Alan Watts: The Wisdom Of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

Thus the "brainy" economy designed to produce this happiness is a fantastic circle which must either manufacture more and more pleasures or collapse - providing constant titillation of the ears, eyes and nerve ends with incessant streams of almost inescapable noise and visual distractions. The perfect "subject" for the aims of this economy is the person who continuously itches his ears with the radio, preferably using the portable kind which can go with him at all hours and in all places. His eyes flit without rest from television screen, to newspaper, to magazine, keeping him in a sort of orgasm-without-release through a series of teasing glimpses of shiny automobiles, shiny female bodies, and other sensuous surfaces, interspersed with such restorers of sensitivity  - shock treatments - as "human interest" shots of criminals, mangled bodies, wrecked airplanes, prize fights, and burning buildings. The literature or discourse that goes along with this is similarly manufactured to tease without satisfaction, to replace every partial gratification with a new desire.

Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner were particularly guilty of working up to colossal climaxes and conclusiojns, and then blasting away at the same chord over and over again, ruining the moment by being reluctant to leave it.