Guilty Pleasures

Photo by Krists Luhaers on Unsplash

Does culture make us find more similarities with other humans in what we dislike? It seems that the things that we don’t like bring us closer together. Things that may not be the most “popular” among people of a similar age group are almost immediately thought of as “bad” and that means we have to dislike it.

If we like something that the rest of the group does not enjoy as much, we become the pariah of the group. We are written off as the “weird one”. Why is it that what we consider our pleasures that are relatively unpopular to be guilty? Our guilty pleasures aren’t really guilty at all. They are just things which we tend to enjoy. Our society around us makes us feel like we have to be guilty for enjoying such things.

My Skype partner and I discussed what we think the reason is that our guilty pleasures were so “guilty” to begin with. Both of us talked about how we enjoy cinema. Not only that, but we also share a common interest in older movies such as Alfred Hitchcock’s films. He mentioned that he enjoys watching poorly made films, which is not popular within his friend group. Because of this reason, that pleasure has become a guilty pleasure. Beyond movies, we also share an interest in video games. The games that we are interested in did not share any similarities except that they were not necessarily popular among other people.

It was amazing that even though we did not share many common interests, we shared the same ideas about how society is to blame for creating our guilty pleasures, not the pleasures themselves, but the guilty part of it.