Guilty Pleasures
Not Only Does The Show Gilmore Girls Mimic the Incessant Voice In My Head But It Also Quietens It
It’s Friday, 2024 and I’m a middle aged man sitting down to binge watch a nearly 30 year old series created for women and designed I think, mainly for comfort. I carve an obscene amount of butter into my baked potato and disassociate to the incessant small town ramblings of...the Gilmore Girls.
Sure, in real life this would be the most dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship in history. And Yes, nobody talks like this in real life. OF COURSE, towns as perfect as Stars Hollow don’t exist! But everyone has their guilty pleasures, so why am I judging myself?
The truth is we are all heavyweight champions of destroying our own pleasure. It’s not uncommon in my psychotherapy sessions with clients to discover that often times people are actively avoiding what gives them pleasure. But what is this all about? Why are we so desperate to deny ourselves our guilty pleasures and why are we even calling them guilty to begin with?
I work a lot with business CEO’s and entrepreneurs who, after attaining the extent of their ambitions suddenly are overcome with a feelings of existential dread. If you’d like the recipe to try at home here it is.
Recipe for Doom and Existential Dread
1 cup realisation of the finite time of a human life (usually approaching midlife but can be multiple times in any age group)
1/2 cup self inflicted stress without time for paying attention to emotions and what you need
A sprinkle of ‘what does it all mean?’
And finally bake at 120 degrees in an oven of SHAME and not feeling enough.
If you sit still in you guilty pleasure for long enough you may start experiencing mild to moderate feelings of discomfort. Feelings imitating anxiety, frustration and stress might begin to bubble up and you may feel shame, or even more stress!
Guess what, you’re actually not in the minority.
It requires a certain amount of discipline, self punishment and steadfastness to accomplish things. But oftentimes this voice in our head ends up convincing us that all of the incessant worry and constant monitoring is the ONLY secure path to safeguarding a fulfilled future. Maybe we’re thinking:
“I shouldn’t be doing this”
“I’m not making enough money”
“This isn’t productive”
“I don’t deserve this”
“I should be exercising”
“I’m fat and I’m sitting too long”
“I bet others aren’t as pathetic as me”
“I’m so lonely”
“This is sad”
“If people only knew how big of a loser I am then nobody would love me”
And on and on...AND you’re only halfway through the first episode of the first series.
When we are afraid to sit still it means that the supercomputer in your head designed to protect you has gone haywire. Thoughts like the ones above may begin as fairly innocuous negative self talk but eventually these can lead to severe drops in self esteem, anxiety disorders and a smorgasbord of other emotional suffering.
So what do we do?
The business professionals I see are often on a hamster wheel not because of choice but out of a perceived necessity. In reality, the more connected you are to the authentic version of you (that means “bad” emotions too) the better you actually run a business. An anxious boss creates anxious employees and companies structured to perform with anxiety as the fuel. Long term it’s unsustainable.
But the antidote to anxiety is not to avoid anxiety, it’s to allow the anxiety to choose the path which most promotes your own genuine happiness and authenticity. We cannot deny our needs and desires for long, ultimately it’s not our choice, they rear their heads in other, often uglier ways.
So how do we know what our authentic path is? Who are we under all the performance, masks, responsibilities identity labels, status and voices?
We’re back at guilty pleasures.
Look for them, experiment with them. Try following them and finding what it is about them that are so alluring. This goes for other, sometimes even hidden desires which could lead to a behaviour we either deem “us” or “not us”.
Approach these with curiosity, share them, ask yourself...
“Am I doing THIS enough in my life? The things I enjoy? How best can I connect with what I really want? And can I trust that if I allow and follow these emotions that they won’t lead to the end of the world, death, destruction, homelessness? If I try, just for a week of my life, am I willing to trust I might feel better rather than worse in the long run if I just pay attention and listen to myself?”
The issues above are too nuanced and wonderful to get into in too much depth here. Obviously it’s more complicated and different for everyone. But I use methods like this one in my psychotherapy practise almost daily and when adapted uniquely to the person it can be a great way to take complicated psychological processes and bring them down to Earth.
Netflix has just asked me if I’m still watching?
Yes. Yes I am.