My first thought in places like that is that I have vastly more in common with the wait staff than most of the patrons, which is certainly true. If I apply myself I make good money, but it is doing work most people would consider menial. Most of the guys I work with smoke, no small number of them chew, and if any of them own suits, it is for church and funerals.
But I was also contemplating that so much of what we call pleasure is the IDEA of pleasure. We think to ourselves “I must be having fun, because this is what everyone wants to do, but most people can’t afford.”
And I got to thinking about wealthy people skiiing Aspen, staying in expensive chalets, eating fine meals every night. And I can’t help but think that while there is CLEARLY an inescapable element of pleasure in all this, that it cannot but be comingled with an awareness of being elite, of being special, of doing something most people can’t do.
We feel pleasure in the places where we are supposed to, but some portion of this pleasure actually disappears in the IDEA we form of the context. The idea of what we are doing mediates to some extent the reality, the direct experience, of it.
And to the extent we mediate our emotions by our sense of what it is we are supposed to be feeling, we are unfree. The world comes to us, and we filter it. We seek what is “good”, and avoid what is “bad”, but in neither case do we ourselves ride out to meet the world as it is, on its own terms.
Does pleasure uniquely arise in us in response to circumstances? Or is there something in us which can rise up anywhere, and influence our understanding and experience of circumstances, such that the connection between what happens “to” us is influenced BY us, making all circumstances potentially under our emotional control, such that we can remain positive and happy in varying circumstances?
In my understanding, this is substantially the argument made by Buddhists, among others. How do you make the ordinary beautiful? How do you make the beautiful spectacular?
How can I get MORE pleasure from Waffle House than a 5 star restaurant? It all depends, does it not, on who I am when I walk in, what I hear, what I feel, what I see?