Zlata Nikolaev about the phenomenon of guilty pleasure

We all want to be better: smarter, more beautiful, slimmer, more popular, more successful. And not so much to be (it is difficult), how many seem, so we filter our lives on Instagram, choose advantageous angles, good coverage and topics for conversations in which at least we understand something.

We adapt to our living environment, go to those concerts where friends will go (or at least we note in social networks that “maybe we will go”), meet in places that are recommended by trendsetters and listen to music that everyone listens to. That is, we often deny ourselves that we really like.

“Oh ** you have a VKontakte tracklist,” I heard more than once.

“Oh ** you have a VKontakte tracklist,” I heard more than once. And also, in general, I believe that I have it “oh ** be”: the fact is that I don’t add myself to the list all the music I like, I do it occasionally, in packs and by mood. And according to the list, you can track my life in the last 5 years: here I am passing the session in the third year and dying from lack of sleep; just a childhood friend came, and we got drunk in the kitchen, and this I fell in love, and this again fell in love, but unanswered, and this I defend a diploma.

But my friends are not surprised at this (how do they know my background?), But because I don’t try to hide this vinaigrette, gathered in three years, where rock-n-roll classics coexist with simple classics, rap and crushed by 80- x and 90, the love for which is usually not advertise. Because it is a moveton. That is, one can say: “When I studied in the fifth grade, I liked Ivanushki,” but admitting that “I still like them without nostalgia” means to cause a smile of indulgence on the faces of the interlocutors. Although I don’t think what I’m thinking, I know that in moments of sadness, or when they come after a party, but they still don’t want to sleep, these people turn on the youtube clip “Clouds”. Or something else from the same era, or Viagra, or the only hit by the singer Lika Star.

However, "Ivanushki" is a bad example - they were just acquitted, because Sorin was there, and he was nothing, and because this very clip of "Clouds" is also nothing "for those years, then." But my dear friends, ashamed of some of their attachments, hide other things. For example, they may well love the barbeque café in their own home, because there they are deliciously fed, cheap and full. But they will never make an appointment there, they will not bring friends, preferring to meet in one of dozens of places “where everyone goes to” - because in the cafe under the house burgundy tablecloths over white, artificial flowers, the music is again not the same, and generally scoop. And they will go to the cinema for romkoms alone, because in the company it is possible only to make films in comics, thrillers and action films. With all my heart love beer, but do not order. To read Coelho or, moreover, steeper, Ustinov, but at home, in the toilet. In general, to hide that which gives pleasure, making it forbidden guilty pleasure.

Is it bad? Studies devoted to the phenomenon of guilty pleasures boil down to about one thing - they are largely Pleger, because it is Gilti. Shame enhances the feeling of pleasure. However, we knew it without scientists: a burger and ice cream at one o'clock is ten times more tasty if you are on a diet. Coffee wants unbearable, if the doctor advised to limit the consumption of caffeine. Even a teenager who tries alcohol and lit a cigarette in the yard behind the school stadium does this not only because he wants to appear like an adult, but also because then he will have to go through the quest - how to arrange his appearance at home so that “the ancestors did not burn”, and worried. So, hiding our addictions and being ashamed of them, we may just leave ourselves and only ourselves some pleasures, reinforcing them with the thought "as if someone did not recognize." Well, and already at the same time we look better, brighter and thinner in the eyes of the public.

Life is much more interesting and more voluminous than the filtered squares.

Once a girlfriend of mine half a year listened to her favorite music in her room, quietly and behind a closed door, so that the guy with whom they rented an apartment would not know about it terrible. Until one day, passing by his room, I did not hear that he was playing a band that I couldn’t call. Now both are listening to music loudly. Sometimes together in the kitchen. And they say that it is no less healthy than shame, reinforcing sensations. Life is much more interesting and more voluminous than the filtered squares in the instagram.

Illustration: Masha Shishova