Things have been a bit busy. The kind of busy where you shut your eyes to give them a break and dream about eating sandwiches, and next thing you know you were asleep sitting up.
So recently, with my son fed (I’m pretty sure he ate, I have a memory of food being involved), I snuck off and played video games for an hour. Maybe 90 minutes. Better part of two hours. The point is, I did it. And the moment I sat down, before I had even loaded the game, I felt it: guilt.
I hadn’t stolen anything. I hadn’t hurt anyone. I had not, to my knowledge, committed any kind of crime. I had simply decided to do something I enjoy for a brief window of time I had legitimately earned. And yet there I was, feeling like I owed someone an explanation.
There is a quote attributed to the philosopher Bertrand Russell that goes: “The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.” It’s a good quote. The kind of thing you want cross-stitched and framed above your gaming setup. (There’s a whole story about how the quote was actually written by a woman named Marthe Troly-Curtin in a 1911 novel but ended up attributed to him – look it up.)
The science, at least, is real. Psychologists describe guilt as a moral emotion. It fires when we believe we’ve violated a standard of conduct. Which is useful when you’ve actually done something wrong. Less useful when you’re 30 minutes into a video game on a Tuesday evening having fed your child (I think) and completed your obligations like a functioning adult. That’s guilt misfiring.
Researchers have found that the social norms driving most guilty pleasures aren’t real. Psychologists call it pluralistic ignorance, the phenomenon where everyone privately enjoys something but publicly pretends to disapprove of it.
A survey of 2,000 Americans found that 84% of them had at least one guilty pleasure they indulged in regularly, 39% lied about it, and 22% actively hid it from their partner. Someone in that survey admitted to hiding a coin collection from their spouse. A coin collection. As far as guilty pleasures go, I have to think a coin collection is pretty far down on the vice meter.
And here’s the part that’s almost perversely funny: Feeling guilty about a pleasurable activity actually makes you enjoy it more. Researchers found that people primed to feel guilt before indulging in something reported greater enjoyment than people who felt nothing. The forbidden fruit effect is not a metaphor. It is a documented neurological phenomenon.
But I don’t want to oversell this. There is a version of the guilty pleasure that is actually something you should feel guilty for. Eating an entire bag of chips at 2am is just some kind of cope. Cope better. Binge-watching television until you physically cannot remember what day it is while your responsibilities combust is also probably something where guilt should apply. The guilt, in those cases, is not misfiring. It’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do: It’s trying to tell you something.
The trick, as far as I can tell, is in the question Russell probably didn’t ask but maybe should have: Are you enjoying it? Genuinely, actively enjoying it, not numbing out, not hiding from something, not eating your feelings in industrial quantities, but actually having a good time? Then the guilt is just society telling you “This isn’t right”. So if you’re enjoying it, then you do you. At least for a bit.
I played my video game. Had fun. I went to bed feeling like a person again. My son was fine. He had definitely eaten, at some point. The house was not on fire.
The time I enjoyed was not wasted. I think.
