Almost everything in our lives is structured like adverts. Some generally accepted value is superadded to some touted object that we might perhaps have some need for. But if you do buy that car, you won't get with it the chick used to advertise it − she is always going to remain the surplus that you are never ever going to meet. The advert stages the structure of the surplus that creates desire; the surplus itself is constitutively detached from the object of desire and hence is never a part of what we actually get. Even when we enjoy something experientially, it is seldom that same promised and desired pleasure. The desired pleasure is thus at base disappointing, always only so-so, but people are used to this and since, in addition, they are also ashamed of their own inability to take pleasure, they say that it “wasn‘t bad” or even that “it was great”. Most of the time people don‘t enjoy life, and so in fact this is not essentially modified by contemporary exhortations to enjoy. People actually do not enjoy, they are dependent (on the need to enjoy). Any current instruction to enjoy does not relate to any real-life enjoyment, rather to the increase in the dependence on pleasure, i.e. to the enhancement of consumption, which is the constant deferral of the orgasm. The way to this pleasure is thus an ever greater effort, a living torment. The order to enjoy creates more and more slog. To be slender, you‘ve got to work at it, slog away in the gym. To get any of the enjoined pleasures, you have to slog. Pleasure has become work.

Pleasure itself is thus not so much the fulfilment, is not the sense of the quest, it is rather the MacGuffin, the thing that sets off the action, that enables things to go on, to get you interested in what comes next, for the future to have appeal. Pleasure as the way of supplementing the MacGuffin reveals to us that everything has the MacGuffin shape and that anything whatever can fill in the MacGuffin void − it is not important what the quest is for, only to go on looking, for the quest still to be on; that it is not important what sets off the complication, only for there to be some complication.

Hedonism has the philosophical value of revealing to us the workings of other phenomena that are ostensibly deeper, more meaningful. Finally, the actual meaning or point is nothing very deep in itself. Meaning is perhaps a better advert than perhaps hedonism, but nothing truly profound. Simply because nothing is truly profound. That very same meaningful life (as advert fantasy) is not meaningful, it is perhaps just a little bit more subtle, complex, perhaps more comfortable than the example of hedonism. Point, somewhere at a level with love, is just the best advert that is given to us in the mediacum-life market of experience, but it is still just an advert. But an advert for what? What are we advertising with our lives? Probably nothing but more continuation... life is taking out loans on the future, getting into debt with the assumption that at some time in the future you‘re going to be able to service your debt, that at some time all this is going to be explained, going to come together. But this is the mass trance.