Super-Sized Enlightenment

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You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. If there’s one thing Pinkerton’s Academy for Young Ladies failed to teach Becky Sharp in William Thackeray’s novel, Vanity Fair, that was it. Although Thackeray’s book was a satire on English society in 1917, some things are just universal—like the endless pursuit of pleasure.

I remember when the first fast-food hamburger place opened in my hometown, Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1950s. Before McDonald’s, we had Taylor Burgers, and the first soft-serve ice cream and milkshakes came oozing from those magical machines with the touch of a button. The burgers were mediocre, as I remember, but the French fries—tossed around in hot, oily baskets with a blizzard of salt covering every surface of each morsel—changed a generation of taste buds forever. As hungry Baby Boomers grew up to become successful yuppies, we were easy targets for the Super-Size-It campaign and were quick to agree that we did deserve a break today.

Fast food was the gateway drug for this massive group of consumers. By the 60s we had quickly extended our quest for pleasure—drugs, sex and alcohol had failed to put out the fire that seemed to burn brighter with each passing decade. Many of the kids who opted to “turn on, tune in and drop out” in their teens refocused their search inward by their 20s. Eastern religious practices infiltrated the American counter culture and eventually became part of the established spiritual landscape of pleasure-weary pilgrims.

Traditions with Buddhist roots offered the most radical approach to dealing with the abuse of pleasure. One such teaching says that greed, or lust—the Pali term is tanha—binds us to pleasure through the senses, with the result that we become addicted to those pleasures unless we choose to free ourselves from their grip. Either, or. Nothing in between. So when the eye sees something beautiful, or the ear hears a pleasing sound, or the nose smells an enticing aroma, or the tongue tastes a culinary delight, or the body touches something sensual or even when the mind discovers an intriguing idea, tanha, the strongest bond of desire, takes over our lives, leaving us slaves to our passions.