currylightskin
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Industrial Society has forced our culture to become one obsessed with Pleasure over Enjoyment.
In Greek mythology, Eros and Psyche gave birth to a daughter named Hedone. A daemon, or minor deity, she has no myths attached to her, but is known for her one gift to humankind: pleasure. Her gift, however, was also a curse. In Rome, where Hedone was called Voluptas, the statesman and philosopher Cicero saw her deification as “vicious and unnatural,” insofar as she “overpowers natural instinct.” That’s not so far from how we see things today. Pleasure can be a boon or a burden, depending on our relationship to it. It can leaven laborious days, or lead us to waste them. The pleasures of a mild stimulant such as caffeine can be harmless or even beneficial, but the pleasures of amphetamines can be deadly.
This creates a puzzle for the modern happiness seeker, who must navigate between the twin perils of puritanism and indulgence, leading to the much-dreaded rule of moderation, which is more or less the philosophy of leaving any party as soon as it gets really good. People force themselves to deprive themselves out of some bizarre sense of moral duty or discipline.
Enjoyment and pleasure are terms often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Pleasure happens to you; enjoyment is something that you create through your own effort. Pleasure is the lightheadedness you get from a bit of grain alcohol; enjoyment is the satisfaction of a good wine, properly understood. Pleasure is addictive and animal; enjoyment is elective and human.
In his 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that enjoyment gives you a sense of effort, forward movement, and accomplishment. Or, as two psychologists wrote in 2021, during enjoyment, one “commits oneself to savoring the situation and engaging in the task to have positive feelings of joy and fun.”
Enjoyment is better than pleasure because it is more conscious and permanent. As Csikszentmihalyi points out, everyone gets pleasure from eating when they’re hungry, but it takes some knowledge and cultivation to enjoy food. After you finish lunch, the pleasure is gone, and in fact, the idea of eating is no longer appealing because your physical need has been satisfied. Meanwhile, the memory of a meal enjoyed with friends transcends the immediate experience and can bring good feelings long after it is over. However, our culture of constant consumption is poisonous to this idea. It says to consume, consume, constantly consume and pursue that pleasure of consuming, like romans forcing themselves to vomit so that they can continue to eat. Keep buying new products, watching new movies, novelty is the greatest commodity because it allows you to consume. Chase that pleasure, it says, pleasure is all that matters, because that's what we are able to easily sell to you.
Each of us knows, without necessarily realizing it, that pleasure is inferior. When we say to kids, “Turn off the computer and go play outside,” we are exhorting them to choose enjoyment by doing something that requires more voluntary effort, does not create a dependency, and has more enduring benefits. We know that this advice will help our children have a happy life because our own happy childhood memories are of playing ball with friends, not sitting in front of the TV watching reruns of Spongebob.
But for these men, reruns of Spongebob is all that exists for them. They never learned how to enjoy, only consume pleasure. They make it a part of their identity, because the media they consume is all that they are.
However, it should be noted that Enjoyment can also be ruined by a worldview that is excessively practical, in which we feel our time and energy should never be “wasted.” This is particularly true in the case of leisure, which is often viewed as a misuse of time, because it is not productive in an economic sense. We've been forced to view human activities in a dichotomy, either you are doing something to be productive, be "on the grind," or lazing around and consuming. A mouse on a wheel with a button that stimulates pleasure receptors in your brain. Such an attitude lowers your enjoyment of leisure: People who consider activities such as hanging out with friends wasteful enjoy the activities 12 percent less than those who consider them to be productive.
Far from being a waste, enjoyment is generative and restorative, and thus worthy of time and resources. To answer Anon's question, I recommend scheduling enjoyable activities, especially with loved ones, much like exercise, or even just sharing/telling stories. If you leave them up to chance, you risk allowing them to get crowded out by work—or worse yet, mindless pleasures.
In his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, the 20th-century German philosopher Josef Pieper writes, “Leisure is only possible when a man is at one with himself.” Enjoyment of life—whether that means spending “unproductive” time with others, reading a good book, or taking a long walk—has a loftier significance than good feelings do. It is important for human agency, a life lived on purpose. Enjoyment means refusing to be managed by pleasures, nor subjugated by joyless drudgery. Pursuing it is a declaration of independence from your base impulses, be they licentious or despotic. It is a key ingredient in creating the life you truly want.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human being to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society. In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these to be highly important.
Tl;Dr - it's capitalism's fault, we've lost our sense of self and are forced to find identity and purpose through mindless consumption.
tagging high iq friend @6ft4
In Greek mythology, Eros and Psyche gave birth to a daughter named Hedone. A daemon, or minor deity, she has no myths attached to her, but is known for her one gift to humankind: pleasure. Her gift, however, was also a curse. In Rome, where Hedone was called Voluptas, the statesman and philosopher Cicero saw her deification as “vicious and unnatural,” insofar as she “overpowers natural instinct.” That’s not so far from how we see things today. Pleasure can be a boon or a burden, depending on our relationship to it. It can leaven laborious days, or lead us to waste them. The pleasures of a mild stimulant such as caffeine can be harmless or even beneficial, but the pleasures of amphetamines can be deadly.
This creates a puzzle for the modern happiness seeker, who must navigate between the twin perils of puritanism and indulgence, leading to the much-dreaded rule of moderation, which is more or less the philosophy of leaving any party as soon as it gets really good. People force themselves to deprive themselves out of some bizarre sense of moral duty or discipline.
Enjoyment and pleasure are terms often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Pleasure happens to you; enjoyment is something that you create through your own effort. Pleasure is the lightheadedness you get from a bit of grain alcohol; enjoyment is the satisfaction of a good wine, properly understood. Pleasure is addictive and animal; enjoyment is elective and human.
In his 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argues that enjoyment gives you a sense of effort, forward movement, and accomplishment. Or, as two psychologists wrote in 2021, during enjoyment, one “commits oneself to savoring the situation and engaging in the task to have positive feelings of joy and fun.”
Enjoyment is better than pleasure because it is more conscious and permanent. As Csikszentmihalyi points out, everyone gets pleasure from eating when they’re hungry, but it takes some knowledge and cultivation to enjoy food. After you finish lunch, the pleasure is gone, and in fact, the idea of eating is no longer appealing because your physical need has been satisfied. Meanwhile, the memory of a meal enjoyed with friends transcends the immediate experience and can bring good feelings long after it is over. However, our culture of constant consumption is poisonous to this idea. It says to consume, consume, constantly consume and pursue that pleasure of consuming, like romans forcing themselves to vomit so that they can continue to eat. Keep buying new products, watching new movies, novelty is the greatest commodity because it allows you to consume. Chase that pleasure, it says, pleasure is all that matters, because that's what we are able to easily sell to you.
Each of us knows, without necessarily realizing it, that pleasure is inferior. When we say to kids, “Turn off the computer and go play outside,” we are exhorting them to choose enjoyment by doing something that requires more voluntary effort, does not create a dependency, and has more enduring benefits. We know that this advice will help our children have a happy life because our own happy childhood memories are of playing ball with friends, not sitting in front of the TV watching reruns of Spongebob.
But for these men, reruns of Spongebob is all that exists for them. They never learned how to enjoy, only consume pleasure. They make it a part of their identity, because the media they consume is all that they are.
However, it should be noted that Enjoyment can also be ruined by a worldview that is excessively practical, in which we feel our time and energy should never be “wasted.” This is particularly true in the case of leisure, which is often viewed as a misuse of time, because it is not productive in an economic sense. We've been forced to view human activities in a dichotomy, either you are doing something to be productive, be "on the grind," or lazing around and consuming. A mouse on a wheel with a button that stimulates pleasure receptors in your brain. Such an attitude lowers your enjoyment of leisure: People who consider activities such as hanging out with friends wasteful enjoy the activities 12 percent less than those who consider them to be productive.
Far from being a waste, enjoyment is generative and restorative, and thus worthy of time and resources. To answer Anon's question, I recommend scheduling enjoyable activities, especially with loved ones, much like exercise, or even just sharing/telling stories. If you leave them up to chance, you risk allowing them to get crowded out by work—or worse yet, mindless pleasures.
In his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture, the 20th-century German philosopher Josef Pieper writes, “Leisure is only possible when a man is at one with himself.” Enjoyment of life—whether that means spending “unproductive” time with others, reading a good book, or taking a long walk—has a loftier significance than good feelings do. It is important for human agency, a life lived on purpose. Enjoyment means refusing to be managed by pleasures, nor subjugated by joyless drudgery. Pursuing it is a declaration of independence from your base impulses, be they licentious or despotic. It is a key ingredient in creating the life you truly want.
The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human being to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society. In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these to be highly important.
Tl;Dr - it's capitalism's fault, we've lost our sense of self and are forced to find identity and purpose through mindless consumption.
tagging high iq friend @6ft4
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