Formerly, the ideal of asceticism was to attain maximum enjoyment of pleasure with a minimum of agreeable and especially useful objects. Its aim was to enhance man's ability of drawing pleasure even from the simplest and most accessible things, such as nature.
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Modern asceticism, however, developed an ideal whose ethical core is the exact opposite: the "ideal" of a minimum of enjoyment with a maximum amount of pleasant and useful things! And indeed we can see that wherever work has assumed the hugest dimensions (as in Berlin and the large Northern German cities in general), the capacity and art of enjoyment has reach the lowest degree imaginable. The abundance of agreeable stimuli here literally deadens the function of enjoyment and its cultivation. The surroundings become ever more glaring, merry, noisy, and stimulating -- but men's minds become increasingly joyless. Extremely merry things, viewed by extremely sad people who do not know what to do with them: that is the "meaning" of our metropolitan "culture" of entertainment.
- Max Scheler, from Ressentiment, 1915
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Something to Ponder...
...during the shopping season: