Consuming Joy: Contemplations on Pleasure, Control, and Compassion

Original illustration by Valentina Zagaglia of Shirokuro Design

I have always loved chocolate. In particular, I love the creation of chocolate: the processes that take a small seed in a lumpen pod to a substance that is so delicious and beautiful. My favourite part of the 1971 Willy Wonka film starring Gene Wilder was never any of the adventures in the chocolate factory; it was the opening credits, showing close ups of chocolate being melted, poured, moulded and sprinkled. The Scrumptious production line in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) filled me with glee, as did the first confectionary store I visited, The Arcadia Sweet Shop.

Something about the rows upon rows of neatly ordered chocolate spoke to the organised hedonist within me: spheres of rich dark truffle; delicate rose-water mousse covered in chocolate; tiny, fluted cups filled with caramel; crisp chocolate cases hiding cherry liqueur – the decadent scale of it, the piles and boxes and ribbons of it, is what I love. A single bar by itself doesn’t feel right; it’s the stacks, the cartons, the chunky volume of chocolate that I adore. I remember feeling envious that Charlie got to rip open a thick paper wrapper to gnaw at his hefty bar of chocolate, while, as a 90s kid, I was peeling back flimsy plastic from my Freddo. And I remember feeling inordinately excited when Tony’s Chocolonely launched their range of decidedly seventies chocolate bars, complete with matt paper covers, meaning now I would get to have that ‘Charlie moment’. It’s not just the taste and feel of chocolate: it’s the sensory experience of everything to do with chocolate that I love.

Perhaps part of that is due to the strange, uncomfortable position chocolate (and sweets in general) had in my childhood home. My mum had been indoctrinated into the obsessive world of calorie counting: she kept a small notebook by the kettle where she would write down everything she ate and drank, with little numbers by it, open for all of us to see. She was unintentionally controlling around food – I think she found it easier to make the kitchen (and fridge and cupboards) ‘her realm’ where we, as children, couldn’t venture or experiment, rather than cede territory and attempt to find time as a single-ish parent to teach us about cooking or nutrition.

One of those unintentional areas of control was around ‘treats’. Every birthday, Christmas and Easter, our home was flooded with chocolate. We would get eggs, bars, boxes, tubs of chocolate from friends and family members – often my grandma, who had an extraordinary sweet tooth – given in the spirit of decadence and pleasure. These treats would sit on the sideboard in the kitchen, or hang around in the hallway, beautifully packaged and waiting to be opened.

But they just sort of – never got opened. Faced with a mountain of bright colours, textures and the potential sugar rush, me and my sister probably felt a bit overstimulated; just like at Christmas, when the sensory overload of gift exchanging rattled our neurodiverse brains. We felt overwhelmed, perhaps, but we also felt unsure. Each time I reached for the chocolate, my mum would say something: “You’ll spoil your dinner.” “Don’t eat all that now.” “Do you really want that?”. It was a sort of background hum that arose every time I went to enjoy this delicious gift. I was encouraged to slow down, to stop; to pause or even back away from my enjoyment. The result was that I rarely ate any of the chocolate in any significant way. I’ve heard friends talk about stuffing themselves at Easter, eating so much chocolate they were sick; for me, that nagging sense of someone watching my behaviour around treats was enough to make me step back and nibble, rather than go full hog.

Which is maybe why the representation of chocolate in films, or the appearance of it in specialist shops – as this vast, swirling, multi-faceted, wonderfully fun substance – appealed so much to me. Here was chocolate celebrated in song and dance and ribbons, with no regard for calories or spoiling your dinner. It was just pure pleasure, without any constraints.

This relationship with chocolate extended into my adulthood. After leaving home, I retained that sense of constraint and watchfulness over my (tr)eating habits. I told myself I couldn’t buy biscuits because I’d eat the whole packet, that there were more important things to spend my grocery budget on. I would buy bagged chocolates and make them last for months, ‘allowing’ myself one a day, or one single square of a Cadbury’s Milk Chocolate bar. I was the person who would eat a third of a Mars Bar and tuck the rest into its plastic cover to keep in the fridge for later. And whenever I did have treats, there would be this uncomfortable sense of guilt that would follow me round for days afterwards.

In some ways, I appreciate that sense of restraint that was conditioned in me. It helped me make resources (like chocolate) last longer. It got me to think about where I spent my time and what I consumed, to be mindful of what I ate. But on reflection, my approach to chocolate was my approach to life: don’t have too much, don’t spoil your next meal, eke it out, make it last, and definitely, whatever you do, don’t go wild and enjoy yourself too much.

This was how I did everything. I held back, so often and so much, that it’s hard for me to recognise and remember the reality of the person I was then. What I do know is that when I started choosing a word or phrase of the year in around 2018, one of the very first was simply “100%”; a recognition that, before those twelve months, I hadn’t been going full throttle at life. I’d been picking my way around the edges, and I needed a year to go in, as fully as I could, giving it all I had and squeezing as much juice out of every experience.

Recently, I ate a whole chocolate bar in one sitting. It was a big enough deal that I joyously told my partner of this extraordinary achievement. Then again, I sometimes do that when I finish any plate of food, having spent years in a state of disordered eating not feeling confident in how much I needed to eat and chastising myself for my food choices. There are still days where I struggle to feed myself, either through knowing what to eat or finding the physical act of eating difficult. So when I do enjoy my meal, I celebrate my savouring of food, and chocolate, just as a celebrate my savouring of life and all its pleasures: because for a long, long time, I would barely allow myself to sniff the possibilities of this world, let alone guzzle them down.

Perhaps though, your challenge is the opposite to mine: too much guzzling, too much mindless consumption with the same pervasive guilt that I felt afterwards. Perhaps the pain you feel is of the lack of control, where mine was the pain of over-control. Both of us are learning how to balance, to come to a place of enjoying pleasure without using it to numb out from pain, or denying pleasure to feel accomplished through sacrifice.

In examining this balance, this is where pleasure and enjoyment of all things intersects with understandings of the soul and God. A Buddhist might suggest that attachment is the root of suffering, and that we should detach further – from experiences, from people, from pleasure itself – to feel the calm depth of transcendence. Believers of Karma would suggest the aim is not to get hung up on enjoying good experiences or avoiding bad ones, but to rise above them and shake off this mortal coil. A Catholic might say we’re born sinners, born depraved, and so our only absolution is asking for forgiveness from the wrongness that is inherent to us and being watchful of fleshly temptations (like chocolate). And many different faiths would say that delight in the body – in sex, food, sensory pleasure – is fundamentally bad in some vague and disappointing way, tied to the separation of body and spirit, and the prioritisation of the soul over the somatic.

I see that life is suffering; it can be a trial, a painful series of events that reflects a deeper, existential angst – the suffering of feeling alone, disconnected, and separate from the sensation of Oneness or God or whatever you want to call it. To be alive is to be isolated, in some ways, constrained in your own body and mind, experiencing life only through your eyes with your own baggage.

And I see that life is also pleasure; the delight in experiencing, in the difference, the nuance, the qualities of me being Me and you being You, separately but with some ineffable, unquantifiable bond. Life can be joy and beauty, wholeheartedly embracing the opportunities we find to remember who we are, why we are here, how we are connected. To be alive is pleasurable, in all its complexity; yet how often do you remember that when you are tied up in the personal suffering that, in the words of G. W. Hughes, has “no glory, no heroism, just a pathetic mediocrity”?

This is not to say suffering does not exist, or is all in the mind. The guilt that was activated each time I reached for a Crème Egg, the sensation of being watched and judged for my food choices – those were real experiences of suffering. The movie fantasies of spotless chocolate factories swirling liquid cocoa into fanciful shapes to a soundtrack of psychedelic harmonies only happens because smallholder farmers across West Africa and South America are suffering: underpaid, unfairly treated and encouraged to destroy their own homeland for the sake of the global minority’s annual demand for 5 million tonnes of cocoa. Chocolate is in the top five most carbon-intensive foods, in significant part because of deforestation; rainforest is culled to plant cacao trees to satisfy extreme demand, releasing washes of carbon as mature trees are felled. Major FMCG brands, in a bid to keep Western consumers entertained and buying, devise new ‘luxury’ products that have higher sustainability impacts, or build entire immersive experiences around cheaply and unethically produced chocolate. Even in chocolate, there is suffering.

Ram Dass suggests that, as individuals walking towards God, we can see our own suffering as a route to Grace. But just because that may be the path for us as individuals, “it is not something that can be a rationalisation for allowing another human being to suffer.” Just because we know we can ‘work’ with our own suffering and allow it to bring us closer to God – just as I ‘worked’ with my guilt and denial of pleasure to allow it to bring me closer to a fuller experience of life – doesn’t mean we should witness the suffering of others without compassion or action.

If we can remember that to be alive is pleasurable, while also knowing that suffering is real, then we should rankle at the very idea of suffering, aware that by being stuck in that pain, it is preventing us from the pleasure and connection that soothes our existential wounds. Our compassion should expand radically as we consider the suffering of others; our self-compassion should blossom as we feel into our own suffering. We should be able to see suffering, acknowledge it, hold it, and take action to end that suffering – in ourselves and for others. Not simply to try and prevent pain (because life is suffering) but to do something more; to move towards pleasure, towards connection, towards a closer understanding that we are like the leaves and branches of one tree: diverse and wide-reaching yet inextricably bound.

Despite what many faiths say, it is not amoral or a spiritual failing to go all in on life, to embrace pleasure, to remember that to be alive is an act of joy. And it’s not a failure of that intention to recognise simultaneously that suffering is real. Because if we are attempting to embrace pleasure and joy as an antidote to suffering without critically examining the cost of our pleasure to others and the world, we are only reproducing suffering and the systems which profit from it.

To “keep our heart open in hell”, to bear the unbearable, and yet not let our hands lay idle in the face of such hellishness, is a gift we have the privilege of experiencing. We have the opportunity of actively transforming suffering into joy - of moving from the nagging guilt of calorie-counting to the wholehearted consumption of a food we adore, of disrupting the status quo that keeps people and planet in decline and choosing sustainable, regenerative alternatives. We have the excruciating pleasure and responsibility of witnessing the pain buried deep in something we love - and allowing ourselves to be broken open and moved to act by what we witness.

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This is a piece of original writing created by Astra Soulfeather. No AI or AI assistance was used in the production of this writing. © 2025 Higher Love. All rights reserved. The accompanying illustration was created by Valentina Zagaglia of Shirokuro Design. Valentina is a multi-disciplinary graphic designer specialising in branding, an illustrator, tattoo artist and unapologetically hybrid. See more of Valentina's work online or Instagram. © 2025 Shirokuro Design. All rights reserved.