Too old to feel guilty

A date recently asked me what my guilty pleasure is. “I’m too old to feel guilty about pleasures,” I replied instinctively, and watched his facial muscles adjudicate between wit and wariness in real time.

The thing is... at a certain vintage of adulthood, one’s capacity for embarrassment lapses, much like an unused gym membership, and with roughly the same ceremony. Or, as my niece likes to say on the (very) rare occasions she is impressed by me, “It’s giving… zero effort from you, Maasi.” The importance of this inflection point in life cannot be overstated. It is a watershed moment, the precipice beyond which life as we know it is over, and the person one has been must finally reckon with the person one is about to become.

LIFE IS A WITCH

My confession, then: I watch Ganji Chudail videos on Instagram. Ganji Chudail is a bald, oddly proportioned, flailing-limbed witch in a terribly made CGI series. Her chief preoccupation in life is tormenting an unnamed village through plots of such majestic incoherence that adults, inevitably, have been conscripted. I am, both, the conscript and the recruiting officer. Better still, and because one witch has never sufficed for anyone of appetite, I also watch Nihal Singh Majithia’s videos reviewing another. This one, the dramatically named Suhagan Chudail, torments a hapless, clueless prince. Pause on that. A woman with a business, a few hundred by lines and firm opinions on GST input credit, devoting her leisure hours to a chudail and a man critiquing chudail lore.

Chudails currently make up a big part of my life. Unpacking this life twist may well be the thing that funds my therapist’s next vacation, but I refuse to be guilted about it.

There’s a kind of company I find particularly odious. I have a friend who can recite every plot, subplot, and major and mini character arc, from all seasons of Bigg Boss, across all languages. And another who would eat her weight in Parle-G, were it not for the calories and the threat of hyperglycaemic shock. But if you ask them, the humble bragging will unfurl with the practised finesse of performance art: a third glass of Barolo, a Proust reread in the bath, a weakness for Italian linen. Except that nobody has in the history of blushing actually blushed over a Barolo. Or, pouted over a Proust. They are not guilty pleasures, just conveniently photogenic Sundays.

GUILT THEATRE

Not that we, the criminally guilty, are better. We have assembled an entire repertory company for our performance of guilt. The rotating cast includes:

The Apologiser: “Ugh, It’s so embarrassing, but.…” A sentence that opens in contrition and closes in a full, unsolicited confession that we are only feigning interest in out of politeness.

The Researcher: “It’s for work.” Said of a dating show he’s six seasons deep into. His boss hasn’t heard of it.

The Scapegoat: “My cousin sent it to me.” The cousin, defamed for a decade, is exhausted and would really like a word (or 10).

The Self-Roaster: “It’s absolute trash, I’ve stopped.” Said by someone who has watched it four times, wept once, and is frantically hoping for a contradiction followed by a serious deep-dive.

The Hider: Phone angled away, volume at two, on the metro, as if safeguarding the country’s nuclear codes.

What unites them all is the pre-emptive grovel. We reach for the whip before anyone else can, apologising in advance to an imaginary audience. Nobody, not even your own mom, is that interested in your Tuesday. You have ordered smelling salts and a fainting couch for a scandal that exists only in your head.

It also buys precisely nothing. In 2009, researchers from the University of Michigan found that people expect indulging without a good reason to bring more guilt and less pleasure. When asked how they actually felt, they reported that the reason made no difference to their enjoyment. But when asked again, days later, people who had expected to feel guilty recalled feeling it. We brace for the guilt beforehand and retrofit it in the aftermath, even though the experience itself was fine. What a colossal waste of time.

PLEASURE ON LOOP

What I propose instead is a patch of unsupervised ground: one pleasure, entirely your own, enjoyed without defence or apology. But it must be a pleasure and not a compulsion. The difference is easy to check—examine what it leaves behind. A pleasure is something that costs nothing (in your particular scheme of things), harms nobody, and leaves you lighter than it found you. You could abstain for a week without incident, but why would you? Or, is it making you restless, short on time, and reaching for it compulsively? If it’s the former, keep it, however preposterous, and offer no disclaimer to anyone. Least of all to the person who has just spent 40 minutes narrating their sourdough starter.

The dividend is practical. Consider what an ordinary day demands of the average adult: deadlines, invoices, payrolls, dragon bosses breathing down your necks and a phone that never stops asking things of you…. And a perpetual obligation to look like you have it all under control. Then the chudail comes on, and for those three to five minutes nothing is required of me. Nobody needs managing, nothing needs optimising, and the only decision I have to make is which instalment I’m going to watch on loop until I stop giggling. My shoulders descend from around my ears and I return to the invoices a more tolerable human being.

Which is precisely why doom scrolling does not qualify. The 1 am Instagram trawl, thumb twitching autonomously, eleventh stranger’s babymoon loading, rising conviction that everyone else is doing life better, is just evil tech addling your brain and tethering you to a poisonous drip of craving. You get all of the wanting and none of the joy. My bald witch, whatever her faults, has a riveting plot. Now, if you’ll excuse me, there’s a new episode up, and I’m told she is terrorising everyone again. I would hate to miss that.