I don't think it's off-base to say that this is an attack on the current state of society - the oft-repeated wail that capitalism and the opportunities it has brought (including technology) has made us all a despicable group of hedonistic thrill seekers. This is universally construed as a bad thing. I have problems with this. In order to decide that something is bad, we need to have an idea of what is good. Where doe…
There's a difference between what we want and what we enjoy. You see this most clearly in drug addicts - no, in compulsive gamblers: they desperately want their fix, but aren't any happier when they're doing it. But the same effect is in play for all of us, in more subtle form. You can find it in people who are trying to write: they enjoy writing, but they don't want to do it, have to force themselves to start.
There's a pattern in this. People enjoy improving themselves, enjoy learning even - but most people don't want it. Strikingly, if you have people make the choice for their future selves, they prefer the self-improvement option; if you offer someone a choice between, say, a ticket to a museum exhibition, or a couple of free drinks (at equal price), in three months' time, most will choose the exhibition. But if you give them the choice for tonight, they'll take the drinks - and when choosing in their own lives, that's what they tend to prefer. Even if they're going to enjoy them less.
So the best way to make people happy isn't just to give them what they ask for. A paternalistic intervention where you, say, banned certain kinds of entertainment, and funded others, might well result in people living lives they were happier with than the lives they would have chosen for themselves.