Upper Middle’s “Very Guilty Pleasures Survey” examines how members of the Oat Milk Elite feel about their least elite behaviors and habit. By treating guilt not as a moral failing but as a social signal, the survey attempts to determine not only what activities we perceive as beneath us, but how the social math of stigmatization gets done.
Results suggest that feeling guilt around pleasure is an almost1 universal experience and that those feelings are mediated by a variety factors, including but not limited to wealth, upbringing, gender, and whether or not you read Pitchfork back in the day.
GUILT AND SHAME
According to the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine, guilt comes in two flavors. Helpful guilt is rooted in morality. It’s why we apologize and why we avoid being assholes in the first place. Unhelpful guilt is rooted in social expectations internalized as unrealistic standards. It helps explain why America’s high-achievers disproportionately suffer from mental health issues — what psychologist Carol Dweck calls the “Fixed Mindset,” the idea that kids are labeled early and pressured to conform to those labels, from “smart” to “athletic” to “artsy” to “kinda slutty.” When grown children fail to behave in accordance with their labels, they feel unhelpful guilt, which can metastasize into shame — a sense of intrinsic and irreparable unworthiness common among Catholics and dogs that can’t hold it.
FIG. 1 Self-Reported Guilty Pleasures vs. % of Respondents
The most common guilty pleasures reported by survey respondents weren’t extreme vices but everyday indulgences: doomscrolling (67%), procrastination (51%), impulse shopping (46%), gossiping (43%), and potential mental coping strategies like bad TV, splurging, canceling plans, or drinking too much (26–38%). In other words, guilt came less from wild escapades than from ordinary behaviors coded as lazy or unserious — the kinds of pleasures that bump up against internalized labels.
FIG. 2 Self-Reported “Normal” Pleasures vs. % of Respondents
As such, it’s worth considering where those labels came from. A striking 84% of respondents said their parents had high expectations. For them, guilt was less about health (“I know it isn’t good for me,” 54% vs. 60%) and more about identity: “doesn’t fit my self-image” (28.5% vs. 20.6%), “doesn’t fit the image I present to others” (27.5% vs. 17.6%), or “I was raised to think I shouldn’t like this” (22.1% vs. 10.3%). They also reported more guilty pleasures overall (5.5 vs. 4.5). The correlation is modest but significant: Children raised with high expectations are more prone to unhelpful guilt. As Dweck puts it, “Mindsets frame the running account that’s taking place in people’s heads.”
FIG. 3 Self-Reported Reason for Guilt vs. % Respondents (Represented By Area)
For socially active people, guilt was about image: 38% worried about inconsistency, and 24% called pleasures a “reward.” For the isolated, guilt came from upbringing (29% vs. 19%). Community seems to soften guilt, because others can offer forgiveness.
GILT AND SHAME
Wealth and income affect not only what people felt guilty about but how guilty they felt. Respondents with less than $50k in assets averaged 6.1 guilty pleasures, those in the $100–249k bracket averaged 6.0, while the wealthiest ($1M+) settled closer to 4.9–5.0. Income reflected similar trends, with higher earners (notably much higher earners) listing fewer guilty pleasures on average.
The qualitative patterns explain why this might be. Lower-income respondents were more likely to say guilt arose from practical concerns (“I know it isn’t good for me”), while wealthier respondents were more likely to worry about presentation (“doesn’t fit the image I present to others”). The wealthiest were also the most likely to say they were “not sure” why they felt guilty — evidence of a kind of generalized class anxiety. In effect, people with fewer resources feel guilty about overindulging in specific pleasures, and people with more resources feel guilty about indulging in the same pleasures as the poors.
DETACHMENT THEORY
In the late 1990s, sociologists Richard Peterson and Roger Kern described a cultural shift in their book Changing Highbrow Taste: From Snob to Omnivore. Where elites once signaled distinction by consuming only “high-brow shit,” they now consumed everything — opera and country music, fine wine and barbecue — in the spirit of inquiry. The sort of detached cosmopolitan openness John Seabrook later dubbed “nobrow” had taken hold. It was no longer requisite to like Wagner. Christina Aguilera was fine if you could explain why (and maybe reference Wagner).
Though sophisticated people (people who have been labeled or self-labeled in that way) probably do feel some guilt when consuming “lowbrow” culture — 24.3% categorized watching reality TV as a source of guilt — survey responses suggest snobbishness is less common than a nobrow omnivorousness. More than half of those who reported a guilty pleasure also reported the non-guilty version of the same activity. They weren’t ashamed of diverse tastes, only of losing critical detachment. Scrolling social media was reported by 68.7% of respondents as a normal pleasure, with 51% of those respondents citing doomscrolling as a guilty pleasure2. Likewise, 58.7% reported going to or hosting parties as a normal pleasure, with nearly 49.5% of those respondents reporting gossiping as a guilty pleasure (and arguably the main point of parties). Some 58.7% said they enjoy sex, with 8.8% of those respondents reporting guilt about excessive casual sex.
Respondents weren’t guilty about these activities in and of themselves. They became guilty when they lost their cosmopolitan detachment. At some point, you’re no longer a sophisticated person taking an interest; you’re just another mouthbreather.
GENDERED PLEASURE
The Marxist feminist scholar and activist Silvia Federici famously (if you’re into that kinda thing) argued that “capitalism must rely on both an immense amount of unpaid domestic labour for the reproduction of the workforce, and the devaluation of these reproductive activities in order to cut the cost of labour-power.” This helps explain why pleasures associated with women are trivialized or deemed low-class — and the “Guilty Pleasure Gap”: Female respondents reported engaging in an average of 5.4 guilty pleasures, compared to 4.9 among men. (Interestingly, queer women averaged 6.8 and queer men 7.9.) It also may explain women — accustomed to having their pleasures trivialized — being more willing to cop to engaging in guilty pleasures than men. Everyone gossips, but women admit it (58.5%) at much higher rates than men (36.0%), simply because the things they are accustomed to their pleasures being diminished or dismissed and don’t take it so personal.
FIG. 4 Self-Reported Guilty Pleasures vs. Self-Reported Sex
Men, meanwhile, have their own weird thing going on. They impulse shop, splurge, and gossip plenty, but they’re more likely to indulge in physical guilty pleasures: drinking too much (36.0% vs. 21.8%), smoking cigarettes (8.8% vs. 8.5%), smoking weed (24.6% vs. 20.6%), watching porn (50.0% vs. 14.8%), and casual sex (11.4% vs. 6.7%). This doesn’t just suggest that men are “very, very fun” — it shows they manage emotion through different, riskier coping mechanisms.
FIG. 5 Self-Reported Reason for Guilt vs. Self-Reported Sex
Evolutionary storytelling can always be invoked here — hunters vs. gatherers, competition vs. connection — but that’s reductive given how modern society reshapes resources and rewards. More likely, men’s tilt toward risk reflects their reduced access to relational pleasures, the product of less active social lives (11.6% vs. 16.4% reporting “very active”) and self-policing around “female-coded” behavior. And risk matters: the “Guilty Pleasure Gap” is also a risk gap3. According to U.S. life expectancy data, affluent men live a year or two less than affluent women. Some of that is just cardiac ish, but some of it may be men jerking off that mortal coil.
CONCLUSION
There’s a classic animation trope where a character making a decision is visited by an angel and a demon, one on each shoulder. They have a debate that inevitably devolves into a brawl and drawings of little stars and curlicues. That’s supposed to be a depiction of how we make choices. In fact, it’s a far better depiction of how we consider those choices after we make them — the ways our pride and our shame duke it out while adjudicating our worthiness.
The results of the Very Guilty Pleasures Survey suggest that we derive self-worth from consistency — what Emerson described as the “hobgoblin of little minds.” Guilt — unhelpful guilt, to be specific — gains the upper hand when our behaviors are at odds with the labels and roles (gendered, economic, professional) we’ve accepted. And we’re really bad at letting it go without the help of others. Which is why we should talk about this shit. Embarrassment turns out to be far less painful than shame.
The Top 5 Pleasurable Guilts
1. The feeling after order the most expensive thing on the menu while out with friends.
2. The feeling of leaving a coworker on read.
3. The feeling of leaving your mom on read.4
4. The feeling after you let a 2-year-old shoplift organic chocolate from Trader Joe's.
5. The feeling of not trying to hard at sex.
