Life's Pleasures Quote by Paul Theroux

Theroux nails the modern condition of lowered expectations: we call something "good" not because it gives us pleasure, but because it fails to harm us. The line is built like an airline safety card rewritten as a philosophy of contentment: a checklist of catastrophes narrowly avoided. That structure is the point. Each "you didn't" is a small act of psychic shrinkage, moving the goalposts from joy to mere survival, until gratitude becomes less a virtue than a coping mechanism.

The intent feels less like complaining about air travel and more like diagnosing how institutions train us to accept inconvenience and indignity as the price of participation. Hijacking and crashing sit beside vomiting and bad food, collapsing terror and discomfort into the same anxious spectrum. It's darkly funny, but the humor has teeth: when even basic competence is experienced as a gift, the system is off the hook. You stop asking for better seats, better treatment, better infrastructure; you just hope nothing happens.

Theroux, a travel writer-novelist with a gift for observing how movement exposes power, is also pointing at the psychology of transit culture: airports as zones where agency is surrendered and the best outcome is to be processed without incident. The closing "So you are grateful" lands like a dry punchline and an indictment. Gratitude here isn't expansive; it's coerced by risk, the emotional tip you leave for a world that managed not to break you today.