dr hayim solovetchik claimed once that pleasure became allowed to orthodox jews in the 70's (the so called Me decade). I feel as people think they are supposed to always feel happy and if they don’t or even worse than that, don’t feel happy when they hit a major milestone, they kill themselves.
This pursuit of pleasure to find meaning has no end. Glatt kosher sushi is the sort of thing that should make us happy, but it doesn’t. So we than look for glatt kosher pot. But even that doesn’t work. And it gets worse and worse. We look for charismatic teachers and leaders, much in the same vein. We need to feel happy, even in shul and in class. As we can't always be happy, we then get depressed as we think there is something wrong with us for being what is actually normal.
The goal of life is not happiness. It is meaning. And the whole orthodox community (at least in the USA, here I am a neophyte) has bought the lie, along with the West, that the point of life is happiness. Its like the joke that you would think that based on the way the society carries on about it that"one night stands,"make the unemployment rate fall in by half.
Unfortunately 60 years of this philosophy has helped many fewer than it has damaged. Just all the people who have died alone (before this terrible outbreak) because they abandoned their spouse or were too busy finding self- actualization to “settle down” in that petite bourgeois phrase. As long as your goal is to feel “right” inside, you will never succeed in meeting that goal. Telling even younger and younger people to feel “right” about themselves seem like a good way to help encourage suicide among the young, as we see in social media encouraged suicides or the what researchers call, suicide clusters.
Running for chometz is just another symptom of deep danger. Having said that, I would love a bagel RIGHT NOW.
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