Life's Pleasures Quote by Jonathan Franzen

Franzen’s line has the cool, slightly prosecutorial tone he often brings to contemporary life: not moral panic, not cool-kid endorsement, but a novelist’s insistence on following the evidence of how people narrate themselves. The key move is the pivot from “drugs” as chemistry to drugs as language. He isn’t claiming substances are new; he’s saying the talk around them has become a primary dialect of identity.

The repetition of “interested” frames the speaker as a behavioral realist, someone who studies humans the way a birder studies flight patterns. Then the sentence quietly shifts from behavior (“how people behave”) to self-myth (“the way they talk about themselves,” “conceive of themselves”). That’s where the subtext bites: drugs aren’t just private choices or public health issues; they’re a ready-made vocabulary for explaining ambition, pain, creativity, burnout, rebellion, recovery. In a culture that prizes self-disclosure and diagnosis, intoxication and abstinence both become story arcs, content, branding.

“Nowadays” does a lot of work, locating the quote in a moment when therapeutic language, opioid devastation, legalized cannabis, microdosing folklore, and celebrity confessionals collide. Franzen is pointing to the way drugs have moved from the margins into the mainstream script of personhood. For a novelist, that’s irresistible: if character is revealed by what people say they are, and drugs are “so much part of the conversation,” then ignoring them means writing with one eye closed.

There’s also a faint cynicism: even self-knowledge gets mediated by trend. The drug narrative can be honest, but it can also become another socially approved way to perform a self.