Pleasure

Aquinas listed four created goods that the human heart, made for God, can mistake for him: wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Pleasure is the easiest of the four to misread. In youth it shows up loud — appetite, indulgence, the chase. In the second half of life it shifts in form. The body's good, the meal, the wine, the chair, the rhythm that asks nothing more than what is already in front of you.

The temptations are quieter, slower, more domestic — the third glass that becomes routine, the screen that fills the empty hour, the food chosen by appetite rather than by stewardship, the slow drift of evenings toward whatever is easiest. None of these are dramatic. That is exactly the problem. The drift is the diagnosis.

Augustine — who knew this substitute well in his first half — wrote that the heart is restless until it rests in God. The restlessness does not go away in the second half. It gets quieter, and it gets answered by smaller and smaller things, until the day the answer is no longer enough to silence the question.

The work is the Catholic discipline of created goods: enjoy them, gratefully, in their right measure — and stop before they begin to take more than they give. Fast at least once a week. Take what you need at the table. Choose the harder good when both are in front of you.

In the Catholic tradition, this substitute is most closely tied to the sins of Lust and Gluttony.