I wasn’t even born when Janet Jackson released “The Pleasure Principle” on her 1986 album Control. Forty years later, those same two words have become the closest thing I have to a philosophy of life.

Indulge me, please.

Black women have mastered survival. Our history has all but demanded it.

We have learned how to stretch a dollar, navigate instability, and keep moving even when the ground beneath us shifts. And over the past few years, we’ve been called to do it all over again.

The first wave was disruption, as layoffs swept industries where many Black women had spent years building careers and making significant contributions.

The second wave was reinvention, as more of us turned toward entrepreneurship, consulting, and self-made opportunities when traditional paths became less reliable.

And now, we are entering a third.

This next phase is not primarily about how we earn. It involves how intentional we are with our energy, time, and effort.

Once you have proven that you can survive, adapt, and create opportunity for yourself, a different question begins to surface: What happens when work no longer reflects who you are?

The first two waves were visible. You could point to the layoffs, the career pivots, the businesses being launched and documented in real time. But this third wave is harder to see, because it is happening internally.

For many Black women, work has never been only about income. It has also been about meaning. Achievement provided direction. Titles provided validation. Productivity provided proof.

But what happens when those markers stop feeling like enough? This is the conversation more of us are beginning to have. I call it the Pleasure Principle.

Not just another soft life

By pleasure, I do not mean self-care or soft life trends seen on social media. I mean something far more practical. I mean pleasure as a means of feedback rather than indulgence. A signal that tells you when something is aligned and when it is not. Too often, we dismiss pleasure as frivolous or something to be earned after the work is done. But what if pleasure isn’t a reward at all? What if it’s one of the clearest indicators of whether the life we’re building actually fits us?

For most of my life, I approached decisions the way many ambitious Black women do: through expectations, logic, and a deep sense of responsibility. To be fair, those instincts served me well. They helped me build a career and move through the world in ways that made sense on paper.

But over time, I began to notice something success itself could not explain. The more I advanced in the ways I thought I was supposed to, the less often I stopped to ask myself a simple question: How does this actually feel? I had become so focused on what came next that I rarely paused long enough to check in with myself.

This realization did not happen all at once. It showed up in quiet moments I was too busy to notice—in the pursuit of the next milestone, the next accomplishment, and the next thing to cross off my list. It surfaced in ways that were subtle at first, until they became impossible to ignore. 

It showed up while working in a global brand PR role that had me traveling and leading in ways that looked like a dream on the outside. After the pandemic and a company reorg, I realized I don’t easily separate work from the rest of my life. Thus, my work must be meaningful, creative, and aligned with who I am.

That understanding wasn’t a rejection of corporate America. Rather, it was the beginning of redefining what I needed success to look like.

It showed up again when I decided to leave Washington, D.C., the very city that shaped my persona for over a decade. I left with no goal, no real plan, only an inner-knowing that there was a different kind of life, more grounded and more my own, waiting for me. Following that instinct led me to Dallas, not immediately the obvious or sexiest choice for me, but it would eventually reveal itself as the right one.

And for me, these moments—these threads in between—that is what the Pleasure Principle looks like in practice. Following the pleasure. What feels aligned, what feels… good.

It is the ability to pause long enough to ask where, when, and how you feel most like yourself, and then make decisions from that place, even when they do not align with what is expected or easily explained.

This is also why I think the current conversations around “soft-life” and ease or aesthetic often miss the mark. Pleasure is not about blindly chasing desires or doing less work. It is much deeper.

Why the Pleasure Principle matters now

The late Audre Lorde wrote about the erotic as a source of power and knowledge. It has less to do with sexuality and more about a deep connection to one’s own aliveness and a way of accessing truth beneath obligation, expectation, and performance. That framing feels especially relevant now.

The systems many of us once relied upon are shifting before our eyes. Entire industries are changing. The third wave is about learning how to make decisions in a way that reflects who you are, not just what you can achieve.

I spent years believing freedom would arrive through achievement. What I have lived is an entirely different truth. I understand the importance of knowing yourself well enough to recognize when your life is aligned with your values and being honest enough to admit when it is not.

That is why the Pleasure Principle matters. It gives you a way to evaluate your life that goes beyond external validation. It helps you distinguish between what is genuinely aligned and what is impressive for LinkedIn or IG.

Black women have spent generations proving that we can survive. If the last decade has shown us anything, it’s that resilience is not the same thing as freedom. If the first wave was about losing stability and the second was about creating new opportunities, then the third is about deciding what is life-giving.

And for me, the answer has become clear.

Success at the expense of myself, wrapped up in survival mode, is simply a cost too high. But success without the pressure to prove and creating a life that reflects who I am? There’s no greater pleasure than that.

For a growing number of Black women, that may be the most important question of all to ask: Who are you when success and survival no longer define you?

Read the original article on Essence.