Before I go into this, I feel like I need to make a disclaimer. This is not about drinking for the sake of drinking. This is not escapism, and it is not about recklessness. This is about pleasure, and the tasteful kind. Which is the one I’m interested in.
And honestly, the fact that I even feel the need to say that is kind of the problem. Think about how much cultural conditioning it takes to believe that quietly enjoying a glass of something on your own terms needs to be justified and is somehow worse than being ten pints deep at the pub on a Thursday night. One gets a disclaimer. The other gets called a “normal week”.
Understanding Pleasure.
Hedonism comes from the Greek word hēdonē which directly translates to pleasure. Not excess, not chaos, not someone face-down at 4am having lost their phone and their dignity. Just pleasure. Somewhere between ancient Greece and modern Britain, we decided that a word meaning the pursuit of pleasure should sound like a warning. And I think that tells you everything you need to know about the culture we’ve built around it.
Pleasure can be simple. It can be a coffee in the sun. A good conversation that runs longer than it should. Sitting somewhere with nowhere to be for twenty minutes. A glass of something on a warm evening that doesn’t need to turn into anything else. It doesn’t have to be expensive or excessive or earned. You just have to actually enjoy it. And it’s subjective, what brings you pleasure won’t be the same as what brings me pleasure, and that’s the whole point. It’s yours to define.
A tasteful hedonist is simply someone who knows what brings them pleasure and has the discernment to choose it. And that’s not recklessness. If anything, it might be the opposite. The recklessness people associate with hedonism is usually what happens when pleasure is absent, too little of it, too rarely, so it comes out sideways.
That’s why I think hedonism is a good thing, when it’s tasteful. When you build pleasure into your days in small, intentional doses, you stop needing it to explode out of you on a Saturday night.
We constantly feel like we don’t have enough, or like we’re not where we’re supposed to be. If it’s not a night that ends at 1am it’s not a good night. People drink to get drunk, not to enjoy the drink. A drink on your friend’s doorstep because they have no room in their flat isn’t as good as being in a ludicrously expensive bar. It’s an all or nothing culture. We have no middle register. But I think most of us do have enough. We just never learnt how to enjoy what’s already right in front of us.
The Art.
So when I say the art of drinking anywhere, I mean this. A coffee on a bench before work. A glass of wine on a wall in the evening sun. A beer on a step with someone you haven’t seen in weeks. A negroni on a kerb because the bar was full and the kerb was better anyway. It’s the act of stopping somewhere that wasn’t designed for you to stop, with something in your hand, and deciding that right there is enough.
In Paris, this is completely unremarkable. People sit along the Seine with a bottle of wine and paper cups and nobody looks twice. In Amsterdam, two people on the edge of a canal with a bottle between them as the light drops, that’s just a Tuesday. In Rome, it’s an aperitivo that doesn’t need to become anything else. In Barcelona, it’s something cold on a balcony. These aren’t occasions. They’re not nights out. They’re just life in places that never separated pleasure from the everyday.
In London, the same act somehow feels like it needs justifying. And it’s not even illegal, in England there’s no blanket law against drinking in public. The fact that it still feels like it shouldn’t be allowed tells you everything. The restriction isn’t legal. It’s cultural. We police ourselves.
The £16 cocktail in the approved bar is pleasure you’ve paid for permission to have. A bottle of wine on a canal wall is pleasure you’ve taken for yourself. And I find it really interesting which one makes people more comfortable.
If you're reading this and thinking “I already do this" you're probably already a tasteful hedonist. You just didn't have the words for it yet.