2024-02-11 13:02:36
Since Friday, 20 Minutes has devoted itself to pleasure in all its forms. Yes, we are talking about sexuality, but also taste, olfactory or sporting pleasures.
By turning the hot water tap in your shower today, have you chosen the option of ease and regressive pleasure that takes you away from true happiness? The act may seem trivial to you, but becomes almost prohibited in the world of personal development. Cold shower, NoFap Challenge (no masturbation for a period), minimalist comfort, restriction of screen time… For several years, industry leaders and other digital gurus of “self-fulfillment” have been extolling the 1,001 virtues and supposed merits of the absence of pleasure and the deliberate choice to deprive oneself of it.
In a video with more than 550,000 views on YouTube, Swiss drop shipping entrepreneur Yomi Denzel explained: “Taking a cold shower is really going against the little voice in your heart. brain, it’s saying from the morning “I’m a disciplined person, I’m not going to let myself be fooled by the little voice that forces me to do the easiest thing”, and that helps me enormously to be in a mode where I do what I have to do and not what I want to do. »
Porn and TIkTok, pleasant boredom
Why do yourself good when it is so deserving to do yourself harm? Nicolas Marquis, professor of sociology at UCLouvain Saint-Louis Brussels and author of From well-being to the market of malaise, The society of personal development (Puf, 2014), summarizes: “Pleasure has become too simple to obtain to be prestigious. » This is what videographer Tristan Hermin calls the McDonald’s effect: according to him, you are happier when you order your Big Mac than after you have eaten it. It ultimately won’t have brought you any joy, it was so easy to obtain.
“Today, any young person can see more naked women without leaving home than all their ancestors combined,” he continues. He has neither the millions of Yomi Denzel, nor his experience – the young man is still a high school student – but already plans to become “the best version of yourself” on his YouTube and Instagram channels. More than 169 cold showers to his credit, and a cell phone free of all social networks: Instagram, Snapchat, and especially TikTok.
Did religion create the cold shower?
The Chinese application remains, with the porn mentioned earlier, the main target for personal dev enthusiasts. “That’s really all that’s wrong: you can scroll through hundreds of videos less than a minute long because everything in them is designed to activate your dopamine: you’re watching a short story with emotions and a beginning and an end in less than sixty seconds. But ultimately, you spent one or two hours of your day scrolling without being in the least happy,” continues Christophe, 32 years old and who has sworn to no longer watch any video of less than half an hour, and to always favor good old books – preferably long ones.
Robert Zuili, psychologist specializing in emotions, recalls: “We come from a Judeo-Christian culture where happiness must be a reward, the fruit of work, and cannot arise from oneself.” Faced with this apparently too accessible pleasure, abstinence is coming back into fashion, and not only among those wanting to become “alphas”. The therapist takes the example of Dry January: “The new trend is no longer to control your impulse but to stop it completely. We’re not talking about drinking less, or more sensibly, but about stopping completely for a month. »
Be an actor in your life, even for your shower water
Tristan thus distinguishes between “immediate pleasure” and “delayed pleasure”: “Doing sport, working on my business, eating healthy, it’s not necessarily something that will make me happy at the time, but when I see the fruit of this work or what these restrictions allow me, I will be happy afterwards, and it will be a pleasure more important than the immediate satisfactions. »
And above all, give the feeling of being an actor in your life, even for decisions as unimportant as the temperature of the water in which you wash. “There is a desire for power based on a form of mastery and self-imposition. We give ourselves the impression of having control in a society and a world that seems to overtake us more and more,” recalls Nicolas Marquis.
In a French society where almost everyone has access to hot water, you are “someone” and you differentiate yourself from the crowd when you voluntarily choose cold water. “If everyone can access their potential, as this movement defends, the question remains of why some succeed and others do not,” continues the sociologist. This is where the notions of control, abstinence and mastery come into play, which are supposed to differentiate you. »
Are we all in abstinence and control?
“People can make fun, but everyone imposes things on themselves,” defends Christophe. Are we motivated to brush our teeth every morning? No, we do it because we are disciplined and we get positive consequences from it. Why are we faithful as a couple? Because we impose this restriction on ourselves not to go elsewhere. The person who trains hard for a marathon, or who works overtime to get a promotion, is less different from me and my cold showers than she wants to believe. »
But everything should be consumed in moderation, even abstinence. “Self-esteem also comes from positive experiences and not just from accomplishment and hard work,” recalls Robert Zuili. Too much emotional restriction may seem empowering at first but always ends up creating anxiety and negativity in the long run. We can’t cut ourselves off from pleasure, it’s inhuman. ” Tristan ends up cracking the armor: “There are pleasures that are still really enjoyable, and you shouldn’t cut them all. ” Ah anyway !
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