Absorption is pleasant while nothing at all is being obtained

The argument

A second argument for this account concerns the pleasures that occur with no object in view. Proponents point to the state of being caught up in something: a conversation that runs longer than intended, a game played without caring who wins, a piece of music followed closely, work that stops feeling like work. These episodes are among the most reliably pleasant experiences people report, and while they are going on there is nothing the person is trying to get. The mechanism proponents identify is that the pleasure is a feature of the activity rather than of any result it produces. Absorption has no completion condition. There is no point at which the conversation has been had or the music obtained, and the person is not waiting for one. If the pleasure were the satisfaction of a desire it should arrive at the end, when whatever was wanted is finally in hand. Instead it is distributed across the middle and ends when the activity does, which is the profile of a quality rather than of a payoff. Proponents add that this is why interruption is experienced as a loss even when nothing was lost. A person pulled out of an absorbing activity has not been deprived of anything they were going to obtain, since they were not going to obtain anything. What has been taken is the state itself, which existed only while the activity continued. On this account that is what pleasure is: not a thing collected at the end but the character of an experience while it is underway, which is why amusement and absorption are the clearest cases rather than the puzzling ones.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics argue that absorbing activities do satisfy desires continuously rather than not at all: each exchange in a good conversation gives the person something they wanted, which is why the activity sustains itself. They add that the account cannot distinguish pleasant absorption from unpleasant kinds, since anxiety and compulsion are also absorbing and have the same open-ended profile, so something beyond absorption must be doing the work. Others hold that what is lost at interruption is the expectation of continuation, which is a thwarted desire, so the case fits the rival account as readily as this one.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Critics deny that nothing is obtained. An absorbing activity delivers a continuous stream of small things the person wanted, such as the next turn of a conversation or the resolution of a phrase, and the absence of a single large payoff is not the absence of any. [Rejecting P2] The distributed profile is disputed as evidence. Many satisfactions are incremental rather than terminal, so a pleasure spread across an activity is consistent with desire-satisfaction occurring repeatedly rather than once at the end. [Rejecting P3] Critics argue that what interruption takes is precisely something wanted, namely the continuation, and that the person's annoyance is the ordinary signature of a thwarted desire rather than evidence against the role of desire.