When I started this work, my vision was pretty limited. I looked back at the suffering and burnout I had experienced and that I saw in others around me. My questions were:
How can this be a bit less awful?
How can we survive long enough to see some transformation?
How can the work of social and environmental change not grind us down completely?
I had pondered the flourishing life to some extent – eudaimonia rather than hedonia, and all that. I thought about what would bring me meaning, and living out my values – but it was all within this little tent of aspiration – to feel just about ok, while just about managing to reduce some suffering out there, without suffering too much, in here.
All this changed when I came across the work of Adrienne Maree Brown, who describes herself as a ‘social justice facilitator focused on black liberation, a doula/ healer, and a pleasure activist’. Her 2019 book Pleasure Activism is a collection of essays from many contributors with two main themes – the justice of pleasure, and the pleasure of justice.
The questions around the justice of pleasure go like this –
Who gets pleasure, and who gets denied it, in our society? Whose pleasure is prioritised, and whose pleasure is sidelined, or is just not ok? How did we get here, and why? What are the justice aspects of pleasure and its distribution?
I found this super-interesting, but it was the second theme that really blew my mind. Adrienne Maree Brown asks, right there on the back cover, ‘How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience?’.
Let’s hear that again. Maybe while imagining your current office at 6pm on a cold dark rainy Thursday evening.
‘How do we make social justice the most pleasurable human experience?’.
