There is a sense that many Americans get when they visit other countries abroad. It’s a sense that in some places outside the US there is just something different about the way people live and enjoy life. The writer Gary Shteyngart attributes this to something called sensualism. Sensualism is a sort of hedonist impulse to enjoy life through the senses. It is the appreciation of craft, of human creativity, typified by the enjoyment of good food, drink, clothes, and arts. It is made possible by robust communities tied together by strong families and governmental systems that nurture the artisanal over the mass-produced. It is also something considered in short supply in American culture, and by extension modern secular culture. Writers like Shteyngart argue that American culture has strayed away from sensualism in favor of ruthless optimization—things like looksmaxxing and the endless pursuit of health and wellness optimization all point to the same soulless, corporate haze that has come to define much of what we consume. What’s the point of a living a life that’s optimized to the max if you can’t enjoy it?
When I hear the term sensualist, I do somewhat recognize a few of its traits in me. I too prefer the artisanal over the corporate. I too believe that American culture has favored optimization and efficiency over beauty. I find workout culture and health tracking tedious and not-fun. Shteyngart advocates for more sensualism—that we don’t have enough sensualism in our society. To me, the choice between going for a run or sitting in a hot tub is obvious—I’d rather not run. Yeah, I get it. Working out is healthy and can extend your life, but who cares how long your life is if you’re just going to spend it running and working out all the time?
Despite my disdain for health-optimization and workout-culture, sensualism presents its own problems. I love sensual pleasures. I love good food, I love a good hot tub. I like buying and enjoying things like clothes and gadgets. I like music (sometimes) and I like tobacco. These are all wonderful sensory pleasures that I often seek out but when I do I’m usually burned by how fleeting and unrewarding these experiences ultimately are. They never last and they never seem to be enough. Even worse, the more I seek them out the more unsatisfactory they become—not to mention the various negative downstream effects they accumulate on the mind and body.
Often times I find myself in the middle between these two impulses, unsatisfied by both. Optimization makes me feel like a soulless robot constantly needing training and upgrades to extend a life filled with more training and upgrades. Sensualism and all its material pleasures leave me in a constantly dissatisfied state too. A state that is always chasing the next hit. It is exhausting and unfulfilling.
It is only natural for humans to want to do more of the things they like. So often we believe the more we do of one thing the more we gain from it—more sensualism, more optimization. In these modern times, I often see so many of us running around doing more and more trying to wrest some state of bliss that will never come. The idea of sensualism is nice, it’s attractive; it feels like the answer to what feels like a soulless amalgam of corporate slop.
My more Buddhist impulses tell me to find a middle way—neither the life of an ascetic, nor the life of a hedonist. The answer according to the Buddha is not to entirely reject sensual pleasures and live the life of an ascetic, but to recognize, embody, and acknowledge that all of life is transient and fleeting. It is the realization that there is nothing outside of the self that will ever be fulfilling—neither material pleasures nor optimization, so just stop.
But even practiced meditators can fall into the trap of believing that the more you meditate, or the more you acknowledge the transient nature of material desire, the more enlightened you’ll be. Like one Buddhist monk put it, “You have to stop believing that meditation will do anything for you.” But this is truly infuriating to hear, and a mind bogglingly difficult concept to practice concretely. So difficult, in fact, it can cause people to abandon meditation entirely. The reason it’s so difficult is because it is unnatural for us to not be seeking—to want to do more of something.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be fighting the natural human urge to look for something out there. The human urge to seek is not a weakness, nor is it a defect to be eliminated in order to find fulfillment. The human urge to seek is our spiritual engine. We have a natural impulse to do more of something in order to reap its rewards. The perennial problem of the human condition is that our natural urge to seek is almost always directed at the wrong things—things that can never fulfill us in the way we need. So our seeking needs to be channelled—it needs to be redirected.
For me, personally, I’ve found that Islam offers precisely the road map to channel this urge to seek and learn. But that’s just me. Others find it in the other Abrahamic traditions and that’s fine too. But this isn’t about which religion is better or worse, it’s simply to offer the idea that when our urge to seek is channeled to God, Allah, the Ultimate Reality, whatever you might want to call Him, sensualism arises naturally. When we seek out God’s grace, forgiveness, blessings, the material offerings of the world become gifts to be grateful for. We slow down and savor them. We appreciate them as gifts and not a means to an end. Seek God, not sensualism; sensualism will arise out of that.
So now when I sit in a hot tub enveloped in the warm, luxurious pulses of the jets, I recognize that it’s not the hot tub that will save me. The hot tub is a gift given to me. I say thank you—thank you for letting me be alive in this very moment. Thank you for everything that’s come together in this precise way to allow me to enjoy this, even if only for a moment. That is sensualism.