MISFIT DOC: The Pleasure Speech

I express my certainty that pleasure is the only thing worth living for to the world in the form of a speech. It doesn’t matter. I call it The Pleasure Speech.

It usually happens late and in darkness, long after I’ve become acquainted with my indulgences. In the space between endearment and alienation lies the version of myself that can preach ideas that no one asked for. I make The Pleasure Speech after an existentially-adjacent topic is addressed, perhaps after a story about religion or a reference to philosophy. Someone else tears a hole in a kite; I jump through.

The Pleasure Speech goes like this. I sit up straight, shake my head, and say as though everyone has actually been waiting for my interpretation of existence all night, all year: “There’s no reason that we’re alive! We’re not on Earth to do anything and nothing happens after we die. The only thing you can do is enjoy it all.” I indulge more in whatever I’m indulging in and sit back to revel in how I’ve done it, I have figured it all out and I didn’t even have to suffer that badly for it. This is the truth and the night still isn’t over.

Those listening to The Pleasure Speech usually nod, pout and raise their eyebrows, drop a ‘fuckyeah.’ I can’t expect much more or less of a reaction to a usurpation of conversation. But the same part of me thinks a speech about personal philosophy is necessary is the same part of me that hopes that someday someone who has heard The Pleasure Speech will, in their existential hour of need, rely on it.

But they probably won’t. The Pleasure Speech might amuse people for a few minutes but no one is taking it into tomorrow or the next decade with them. Each day brings matters more pressing than purpose.

I bring The Pleasure Speech to parties because it justifies itself while drinking. Talking about pleasure as the only point of life while allowing pleasure to manipulate your faculties is too poignant not to toast to. In the realm of The Pleasure Speech, the idea should always be toasted to and immediately forgotten; attention and irony flow towards where they’re summoned.

I never claimed not to be naïve. I made this speech to my grandparents and they asked if I consider myself a hedonist. I said yes proudly and realized years later that they were trying to insult me.

The extended version of the pleasure speech comes out once in a while. It cites the wrong way to pursue meaning in life, which, according to the theory, is through money and religion. This version of The Pleasure Speech rests on this decree: “Pleasure isn’t just pleasure, pleasure is your sense of self.” And that leads into a speech about how knowledge of the self is the only way to make the world better.

I know this: The only thing that makes me feel like I can ever have any impact on the state of things is the promotion of a theory based on no empirical evidence, no dogma, no economical transaction, just a concentration on what feels good and temporary.

Believing in pleasure isn’t obnoxious. Evangelizing is. I can’t fix the world but I can keep drinking and making a speech that isn’t an attempt at changing minds but rather an attempt at making my own philosophy feel dramatic and therefore real. I don’t know what I’m capable of. But there’s no fear of the unknown if all you know is the good of the moment.


Kiki Volkert writes and drinks in South Philly. She has a chapbook called Imagine Real Data published by txtbooks and poems in Prelude. She is unclever and not opportunistic and suggests that you follow her on Twitter.

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