In the wake of the Death of God, it is quite common that people come to the conclusion that we shouldn't feel guilty about pleasure, to the point where they push this idea to its culmination by believing in hedonism and thereby aligning their entire life around the pursuit of pleasure. What is the problem with that? they ask. As long as I don't hurt anyone, why not pursue pleasure?
As I have mentioned with art at point number 2, these questions signal to me how deeply atomized people's thinking has become. They no longer consider the consequences of their actions to their relationships with other people, to the culture they're part of and the further consequences it will have on those after them.
One major reason of course is that people are increasingly isolated from other people—and to the extent that people are in the same room they might each be on their phone—that culture has essentially dissolved and been replaced by a network of algorithms6 and that an increasing number of people aren't particularly keen on having children and thus don't have direct skin in the game in the future they are leaving behind.
There is nothing inherently wrong about pleasure, and it is true that the deeply repressive standards of religion left behind significant scars in individuals, since shame is a very sticky and damaging pattern, but the opposite of a bad idea is not a good one either.7
My fundamental problem with hedonism is that it looks at pleasure isolated from any social consequences. There is no such thing as "harmless pleasure", because humans don't exist in isolation of other ones, no one does because at the very least you were born from your two parents.
For instance, having your life revolve around porn is a deeply anti-social thing because it replaces real sexual intimacy with a complete simulacrum of it, and it's just not the type of stuff you could talk about with real flesh and blood people. It's not merely a "social construct" that talking about porn with people is taboo, it's rather that, even if people cannot articulate why, there is just something really spiritually dead about it. And to the extent that you don't care about interacting with other people—which is probably a belief rooted in fear rather than a deep conviction—porn, and hedonism in general, makes you numb, constantly looking for the next hit of the hedonistic treadmill.
Porn for instance dissociates you from your body and fixates all your attention on a screen, a literal 2D image of a real thing, for the sole reason of deriving a very narrow form of pleasure—and escapism, my experience with porn addiction being that it is mostly a form of cope rather than genuinely being sexually aroused—only for the confines of your own ego8, and the whole thing consistently feels empty. It's not that it is "wrong" to watch porn, it is rather that it creates a tremendous amount of suffering by the way it separates you from yourself, by treating your body as a mere tool for pleasure and wasting away your time and energy, and separates you from other people in the shame it induces in you and how it makes you look at sexual relationships.
Pleasure is great when it is aligned with things higher than mere ego games, such as genuine sexual intimacy with your partner, or the satisfaction of creating something which adds to the world, or the subtle peace that comes from letting go of the need to endlessly do things, or cooking and enjoying a meal with friends. But not so when the pleasure is purely informed by the unconscious ego. I think fundamentally there isn't much to say to someone who is a convinced hedonist, because words and ideas are merely a surface layer on one's ego dynamics. Life will sooner or later instruct them with the pain of separation, and perhaps in those moments, they will come to feel the importance of connection, and the difference between the more subtle forms of joy and the gross forms of pleasure sold to us by society.
Footnotes
4 My tinnitus is caused by accumulated tension in my jaw. The exercises in Jack Willis’ Reichian Therapy: A Practical Guide for Home Use have greatly helped with tension in my face and my jaw, so I would recommend it to anyone who experiences that form of tinnitus—or anyone really because growing up in the West is basically guaranteed to leave you with quite a lot of tension in your body.