when you’re running from pain and you need to be honest about consequences, both immediate and long-term. It isessential that you are aware of how your choices affect other people.
Healthy hedonism honours pleasure whilst maintaining this awareness.
The biological imperative
Pleasure isn’t frivolous. It’s essential for wellbeing, connection and living fully. Human beings are designed to seek pleasure and avoid pain. It’s how we navigate the world and learn what serves our wellbeing. Pleasure signals that something is good for us, that we’re safe, that we’re connected and that we’re alive.
Sexual pleasure strengthens intimate bonds, reduces stress and helps us feel connected to our bodies and partners. The pleasure of physical touch regulates our nervous systems and reminds us we’re not alone. The pleasure of laughter, play and joy helps us process difficulty and maintain resilience through challenging times.
Denying ourselves pleasure does not make us virtuous.
It disconnects us from essential feedback our bodies provide about what we need and it teaches us to override our own wisdom in favour of external rules about how we “should be”. When people honour their genuine need for pleasure, they often become more generous because they’re no longer operating from a depleted state. They have more to give because they’re not constantly sacrificing themselves, and in turn they become more connected to themselves and the world around them.
Oh, the shame!
Much of our cultural rejection of hedonism is really about shame. We’ve been taught to feel ashamed of wanting pleasure and ashamed of our desires.
This shame keeps everyone in check. People who feel guilty for experiencing joy are easier to manipulate, easier to exploit and less likely to advocate for their own needs. If you can convince people that wanting pleasure makes them bad, you can keep them suppressing themselves indefinitely.
Sexual shame in particular keeps people disconnected from their own desires and convinced that their sexuality is somehow wrong or dirty. This serves patriarchal structures that benefit from people, particularly women, remaining disconnected from their own pleasure and power.
Shame around pleasure shows up in my work quite a bit. People feel bad for having desires and feel guilty for taking time for themselves. They believe that experiencing their own pleasure makes them selfish and they’ve spent so long denying their desires that they often don’t even know what would bring them pleasure anymore.
Releasing this shame requires recognising it for what it is: learned conditioning that doesn’t serve your wellbeing at all.
Hedonism in sex and intimacy
The rejection of hedonism shows up strongly around sex and intimacy. The societal narrative is that sexual pleasure is dirty and suspicious. Sex sells everything, but actually pursuing sexual pleasure for its own sake is treated as shameful or dangerous. Most people believe that good sex should happen spontaneously without communication or effort, that indulging your own satisfaction is selfish and that certain desires are wrong or abnormal.
I have met people who have spent years ensuring their partners enjoyed themselves whilst completely neglecting their own experience. I was actually one of these people, many moons ago. I believed that good lovers give instead of receive, that asking for what they want is demanding and that their pleasure matters less than their partners.
This isn’t actually generous at all, it’s self-abandonment dressed up as virtue. Real intimacy requires both people to value their own pleasure alongside their partner’s and it requires honest communication about desires. You also need a willingness to advocate for your needs and the understand that mutual pleasure is the goal, not one person’s satisfaction at the expense of the other’s.
Reclaiming pleasure without guilt
So how do we indulge in hedonism without falling into harmful behaviours?
Look at your relationship with pleasure. When you do something enjoyable, do you feel guilty? Do you constantly delay gratification, believing you need to earn the right to enjoy yourself? Do you struggle to receive pleasure without immediately reciprocating? These patterns often indicate internalised beliefs that pleasure is something to be ashamed of.
You could try to:
- Spend some time distinguishing between pleasure that genuinely serves your wellbeing and escapism that creates more problems than it solves. This requires honest self-reflection about your motivations. Are you pursuing this experience because it brings you authentic joy or are you using it to avoid something uncomfortable?
- Give yourself permission to prioritise pleasure without guilt. This doesn’t mean abandoning responsibilities or using people for your gain, but you need to recognise that your joy matters and that you don’t need to suffer to be virtuous.
- Develop awareness of consequences without letting fear take the wheel. Healthy hedonism involves making informed choices about what serves your wellbeing.
- In sexual contexts specifically, practice advocating for your own pleasure. Communicate what feels good, what you want to try and what doesn’t work for you. Stop performing and start actually experiencing!
- Practice learning how to receive without guilt. Whether that’s physical pleasure, care from others or simply allowing yourself to enjoy something without immediately thinking about what you should be doing instead. Receiving is a skill many of us need to develop deliberately in order to strengthen the neural pathways.
Finally
The cultural suspicion of hedonism has kept many people from essential experiences of pleasure and joy.. By treating all pleasure-seeking as dangerous, we’ve created a framework that controls people more than it supports them.
Reclaiming pleasure as legitimate and important requires examining our conditioning around what we deserve, what makes us virtuous and what constitutes a life well lived. It’s really important to distinguish what is genuine hedonism and what is just destructive behaviour.
We need more people in the world who are willing to pursue pleasure without guilt, who value their own aliveness and who refuse to accept lives that feel stagnant and depressing. Not because pleasure solves all problems, but because joy and vitality are essential for wellbeing and because the world genuinely benefits from people who know how to be fully alive.
The experience of hedonism is our birthright and there is absolutely no shame in wanting to live your life fully and authentically.
Love Evie