The Pleasure Renaissance Aliveness Test

We live inside stories.

Not only the ones we tell about our own lives, but the ones we absorb every day through films, television, video games, and media. Stories don’t just entertain us. They quietly train us. They teach our bodies what to expect from life, from power, from pleasure, even from safety.

Most modern stories share a single underlying orientation: survive first, feel later.

Avoid pain. Reduce threat. Secure safety. Control outcomes.

The Pleasure Renaissance begins with a different question: What if aliveness — not survival — is the true foundation of human thriving?

At its heart, the Pleasure Renaissance is a cultural effort to rewrite the story we’ve inherited about pleasure.

For centuries, pleasure has been framed as dangerous, indulgent, distracting, or morally suspect. Even when pleasure appears in media, it’s often punished, commodified, stripped of intelligence, or collapsed into sex and spectacle.

The Pleasure Renaissance restores a deeper understanding: pleasure is not an indulgence. It is a form of intelligence. It is how aliveness speaks through the body.

In this framework, erotic does not mean explicit sexual content. It refers to the quality of engagement with life itself — curiosity, presence, responsiveness, and the willingness to taste experience rather than endure it.

Stories shape us more than we think.

Our bodies learn by watching and listening.

When we engage with a story, our nervous systems are subconsciously tracking what leads to safety, what leads to power, what gets rewarded, what gets punished, and how much aliveness is allowed. Over time, this training shapes how we relate to love, authority, creativity, desire, pleasure, and even ourselves.

This is where the Pleasure Renaissance Aliveness Test comes in — not as a judgment, but as a way of noticing orientation.

Survival and aliveness are two different things.

Some stories train us to reach for relief — the absence of fear, of pain, or of loss. The Hunger Games is a clear example. The characters aren’t reaching for fulfillment or vitality; they are trying to stay alive inside a system that rewards numbness, control, and domination over others. Pleasure is dangerous. Sensitivity is a liability. Feeling too much gets you killed.

Survival-oriented stories often require a quiet kind of self-betrayal. Characters must suppress their truth, dampen their sensitivity, or perform an identity that keeps them safe. Authenticity becomes dangerous. To survive, they must become less themselves.

Aliveness-oriented stories move in the opposite direction.

In these worlds, pleasure is treated as a form of guidance — the body’s way of signaling resonance, alignment, and aliveness. Curiosity is rewarded. Sensitivity becomes a strength rather than a liability. Avatar offers a clear example. Power doesn’t come from conquest or extraction or domination — it comes from learning how to listen, how to attune, how to enter into relationship with the living world itself.

The protagonist doesn’t become powerful by hardening or performing a role that keeps him safe. He becomes powerful by becoming more himself — more embodied, more aligned, more responsive to life.

Power comes from being in relationship with life — not from taking, forcing, or conquering it.

Over time, aliveness-oriented stories tend to reward authenticity — characters become more themselves.

At the deepest level, these stories carry very different assumptions about what it means to be human. Survival-oriented stories assume the world is fundamentally unsafe and connection is a risk. Aliveness-oriented stories suggest that life responds to engagement, that feeling deeply is a skill, and that pleasure does not have to be sacrificed in order to survive.

Video games make this contrast especially clear because they train the body directly.

Games like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Fortnite, or League of Legends condition the nervous system for constant threat and competition. Power comes from domination. Safety arrives only after others lose. These games wire vigilance, speed, and control.

By contrast, games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Animal Crossing, Minecraft in creative mode, or Journey reward exploration, curiosity, care, and beauty. Progress comes from participation, not conquest. The world responds when you engage with it rather than overpower it.

Most people can feel the difference immediately — not intellectually, but somatically.

Even something as simple as a board game carries this training. Monopoly normalizes scarcity and accumulation through others’ loss. Cooperative games quietly teach collaboration and shared navigation of complexity.

These lessons don’t end when the game does — they shape what our bodies come to expect from life.

Don’t misunderstand me. This isn’t about boycotting certain works or creating “better” stories.

Some stories are meant to show us what happens when aliveness is stripped away.

The Handmaid’s Tale is not an aliveness story, and it’s not trying to be. It exposes the cost of systems built on fear, control, and bodily suppression. Crime dramas often explore what happens when power is pursued through domination rather than connection.

These stories matter — by contrast.

The Pleasure Renaissance doesn’t reject them. It simply helps us see what they are training us toward.

The Aliveness Lens

You can think of the Pleasure Renaissance Aliveness Test as a simple lens you carry with you.

The next time you’re watching a show, playing a game, or consuming a story, gently ask yourself:

-Is this story training my body to brace — or to engage with life?
-Does it associate power with control and domination, or with connection and presence?
-Is pleasure treated as dangerous or distracting — or as something meaningful and informative?
-Do the characters grow more alive or more of themselves over time, or simply better at surviving?

And underneath it all:

-Does this story assume life is hostile — or that life is something you can be in relationship with?

There are no right answers. Only awareness.

The Pleasure Renaissance restores pleasure as the primary driver of human thriving — retraining the body to create from aliveness instead of survival.

This isn’t about changing your taste or policing consumption.

It’s about noticing.

As you watch, play, or engage with stories, notice how your body feels afterward. Do you feel more open or more braced? More curious or more defended? More alive — or merely relieved?

Awareness alone changes the narrative.

Because once you can see the story shaping you, you’re no longer unconsciously living inside it.

In sovereign aliveness,
-Sharon Marie Scott