How To Eat Ice Cream

A Manifesto for Pleasure

Pardon my absence.

This summer, while on an roadtrip through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy and France, I devoted my writing time to creating a proposal for a book I titled How to Eat Ice Cream: On pleasure, Sensuality, and the Sensorial Experience of Being. It’s a manifesto for pleasure presented through the lens of ice cream. And, it’s a call to reclaim our humanness in the all-consuming spiritual tsunami of the Digital Age.

While I await responses from literary agents (it may go nowhere), I thought I would use Jeni Unlimited to explore these ideas.

I have lived my entire life driven by pleasure and have been gathering notes and questions on pleasure as an intrinsic motivator (as opposed to the extrinsic motivation of discipline) since at least 2010–the start date of my google doc.

There are many facets to explore in future posts and I am excited for the conversation. I will try to post once per month and work up as I get more acquainted with this platform.

How To Eat Ice Cream.

The words pleasure and sensuality are trigger words for most Americans. They are associated almost exclusively with sexual fantasy and even deviance. There is a particular vulnerability in succumbing to the sensations of pleasure and sensuality, and Americans don’t have much of an appetite for it. Or maybe we don’t have the guts for it. We can’t bear to part with the facade of control. We must always project mastery over our humanness and dominion over nature. We want our pleasure and sensuality wrapped in plastic and kept at a safe distance. But pleasure and sensuality are not rational or controllable. There is no safe distance.

I chose these two words on purpose. They make you feel a little bit uncomfortable. They make me blush a little when I say them out loud to people when explaining this concept. Sure, I could use the word joy instead of pleasure, and connection instead of sensuality. But I don’t want to write about joyful connection.

I want to write about vulnerability, sacrifice, pain, suffering, curiosity, and understanding. And the lightness we earn in return. Joy is beautiful, of course, but it is light as air. We are searching for more. These two saturated words, pleasure and sensuality, may hold keys to unlocking more meaningful levels of being.

More.

Contrary to shallow definitions, a life devoted to pleasure necessitates an acceptance of pain—as love accepts loss, serenity accepts chaos, and living accepts death—twin sides of single coins that cannot exist without one another.

I suggest that our culture has an aversion to pain and is thus unable to experience genuine pleasure. We don’t know how to eat ice cream anymore. In the pursuit pleasure without consequence, we lost some of our ability to feel. And with it, our perspective on what matters most.

Ice cream tastes better in Italy. It’s a fact. One reason why is simple and profound: there is no air conditioning in Italy. You are hotter, less comfortable, and more grateful for the relief of a scoop (lemon sorbetto and coconut for me). You long for ice cream in a way that is impossible anymore in America. You dream of it. Ice cream becomes a metaphor for all the lusciousness of life in summer in Italy. And you will miss it when it’s gone. Longing (not the same as craving) is a prerequisite for pleasure. And pleasure is a prerequisite for happiness.

The internet lures us into an alternate world with the promise that we can have whatever we want whenever we want it and that pleasure can exist safely. It is a place where we are ever-bored and ever-fascinated at once and seeking ever more distilled and potent impersonations of life—porn, war, food, cat videos: love, hate, desire, cuteness. More always needs more, but it adds up to less and less.

These impressions are so extreme as to be grotesque—and yet most lack any semblance of sensuality or embodied pleasure because there is nothing to be lost in experiencing them. Nothing to be sacrificed. And nothing to be gained either. All these experiences are far more fleeting than an ice cream cone. And a waste of the gift of being.

Embodied experiences can serve as an antidote to the machinations of technocrats who know that algorithms are not about programming models to serve humans but programming humans to serve the model. We are the AI; our behavior is being programmed to buy things that have no real value or meaning—by design. The oligarchs become richer and more powerful, and we are left hallow and searching for signs of life. It's time to step back into embodied pleasure, one lick at a time.

Ice cream is a great metaphor for life because it shouldn't exist at all. It alights all senses at once and exists briefly as a beautiful evocation of life and lives lived. Overlaying the physics and metaphysics of ice cream with a philosophy of pleasure and sensuality is a wild and wonderful idea (if I do say so). I want to whisper ancient truths into your belly and knock you off your path.

Thank you for being here with me. We will continue to expound on all of this. Send me your thoughts—always appreciated.

With love and lightness forever,

Jeni