“Many significant human pleasures are universal,” Bloom writes. “But they are not biological adaptations. They are byproducts of mental systems that have evolved for other purposes.” Evolutionary psychologists like Bloom are fond of explaining perplexing psychological attributes this way. These traits emerged, the argument goes, as accidental accompaniments to other traits that help us survive and reproduce.

Image Credit... Illustration by Shannon May

Our most puzzling sources of pleasure, according to this view, are side effects of our inborn “essentialism,” the idea that “things have an underlying reality or true nature . . . and it is this hidden nature that really matters.” It was to our ancestors’ advantage to be essentialists, so they could categorize the plants and animals in their environment into “dangerous” and “harmless” and thereby know which ones to avoid. Today, our ability to recognize the essence of things explains, for instance, why someone would be willing to pay $48,875 for a tape measure once owned by John F. Kennedy.

Pornography is another example of pleasure via essentialism. Why do some men spend more time looking at Internet porn than interacting with flesh-and-blood lovers? There may be “no reproductive advantage” to liking pornography, Bloom writes, but there is an advantage to its source: an urge to look at real-world “attractive naked people,” which makes us want sex, which in turn is good for continuation of the species. Pornography uses the same pleasure mechanism as actual sex, which is handy since “there aren’t always attractive naked people around when you need them.”

Then there are the (sometimes) more G-rated pleasures of the imagination: the joys of fiction, movies, television, daydreaming. “Surely we would be better off pursuing more adaptive activities — eating and drinking and fornicating, establishing relationships, building shelter and teaching our children,” Bloom writes. But when we retreat into an imagined world, it’s almost like experiencing the pleasure for real. Bloom calls it “Reality Lite — a useful substitute when the real pleasure is inaccessible, too risky or too much work.”

Bloom’s ideas go against the traditional view of pleasure as purely sensory: that is, that we get pleasure from food because of how it tastes, from music because of how it sounds, from art because of how it looks. The sensory explanation is only partially true, he writes. “Pleasure is affected by deeper factors, including what the person thinks about the true essence of what he or she is getting pleasure from.” When we pay good money for tape measures that famous people have touched, or treasure our children’s clumsy kindergarten art, it is because we believe that something about the person’s essence exists in the object itself. How else to explain Jonathan Safran Foer’s collection of blank sheets of paper? These are not just any blank sheets: they are the sheets that were about to be written on next by Paul Auster, Susan Sontag and David Foster Wallace, who sent them to Foer at his request.