Life's Pleasures Quote by Keith Henson

Henson’s line has the cool, clinical bite of someone looking at a sacred social institution and insisting it be treated like any other system: incentives in, behavior out. By framing long-term recovery participation as “staying with the programs indefinitely,” he quietly challenges the romantic narrative of recovery as a clean arc from brokenness to independence. The key move is the redefinition of community as a reward structure. “Family” isn’t just belonging; it’s an alternative attachment network with rules, rituals, and status. “Attention rewards” is even sharper: it compresses fellowship, care, and recognition into the language of reinforcement, hinting that what looks like healing can also function like a substitute dependency.

The intent isn’t to sneer at recovery so much as to puncture its moral insulation. Twelve-step and similar programs often encourage ongoing attendance, sponsorship, and service, partly because addiction is chronic and relapse is common. Henson’s subtext is that chronicity has social benefits, too: the program supplies identity (“I am in recovery”), predictable validation (meetings, chips, shared testimony), and a managed intimacy that many participants lacked outside the room. That can be lifesaving; it can also create a perverse incentive to remain a “recovering” person forever, because graduation would mean losing your audience.

Context matters: coming from a scientist, the phrasing reads like an evolutionary or behavioral-ecology lens applied to modern support groups. He’s pointing at an uncomfortable truth about care: it’s never purely altruistic or purely transactional, and the systems that rescue people also recruit them.