> I am talking about the need to feel whole, Desire itself. The idea that some moments can make you feel like life is beautiful, moments where you feel you can die right then and it would all be worth it.
That feeling comes from dopamine. If you actually believe that feeling is better than actually living to experience that feeling again in the future, a heroin dealer will be more than happy to help you out.
> but you simply think that humans should change fundamentally.
Only in that they should be more rational. I don't think that is an onerous request. Many people already try to be.
>If you just want to 'feel good', you could start a heroin habit; you will FEEL great. But is that a satisfying and full life?
I don't know, but I would facetiously guess that yes, it probably feels like it is. Until you stop being able to afford more heroin, at which point no, it absolutely would not. Kind of like driving fast; it isn't the speed that kills you, it's the sudden stop.
Happiness and meaning probably look like different things to different people, though. Some people find fulfillment in offspring, sure. But I don't see how that's any different from anything else that works to assuage someone's existential malaise.
And what if the body decides that the best thing for itself is crack cocaine? You don't want happiness per se, but a fulfilling and satisfying life.
Think about it, if you could wire yourself to a machine that injected all the happiness chemicals into your brain for the rest of your life would you do it?
"Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word happy would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness."
> If you spend an hour thinking about how you suck at various aspects of your life, how is it making you feel?
It doesn't matter how you feel about it. You need to focus on the bad things in life if you want to have a chance of improving things. Burying your head in the sand doesn't solve anything. Don't waste your time focussing on the good stuff, it doesn't need fixing.
If all you want to do is feel good despite everything around you being shit, why not just do heroin ? You'll feel great and it's a lot less effort than convincing yourself that black is white.
> When you describe someone as "doing only exactly what he wants to do in that moment", I'd imagine something quite different. A heroin addict.
Fair enough. But heroin addict wants to do heroin in every moment and nothing else. While in my cases it varies wildly from moment to moment. At any given moment I might want to play a game, talk to human, craft a response on stackoverflow, read about some obscure database, build a prototype in language I barely know, connect solar panel to LiFePO batteries, sculpt large ugly head out of polymer clay, read online about covid19 related research, think about how you can prove simple tautologies within axiomatic logic system, attempt to fix a bug in a program I just started using, discuss philosophical ideas with you, watch youtube video and then game some more. All of it just as useless as heroine (although less harmful), but all of it something that I wanted to do in that given moment.
> The thing I wouldn't picture is moderation.
Moderation comes from diversity of whims.
> I understand to have many years ahead of me. And all of that might leads me to a great path with a happy ending. But right now I'm certain having played less would have made such a path more likely.
I wish you all the best. When I was younger I had this urge that everything I do should ultimately give some monetary benefit. Once I felt secure with what I had materially this feeling subsided and I felt (bit aimless) freedom. Now I just want to be as happy as possible. Even if that desire has nihilism as a foundation.
> Most people have pretty strong beliefs that they would rather suffer in a real world than have a satisfied fake life with managed feelings. It's only when the pain is too much that they fall back to alternatives.
Right, but you're still just trying to achieve some mental state. It's just that that mental state is impossible to reach through drugs/simulation alone.
>But most of the time in my life I've felt empty, doubting myself and struggling with a weak sense of self and unhealthy thought/behavioural patterns that are hard to shed off. I feel like I've lost any passion for anything, and don't know what I want or need.
You've got to look inward and figure yourself out - that could fix a lot of the other things you brought up.
If you know yourself and your ethics very well and you work hard to live them out, you're probably happy no matter your circumstances. Meditation or long boring walks can kind of open up your subconscious so you can start doing that; you can just wait until a random thought pops in your head and start pulling that thread, ask why you thought that, where's that coming from.
Also taking psych/life advice from strangers on the internet is pretty dangerous.
>I vaguely resent the implication that wanting things is so rarely coming from endogenous desire of self-fulfillment for purely self-motivated reasons rather than sourced from some other source of power or peers.
You have no way of knowing what is truly endogenous desire, from what's not - even if you perceive it, after some reflection, that it's endogenous... the reality it that it just might not be.
A chunk of us is a product of what surrounded and surrounds us. It's the human condition.
So I maybe the exercise you should do is to accept your humanity? The fact that you are human and that's doesn't have to be a bad thing, to the point of being resented about it. You can see it as a constrain, but it can also be a source of freedom once you accept it.
> Happiness is a reward. Chasing happiness is a fundamentally mistaken project because if you just want to be in a mental state of happiness, do drugs, it's that easy. We got plenty of pharmaceuticals that short circuit all the annoying steps you have to do to be happy.
Drugs don't work like that. Over time, your body gets used to them, and you need drugs just to feel normal - and without them, you feel terrible. Just like with less dangerous addictions, e.g. to coffee.
> Fact is, the vast majority of people prefer pleasure over pain .. all time, although not-pleasure (or pain) is one of the few guaranteed things in life. Pleasure is optional, pain and suffering are guaranteed and unavoidable, because of our mortality.
No parents would want their child to die, but if you offered grieving parents some happy drugs that made them forget they ever had a child, do you really think most would take them? Would you?
If someone offered you a drug that killed you, but somehow subjectively made it feel like a million years of bliss, would you take it? Sure, you'd make the people who love you sad, but you wouldn't notice that anymore, so why not, wouldn't that be the most efficient thing you could ever do in your life?
Pleasure is something that I generate in myself. Based on stimuli, sure, but those stimuli are not the pleasure. And I think it's not a stretch to say that pleasure and pain exist for reasons (I know it can go wrong in all sorts of ways, that there's plenty of pointless and chronical pain, but let's ignore that for the sake of simplicity). Pain warns of things that harm us, pleasure does the opposite, but this can be "hacked" and abused in all sorts of ways. Comparing it to the feeling of hunger, you could take drugs that make you not feel hunger and pain, then you'd simply starve happily, rather than also getting what "not feeling hungry" is supposed to mean. And I think the same would happen to people held as pets: yes, their bodies would still exist, they'd "be happy", but they would cease to exist as the person that happiness and pain as once a tool and advisor for. As they say, the lights are on, but there's nobody home. (In my hearts of hearts, I believe this may have long since happened, and that we might be the afterbirth of an afterbirth of an afterbirth of an abortion. But if that is true, I can't lose anything valuable by not giving up that I haven't lost already, and if it's not so, I could make it so by believing it, making it self-fulfilling prophecy.)
When you see, say, a religious fanatic or deranged person, who really believes in whatever floats their boat, and is happy 24/7, would you envy them? Or would you shudder? Wouldn't you at least think "I wish I was that happy, but not at that price"?
> If there's a choice between being a pet and a factory farm animal, I guess being a pet is much nicer and desirable.
Well, if. But those are not the only choices you have, and I'd even say being a pet is a choice you might never have. From you having a cat doesn't follow that you being the pet of someone will be an option for you. You're not your cat and your overlords are not you. Who would keep you as a pet? The people who sleep well while people starve? People who use fears and love to bring about more of the things people fear and destroy more of what they love? Machines ordered to be made by the same? Why would they, and what for? I'm sure you're a great person and all, but what makes you think you'd not rather be used as prey in hunting games, until more challenging prey is made? What makes and billions of other people so great that a few thousand square miles of private golf course or jungle wouldn't be more interesting?
When cars were invented, we didn't keep all the horses around to love and cuddle. Where's the children of the horses your grandgrandgrandparents owned? What's that, you never even thought about that? Welcome to your own role in the sight of your "overlords" :P
How are we treating the vulnerable so far? Last time I checked, every few seconds a child dies of thirst. And that's just one thing in a long list. So at what point would the drive for MORE power lead to LESS suffering, instead of more, as it does until now? Can you at least see how that might come across as a little kool-aid-ish, to believe it will suddenly change because that would be nicer? It would also be nice for the millions of people who suffer currently, but if they don't matter now, they won't matter then.
> I say this while my cat is purring ecstatically on my lap. Not bad to be loved and cared for by a omnipotent giant.
So you're thinking the cat is your pet, instead of the other way around? :)
But more importantly, you're a human, whatever turns you into a pet will be made by humans. As Erich Fromm wrote:
> The whole concept of alienation found its first expression in Western thought in the Old Testament concept of idolatry. The essence of what the prophets call "idolatry" is not that man worships many gods instead of only one. It is that the idols are the work of man's own hands -- they are things, and man bows down and worships things; worships that which he has created himself. In doing so he transforms himself into a thing. He transfers to the things of his creation the attributes of his own life, and instead of experiencing himself as the creating person, he is in touch with himself only by the worship of the idol. He has become estranged from his own life forces, from the wealth of his own potentialities, and is in touch with himself only in the indirect way of submission to life frozen in the idols. The deadness and emptiness of the idol is expressed in the Old Testament: "Eyes they have and they do not see, ears they have and they do not hear," etc. The more man transfers his own powers to the idols, the poorer he himself becomes, and the more dependent on the idols, so that they permit him to redeem a small part of what was originally his. The idols can be a godlike figure, the state, the church, a person, possessions. Idolatry changes its objects; it is by no means to be found only in those forms in which the idol has a so-called religious meaning. Idolatry is always the worship of something into which man has put his own creative powers, and to which he now submits, instead of experiencing himself in his creative act.
The only way that "overlord" can be "omnipotent" to you is by either lying to you, or by keeping you in check. (Why am I suddenly thinking of gardens and forbidden fruit? ^^) I had two cats, they were happy because they had a nice place to stay, food, humans who loved them, and each other.. any powers of mine beyond that they had no use for or interest in. A cat living on a farm catching its own food is also happy, no "omnipotence" required.
And we are, right now, sitting in the warm, gentle lap of the sun. We could be purring, too. The same motives that keep that from realizing now, will likely still be around when the technology is there to completely control everybody and everything. And I suspect that won't be for the purpose of making us happy as we are, but to either make us fit or make us gone. That is, everything else being the same, namely as it currently is and how it trends. I don't know the future but I know my contemporaries. So my pick would be kicking Big Brother in the dick, flirting with his sister and singing loudly as they drag me to the guillotine.
> I always hear the situation put this way, but it rings false to me. If you gave me a perfect happiness drug, I wouldn't want to sit in bed all day and take it.
Reason is a poor way of estimating behavior, in special, your own.
>Having read some of the other replies now, it's slightly disturbing how many of them draw to one of two conclusions: there's something chemically wrong with you, or you've made a massive mistake in life and you need to immediately change every decision you've made up to this point.
Yeah I get tired of this response. YOU NEED DRUGS NOW! No, life is often boring and mundane. You will not be happy every second of it, if you were you wouldn't even know what happiness is because it wouldn't stand out. The solution is to force yourself to do something, whether you feel good is irrelevant. Motivation rarely appears on its own, it's a result of action. You do not wait around to feel motivated.
The problem is modern society gives you this option when for centuries waiting to feel some sort of innate internal motivation wasn't an option, you did what you had to for survival whether you felt like it or not.
> At an overarching level, my primary wish in life is to leave something in the world that serves as an artifact of what kind of person I was. Maybe this wish is at fault and I ought to get a better wish instead, or I'll be destroying my drive for creation at every turn. But in the present, this is how I honestly feel.
Yes, I'm saying you would be better off dropping that, and instead just engaging in pure creation without any dependencies.
> Why would I be doing this if I was only going to keep all of it to myself?
That's my whole point. You shouldn't need a reason beyond "fun" or "just because" or even "keeping the hands/ears busy".
People are unreliable, having reasons that depend on other people are unreliable. Letting go of that and having only reasons that depend on yourself is reliable.
> Otherwise, the entire effort is nothing but toil with no sense of reward.
Once again, it is entirely possible to just do it without any sense of reward. I know because I've developed this mindset, while I used to crave reward.
> Everyone, snap the fuck out of it. Your life sucks, but it also doesn’t. We’re all going to be fine.
This is kinda what I was getting at before. The things that make us uniquely human are our abilities to override our natural tendencies. I figure that's what you're suggesting with this line.
To dig further into what I've said before about people being comfortable and existential concerns, I think part of the problem here is that it is harder to determine how to take action. The gap is quite large from where we are to where we need to be. In every day complications it is easy to break down a need into several tasks with clear goals. Whereas existential and abstract problems seem insurmountable and difficult to break down because of their complexities (a thing humans aren't particularly well equipped to handle through natural means). So it is easier to just lay flat. But I think part of what makes us human is being able to light that internal fire yourself, though it is not anywhere near as simple as it sounds.
> The emotion is sold because the emotion exists. They wouldn't be able to sell it if it didn't.
Very true.
> What brings you happiness, what brings you joy, is not really up to you.
Not quite so true, because of this:
> Don't think it has to look like anything, because it doesn't.
In general, people who are "sold" aren't going to be as happy as people who are capable of identifying their needs for themselves. In the case where a person is used to being sold, it's probably true that they're not as capable of taking this kind of responsibility for themselves.
However this is a skill that can be learned. It's the reason why I'm far happier now as a married man living a very simple life than I was when I was making gobs of money, renting an expensive beach house with a massive pool, and getting drunk all the time while chasing women.
I was sold on an ideal, and it was god awful depressing. As soon as I learned to let that go, things got much, much better.
I think part of what keeps me locked on to the hedonistic treadmill is that a lot of other people (including my partner) don't like who I am when I'm trying to stay off it. I tend to get more intense about a lot of things most folks don't care about.
It's funny, out of my whole family & friend circle I'm probably doing the most damage to myself via self medication, but when I try to get serious about things that matter and take a break from intoxicants, I end up doing just as much damage or more by putting my relationships through pointless trials of fire.
But I know what you mean about meaning. When it's good, it's really good and worth every bit of seeking.
It's unfortunate there are so many pitfalls to dodge for so many of us.
> Where you appeared to be justifying creating dissatisfaction on the basis that you are providing a solution to that dissatisfaction. I'm sorry if I misunderstood your point here.
Touché. I did say that. Balderdash.
My point (poorly stated) was that while I think it's cruel to create a problem where it doesn't exist, it's not cruel to promote the solution to a real problem that already exists. However, promoting the solution involves reminding you of the problem, which creates or emphasizes a dissatisfaction you may have been ignoring.
> I suppose that I did -- and I still do, because I don't see how my reply was unresponsive.
My point in using heroin as an example was to say there are plenty of ways to create happiness that aren't necessarily beneficial in the long run.
Perhaps some better examples would be:
- Sitting on the beach all day
- Not exercising
- Spending every dollar I have today and ignoring my future needs
All of these would lead to me being happy for a while. But eventually they're detrimental. Yes?
>So, one hour spent Really Happy, outweighs a year spent Just Happy, because that Really Happy is all received by your present self.
I find making decisions that end up along lines of this really, really difficult. The rational part of my brain knows very well which one should I choose, but it has really, really hard time arguing with that more... I don't know, primal? part of me.
I think it's really fascinating, how relatively weak our conscious self is in arguments with our short term desires.
>More than that is chasing a high via materialistic consumption and pollution.
Yeah that is what we are told by the people who control the information you receive. Live a minimalist life because that's all you need.
There are two sides of philosophy(IMO), those that believe in idealism, and those that believe in realism. I can flip back to Stoic idealism, but there is something real about Humans wanting More.
That feeling comes from dopamine. If you actually believe that feeling is better than actually living to experience that feeling again in the future, a heroin dealer will be more than happy to help you out.
> but you simply think that humans should change fundamentally.
Only in that they should be more rational. I don't think that is an onerous request. Many people already try to be.
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