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"While it’s true that the Buddha doesn’t say that all sensory pleasures are bad for the mind, still you have to realize that some pleasures work at cross-purposes, and every type of pleasure has its price. The price, of course, is not the money that you pay for the pleasure; it’s what the pleasure does to the mind, along with its karmic consequences.
So, with each pleasure, you have to ask yourself what you do in order to gain and maintain the pleasure, and what happens to your mind as a result. A lot of pleasures actually weaken the mind. They weaken your powers of concentration, weaken your alertness, weaken the sense of heedfulness that lies at the base of all your skillful qualities. Many pleasures require that things outside be a certain way, and you’re not going to be happy unless they are just that way. Those pleasures, and the attitude they induce, actually weaken the mind. You find yourself creating a hothouse environment for yourself, and only within that hothouse environment can you be happy. Step outside of it and you can’t stand it. Yet, we all know about hothouse plants: They’re perfectly fine as long as the temperature is just right, the humidity is just right, but if you change anything, they die.
That’s the way it is with a lot of our pleasures: They require that society be a certain way, that the economy be a certain way and have reached a certain level of development. When you stop and think about how much your sensual pleasures are dependent on a huge network — a very fragile network — that could break down at any time, you begin to realize that they’re pretty scary. To really enjoy those pleasures, you have to forget about how fragile the network is. That’s what leads to heedlessness, and you start blocking out huge areas of your awareness, which gets in the way of mindfulness: That’s a price you have to pay as well."
~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Pleasure Has a Price"
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