Hyperstimuli are Understimulating

Pleasure is satisfying, and satisfaction makes you stop.

There’s a phrase I keep seeing around—I think it originally comes from addiction theory?—of “wanting versus liking.” I find it more helpful, when thinking about it to myself, to phrase it as craving versus liking, because “wanting” seems more conscious/chosen/considered to me. Basically, the idea is that how much you want something does not necessarily have much to do with how much you enjoy it when you get it. From your own experience you probably know this to be true.

The discourse around hyperstimuli is usually about extreme pleasure. Porn, junk food, video games, etc etc etc are talked about as if they offer surreal, ahistorical amounts of enjoyment. I don’t think this is true at all.

Of course, it’s always easier to notice what’s acually present in any experience than what isn’t present in it. But I feel like the stuff that gets called a hyperstimulus is at least equally characterized by missing something as it is by having too much of something.

This is pretty obvious when you compare porn to sex. The performers in porn are not actually touching you.¹ There are certainly aspects of porn that are more stimulating than what people are likely to encounter in their actual sex lives: easy access to a wider variety of acts & people, often people who might be hotter than the people one has sexual access to in real life. But these hyperstimulatory aspects seem….not luxurious, not just sheerly directly enjoyable, but compensatory. Porn lacks the most basic satisfying things about sex. No one would consume it if these extras weren’t there.

The same goes for junk food. There’s a post I would like to write, a book review of The Dorito Effect, which goes into (at least Mark Schatzker’s theory (which I do think is right) of) how exactly this plays out in food. But you can compare your own experience of eating a steak² to eating doritos. They are in the same flavor family, both savory. But it’s much harder to get carried away eating steak than it is to get carried away eating chips. With steak, you don’t have that “bottom of the family-sized bag” experience. I think this happens specifically because steak is more enjoyable than chips. Pleasure is satisfying, and satisfaction makes you stop.

Hyperstimuli are not simply “more stimulating.” They are more stimulating of craving, and less stimulating of pleasure.

There are obvious market incentives for this. I’m a free market enjoyer myself, & I certainly don’t have a better idea, but the inherent division of liking and wanting kind of blackpills me on the market a little bit. Things succeed in a market by making you want them, not by making you like them. To the degree that satisfaction makes you stop, unsatisfying things will succeed in the market better than satisfying things, specifically because they’re unsatisfying.

I feel like this applies to basically every hyperstimulus, I could give examples. Video games are hyperstimuli because, among other things, they make you want to accomplish things without making you feel very accomplished. Tiktok videos of influencers making dreamworksy, pixary, theater-kid crazy facial expressions are hyperstimuli because they offer a lot of facial expression without ever offering the thing that is satisfying about watching a human face: the feeling that someone is responding to you. Other hyperstimuli are left as an exercise for the reader.

1. There’s more missing than touch—you can’t for instance smell them—but I feel like the touch thing is most important.

2. Sub in another food that you really enjoy, feel satisfied by, & think is healthy, if you don’t like steak as much as I do—although I guess this is kind of begging the question a little bit