|
I haven’t written about our pandemic-era lexicon in a while — you may recall an early NEXT on “pandemic fine” — so I’m here with a new term we can add to our ongoing COVID-era dictionaries: “treat brain.”
“Treat brain” was first coined, as far as I can tell, in this piece from the Financial Times. The writer and her friend were justifying their (completely fine, I’ll add) choices to watch trashy reality TV and order midweek takeout. “It’s treat brain,” her friend, a genius, responded.
“Here, finally, was a term for the mindset I had noticed myself slipping into over the past 18 months,” writes Imogen West-Knights, adding that prior to the pandemic, she had pretty good impulse control. “This changed completely when lockdown arrived. Suddenly, I was eating pizza upon pizza upon pizza, their boxes towering up like greasy Jenga blocks in the corner of my flat. Every day was a day for emergency chocolate. I bought video games, make-up I didn’t know how to use and two suits in the space of one week. Gone was the little voice in my head that used to gently intervene when I was overindulging. Treat brain was in charge.”
Advertisement
Wow, yes. This hits. Treat brain was fully in charge during the height of the pandemic for me, too. “I deserve it, these times are unprecedented, I need a modicum of joy,” I’d say to myself, before pouring another glass of wine, or purchasing eye-wateringly expensive skin care, or ordering takeout. Again.
Treat brain was fully in charge ordering takeout. (John Woods / Free Press files)
Treat brain was bolstered, I expect, by the edicts to “support local.” Getting takeout multiple times a week wasn’t indulging, it was “saving restaurants.” Ordering yet another graphic tee from a local boutique wasn’t frivolous, it was “stimulating the local economy.” No purchase could go unjustified — especially if that purchase didn’t arrive in a box from Amazon.
Now, it seems, I can’t scroll through Instagram without seeing posts from local businesses who are really struggling or closing altogether after weathering a historic pandemic, only for the world to re-open to historic inflation. Just like all the other things we were told to do during the pandemic, the push to “support local” seems to have disappeared.
Treat brain is also probably slightly less in charge now that the world has re-opened and people are having to reallocate funds to, say, gas for their return-to-office commutes or airline tickets for the trips they can finally take. It is, as I wrote a few weeks ago, the sticker shock of “normal.” For my part, my pandemic “treat brain” has been replaced by “YOLO (you only live once) brain,” and, for the first time since early 2020, I’m carrying a credit card balance because of travel.
Obviously, too much of anything can be bad for your health — physical and financial — and we live in an increasingly instant-gratification society that leaves us with an ever-gaping hole we’re trying to fill via consumer goods and the hit of dopamine we get every time we click “add to cart.”
But I wonder, as West-Knights did, if “treat brain,” as a concept, is necessarily such a bad thing. I think about how often we control or deny our impulses in service of diet culture, or “being good.” How often we don’t burn the nice candles or wear the nice dress or drink the good wine because we’re “saving” them for some fuzzy day in the future when we’ll, what, have earned them? Deserve them?
Treats, it’s also worth remembering, don’t always have to be consumer goods — though, if they are going to be consumer goods, shop local. Treats can also look like getting lost in a good book, or allowing yourself to get absorbed in a hobby, or a really long meandering walk with a friend, or taking some time for yourself.
You deserve to enjoy your one life. You know, as a treat.
|
