Also, over millions and millions of years, certain aspects of hominine reproduction (large heads, long gestation times, preposterously long childhood, staggering maternal mortality) and simple statistics would have conspired to make women very, very picky about when and by whom they want to press their buttons. At the same time they would have conspired to make men want their buttons pressed as often as possible, and by pretty much any girl with a neck pulse.
The availability of people of the desired sex willing to press your button would be your default main source of serenity and self-respect. It would take experience and hard work for you to create other sources of fulfillment for yourself. It would be natural for immature, stupid, or bitter people to spend enormous amounts of energy trying to control access to other people's buttons.
If you could press your neighbor's button without risk of adverse side effects (killing months of their productivity, having them lose one of their four of five shots at producing healthy offspring, making them die in childbirth) offering someone to pleasure of a press of their button would be as harmless as offering them the pleasure of a smile, or of a glass of drink. There would be certain rules of etiquette, but there wouldn't usually be much debilitating drama.
I think Adams' point is simply that it's not that hard to make someone's day better.
On the contrary. Almost completely, happiness is other people.
This morning my wife flew back to her country for a 3 week holiday. I suppose I'm going to recover soon but right now I'm still having depressive thoughts.
I would imagine the right to pressing button or having your button pressed will be institutionalized,e.g. through a Church or Government. Doing that freely and often - before some sort of permission, license or ceremony - would be stigmatized and possibly outlawed.
The original allegory was written by Claude Steiner.
Here is the original http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v683T1GVS1U
if that is annoying read the story here http://www.claudesteiner.com/fuzzy.htm
As others observe, if this is a metaphor for sex, it is a terrible one. A metaphor useful to the extent it has similarities with the target of the metaphor and this deviates in numerous critical ways that render any resulting "insights" completely irrelevant to the question of sex. Numerous, numerous, numerous.
Some (most) governments/religions/cultures would create and enforce laws to force you to conceal it.
