Anhedonia is no fun
by Bob on May 14, 2007
Anhedonia is no fun.
Well, anhedonia, if we break the word apart, is the opposite of hedonia. And hedonism is quite clear. Or let's just make it the simple pleasures of life. So, anhedonia is the inability to experience joy or usual pleasure for whatever reason.
It's a formal diagnosis in medical psychiatry, but more usefully to this writing, a seemingly increasing syndrome in modern society.
Really, the lack of pleasure or joy from things or situations which normally and nominally be inducing pleasure.
One can see a flat affect on a person's face with a happy story on the TV news, because it follows a tragic story back-to-back. One is deprived of the pleasure. This is kind of schizo in terms of news stories on TV or the media in general. But TV and radio have an enforced sequentiality to them, whereas print media does not --- we can flip the pages as we like.
This emotional tomfoolery can be devastating.
It can produce pleasure at the oddest and most inappropriate stimuli, as we saw in the studies of Dr. Philip Zimbardo and his Stanford Prison Experiment in the 1970s, or earlier in Dr. Stanley Milgram's Experiment at Yale University in the 1960s.
Now, an antidote to all this can be competitive sporting events as either a participant or spectator. One can hardly imagine a dull affect in a soccer stadium in Europe or anywhere during any kind of decent rivalry. One cheers. One boos. One jumps up and down. One throws one's shoe at the referee who made the last unfortunate penalty call. One is energised.
But it doesn't seem to carry back into many people's lives. There is little continuity of this in the inner self, too.
The world we live in is so intricately intertwined now, one could hardly imagine this to be the case. But it seems to be happening at an alarming rate.
How can we reconcile this ? How can we deal with it ?
The ancient Greek deity, Dionysus, who was not simply the god of wine, had the charge to relieve mankind of its daily worries. By the music of the flute. By a performance in the theatre, hence he was the patron of tragedy and comedy and there was an altar originally at ancient Greek theatres to him for worship before the play. And the chorus likely started as religious ceremonial dancers. And Dionysus also was to be associated with wine and sensory-overloaded feasts which also took mankind away from his daily worries. At least temporarily. Which was his assignment from Olympus.
Or even, in the extreme cases, Dionysus drove people to madness, as with the Maenads running around the mountains and hills. Clearly, Divine Madness is a definite form, albeit extreme, of freeing oneself from the tribulations of daily life.
So it would seem Mankind needs some more genuine fun in life in between the points of harsh working realities and a seemingly overly-populated world. And a world of too much information as Sting and the Police sung about in their song "Too Much Information" from their 1981 "Ghost in the Machine" album, as did Duran Duran in their different 1993 song "Too Much Information", and Alvin Toffler wrote about in his 1970 magnum opus "Future Shock".
Let us not forget Iggy Pop and the Stooges and their brilliant 1969 song "No Fun" as a benchmark. In somewhat of a contradistinction to Iggy Pop's later 1977 song "Lust for Life", co-written with David Bowie, and which is considered a bit of a classic in punk/indie circles. But that's not meant to be quite the belly laugh we wanted as an antidote, no matter its brilliance.
Being reasonably happy and of good cheer most of the time is a good state to be in for anyone.
But the thing is -- and the hitch -- is when presented with such a pleasurable experience, can it be enjoyed ? Or does it fall flat in the face of modern stresses of life ?
We must allow ourselves genuine joy and fun in between the drudgery to survive.
Let us all hope that the medical diagnosis of Anhedonia will be a rarer one.
A good joke or belly laugh is great folk medicine. Especially when amongst other people and in person. We are not simply meant to be electrons on the internet superhighway of altered consciousness.
So it seems. How it goes and fares is up to the fates. And our free will if we exercise it.
Physical comedy has a certain undeniable aspect of silliness which we all need. We can choose either Oscar Wilde or the Marx Brothers. No matter. As long as we can enjoy a good laugh.
Hear the one about the three holes in the ground ? "Well, well, well. ...".