• blarghly@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    That’s sort of sidestepping and deliberately misinterpreting the question. Sure, there are the dumbasses who thing “this thing feels good, therefore it must be bad!” But that’s not what most people think of when they think of a “guilty pleasure”.

    A guilty pleasure is like, eg, drinking a beer. Drinking is bad for your health. In moderation, your long term health probably won’t be significantly impacted, but presuming you care about your health, you probably also care about other aspects of living a healthy lifestyle. For example, maybe you play pickup soccer in the park, and find you have more fun when you are more in shape, since you can run faster and farther without having to catch your breath. Drinking will lower your aerobic capacity the next day, and will impair your recovery - you know that you are happier in general when you don’t drink. But then a friend invites you over, and it’s been a stressful day, and they offer you a beer, and you say to yourself “I know that I will be happier in the future if I stay sober. But right now I really want this beer. Fuck it.” And then you wake up the next morning with a hangover and say “that was dumb, why did I do that?”

    The “guilt” in guilty pleasure doesn’t have to be based on arcane moral codes. It can just be guilt about doing something we know is against our own best interests, by the standards we set for ourselves.

    Saying you don’t feel guilty about your pleasures either means that you never do this (ie, you’re a liar), or else it means that you literally put no stock in the future (ie, you’re a dumbass), or that you are so insecure that you are trying to sidestep the question because you can’t bring yourself to admit you have any flaws.