Vicarious Pleasures

One Degree of Separation

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

The secret of happiness is often claimed to be the ability to live in the present, as children do, enjoying the immediate now. The sun on your face, the snowflake on your tongue, the chocolate melting in your mouth. Past disappointments are forgotten; future worries disappear. Giving yourself over to the pleasures of the senses is to Be Here Now.

Yet experience at one remove can also bring deep satisfaction, especially in our later years. Even if the acuity of our senses diminishes, with imagination and empathy, our capacity for indirect or vicarious pleasure can grow.

Vicarious Pleasure from Our Pets

A few months ago, I wrote a post about dogs and how they bring us joy:

https://catherinehiller.substack.com/p/the-pleasure-dogs-bring

What I didn’t discuss was the vicarious delight dogs bring their owners. When we watch our dogs frolic, we are in some way frolicking with them. We feel lighter and friskier, as if we ourselves were bounding across the dog park, about to enter a play group. When we are alone with our dogs, we feel they understand us—and perhaps they do.

In a paper published by the National Center for Biotechnology Information only last month, the authors argue that “dogs possess the prerequisites for motor resonance, and we suggest that interspecific behavioral synchronization relies on the activation of both human and canine mirror neurons.”*

Mirror neurons fire when we feel an emotion, and also when we see others feeling an emotion.

When we see a woman feeling sad, our mirror neurons fire, allowing us to literally feel some of her sadness. A person’s feeling that their dog suffers or rejoices with them may be backed by science:  a human’s mirror neurons cause Fido’s mirror neurons to fire in synch.

So there’s this interspecies empathy! Still, I don’t really know what my dog Theo’s life is like—I can only imagine it. If only I could be a dog for a day, or for just an hour! I would race across a field at twice my running speed, skid to a stop, and leap in the air to catch a Frisbee. I would know with a sniff the age and health of every dog I encountered, as well as the health and happiness of my humans. When I saw new dogs, I would signal my willingness to play by flopping down and thumping my tail, and they would send me signals of their own. Two dozen times a walk, I would sniff here and there until I found the exact spot of ground that deserved my urine sprinkle, for reasons obvious to me, though not to my humans. Occasionally, when I got lucky, I would lower myself into a mud puddle for the sheer pleasure of it, even, especially if, if my humans shouted, “No!”

Vicarious Pleasure from Children

If we’re lucky and our progeny are sweet, we get even more vicarious pleasure from our children, and especially our grandchildren, than we do from our pets. (After all, we were once young humans, and we were never young dogs, so we understand children better.) When I am with a child of three, I remember being three myself and I see the world through her eyes. Her pleasures become mine. Watching older children climb trees or turn cartwheels, I can almost feel my own muscles working.

Watching children, perhaps especially those related to us, we remember being young ourselves, in prime physical condition, with boundless energy and stamina.

Vicarious Pleasure from Story

Novels, memoirs, movies, plays, videos: all provide us with stories. And humans need stories for a variety of reasons: for entertainment, for intensity, and for showing us lives not our own. To engage us, the story usually provides at least one appealing character, someone to root for. We are scared when they are scared and thrilled when they are thrilled. When that person succeeds, especially after surmounting obstacles, we are emotionally satisfied. We have so identified with the character, that their pleasure and success has become ours. We are glad because they are. No wonder we like happy endings!

Vicarious Pleasure from Sports

Spectator sports provide enormous pleasure to the public, and much of that is vicarious.

Fandom is so random! I might watch a tennis match and not know anything about either player, but soon something small (a spin shot, a self-deprecating smile) makes me favor one of them and from that point on I am devoted to her, agonizing over her unforced errors and gloating over her winners. Her shots are my shots, and for the moment, I am an elite player with a killer serve and a devastating backhand. Her triumph becomes mine, which is why it is, for the moment, so intense. I used to play tennis, and when I watch a match, in a way I play again.

Fans of baseball and football identify with ardor for their home teams, groaning when they lose, yelling when they win. Are they remembering games of their youth and throwing themselves into the games they are watching? Perhaps the games evoke a muscle memory. Identifying strongly with a team or an athlete can lead to ecstasy when they win and genuine depression when they lose.

At a party recently, I watched two men talk with gusto about the teams of their youth: how they loved, respectively, the Minnesota Cubs and the New York Mets. They got such delight in these memories that I, observing them, couldn’t help smiling myself. This was doubly vicarious: I was happy for the pleasure they got from their conversation about the pleasure they got from their teams.

I’d like to hear about other vicarious pleasures!

*https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10886274/#:~:text=Neurological%20studies%20on%20dogs%20would,modulated%20by%20various%20social%20factors.