“Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”

– The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

Hedonism: the argument that pleasure is the only intrinsic good.

Each new generation enjoys the prospect of a longer lifespan than the last. As such, the rights of passage that our parents experienced in their teens, we now experience in our twenties and those rites traditionally experienced in our twenties are being postponed until our thirties. Like Barrie’s Pan, Generation Y (Gen Y) has the opportunity to hold on to the freedom and the hedonism of youth a little longer, deferring responsibility and postponing the course of growing up. Now evading adulthood, consequence and accountability as long as we can.

All you have to do is look around a music festival (the scene at 6pm at the Sydney Good Vibrations was the setting for my realisation) to see that much of Gen Y are intoxicated by their own youth and the pleasure of the hedonistic experience. We crave instant gratification and derive our satisfaction in life from the pleasurable and interesting experiences we accumulate. Similar to the material possessions we consume, the experiences gained from festivals and travel with new people and/or old friends, has come to represent who we are. Gen Y not only values the material but the intangible experience that affirms we are living our life to the fullest, extracting the most pleasure from every moment while we can.

We do this because we are painfully aware of the fact that our youth and each moment of it, is fleeting. Nonetheless, this hedonistic pursuit of the pleasurable will eventually loose intensity as the weight of responsibility and consequence becomes more prominent in our lives. In the end, we will all have to let go of our hedonism as we come to find meaning, by giving the next generation all the things we wanted for ourselves.