An Essential Flavor

I am and I remain an advocate for non-centralized value systems; I do not believe that human beings - in general, anyway - have a hierarchy of values with a summum bonum up top that provides value to everything beneath. We have distinct values - competing values. However, I have also noticed that humans have a tendency toward an essential flavor in their values - something that they feel should be present in all their pursuits and experiences lest a feeling of absence be experienced.

This "essential flavor" does not necessarily give the experience its value, but it is something that is sought and expected, and when it is not present it leaves the perceiver feeling as though there is something inadequate. These "essential flavors" seem to take the form of a profound interest or preoccupation and when experiences do not account for this interest or preoccupation the person may feel as though they are a bit distracting.

To illustrate the concept, imagine a mother who can no longer lose herself in anything that does not in some way better her children. Imagine the devout believer who feels dissatisfied when he cannot tie his moment to God. Imagine the addict who no longer enjoys his activities unless he can enjoy them with his substance of choice.

To understand a person's desired essential flavor is one of the quickest ways to see how that person could be given satisfaction or given despair. Remove it from their life and, though their life remains rich, for a time it will darken and become gray without the aspect that they have come to crave. Add it to their lives, and perhaps even the most mundane of activities can be enriched with that special spark that will keep them content in the midst of it.

A Distinction of Note

Divide the joys of life into two camps: joys which are dependent upon the state of the world and joys which are only dependent upon one's own will.

The result of pursuing the first sort of joy is despair and frustration. That is not to say that there will not be happiness as well, but it will almost certainly be intermingled with life refusing to provide what it is that your will is demanding.

The result of pursuing the second sort of joy is numbness. One will be able to please oneself whenever it is wanted and consequently feelings will lose their dimension. Like soaking a canvas in blue or flooding a room with bright light: the details fade away and depth becomes impossible to perceive.

Digestion of Media

I have noticed as of late that whenever I cycle through my phone to choose music to listen to, I invariably tap the "Recently Added" button and choose from among the first ten or so songs. I have also noticed that whenever the player moves beyond my most recent additions, my finger starts pressing the skip button.

I remember being in early High School and getting excited whenever Sublime's Wrong Way or Date Rape came on the radio. Then I remember later in High School listening to Nirvana songs over and over again. Then I entered college and began listening to Rammstein's singles. Rarely will my music player land on a Sublime, Nirvana, or even Rammstein song without my ears itching to hear something else.

I wonder if my interest in a song, or more properly my boredom with a song, has nothing to do with the traits of the songs themselves and more to do with the novelty of the song. Perhaps what keeps my attention is the extent to which the song lies outside what I am used to, the extent to which the song has not been already digested.

Imagine it in this way. You encounter a new sound, a new arrangement of instruments, a new combination of tone, accent, and emotion in a voice, and if it has an initial appeal to you, you begin playing it in your head if not playing it through speakers. You begin wrapping your mind around it, you begin making it more and more familiar to yourself. This may take a long time, it may only take a few weeks, but in time you find that whatever it was in the song that fascinated you begins to fade.

I submit that the fascination arose because there were characteristics in the song that stood outside of you. The song left impressions that were unfamiliar, perhaps only a few unfamiliar impressions in otherwise well-traveled territory. If those impressions struck you as lovely, then you are driven to consume them. Paradoxically you want to end what makes those elements interesting: the fact that you have not already made them a part of yourself.

Fascination, in this conception, is the feeling one gets when they find something outside themselves that they want to add to themselves. Contempt, then, in the usage of "familiarity breeds contempt" is the feeling one has when one encounters something with nothing new to chew on.

Happiness Tethered to Desire

If we imagine a man who wants nothing, do we imagine a happy man? Or if not a happy man, a man capable of happiness? What is happiness apart from a man's desire?

Of course we can define happiness in different ways, which means that there are possible definitions of happiness that do not require desire. Instead, lets focus on our gut understanding of happiness, the kind we inherit from culture and biology prior to reflection.

With that foggy notion of happiness, is it possible without desire? Is it possible without wanting something? I do not think I can conceive of it.

It may be pointed out that if we conceive of happiness this way, then we can conceive of a negative happiness as well, what would probably be called suffering. Suffering that would also depend upon desire. By wanting and having our desires frustrated we would experience pain.

To opt out of the game and try to quiet one's desires so that all suffering is manageable would also be to deny ourselves happiness. Happiness, under this conception, carries the risk of greater suffering. Is there a way around this? Would we really be better off escaping the risk of suffering? 

A Conception of Despair

If we conceive of human beings as lacking unity, of having a divided nature that may or may not be united in its ends, if we conceive of value as consisting of whatever individual humans happen to love and desire, and if we conceive of happiness as a kind of satisfaction or indulgence of our loves and desires, then I propose a conception of despair.

Despair is the state one gets into where one or more deep fragments of one's nature desires what conflicts with one or more deep fragments of one's nature. The result is that harmony and satisfaction becomes impossible: every indulgence is simultaneously a wound and every satisfaction simultaneously a poisoning. Happiness eludes a person in such a state because their loves and desires cannot be altogether taken care of.

What hope would there be in such a situation? So far as I can see, only a self-recreation could save such a person. They would require a new nature so that they would love differently.

The Problem With Common Ground

Between any two people or any group of people, there are those things that are common and those things that are particular. In a crowd of fifty people, they all might share the same nationality, maybe the same skin color, maybe the same profession, certainly the same species and need for food and oxygen; there could also be fifty different value systems, fifty different passions, fifty different languages, fifty different destinations. Some people want to focus on what is common, others want to focus on what is different.

It seems that people hope to overcome conflict, selfishness, unproductivity, and nearly all dissatisfaction if they can just get people to focus on common ground. What must be remembered, though, is that shared common ground can only account for a portion of any single human being, and the more individuals you add to the crowd the smaller that portion of a human being that is common to them all will be. No satisfaction is possible for the individual because no individual is taken as his full self, a sliver of satisfaction is possible at best. And certainly it is impossible for the crowd to be happy because crowds do not experience, only individuals do.

Happiness and satisfaction can only be sought at the individual level. At the macro, societal level, the best you can hope for is to stay out of people's way.

Happy New Year

I wish you all, whoever might stumble across this tiny corner of the web, a happy New Years.

I am, presently, drunk. Three Coronas, four Jager Bombs, a Surfer on Acid, and half a bottle wine are currently coursing through my system.

It occurs to me, that, at this moment I am happy. I am content. I enjoy my existence in this state. If, however, you were to offer me a button that would perpetuate it, I would refuse. I am in a state of joy, but I am not in a state of fulfillment.

Put simply, I feel good, but that is not enough. There is more to human existence than merely feeling good. Feeling content, or feeling good, is prerequisite to the most important matters of human existence.

There is something else we seek. I do not know what it precisely is. But a finite life spent exciting the parts of our brain responsible for pleasure will not satisfy our natures.

More than pleasure is requires.

Take it from a drunk individual, the sort of individual most likely to throw everything away for pleasure.

This activity is enjoyable, but it does not fulfill. We must go beyond. Go further. Find something else.

In the meantime, though, this is indeed fun.

I wish you all a happy New Years. For when one enjoys himself, he wishes that others will enjoys themselves too.

Illness and Hedonism

It is inevitable, I am bound to get sick at least two to four times starting in November and continuing into January. Currently, I'm in the middle of my second illness, a mild cold. Fortunately, being sick gave me a time to reflect on my emotional reaction to an aspect of reality. It provided me with an opportunity to gain insight into my response to a particular experience. It allowed me to discover what understanding could be gained from the perspective of someone who is (slightly) sick.

Being sick sucks.

Apart from that mind-blowing revelation, though, I had a train of thought on the first night when I could feel myself getting sick. I will come to that train of thought in a moment, first, a little background information.

I'm no fan of hedonism. I'm no fan of the notion that pleasure is good and pain is bad, partly because I think it is quite possible for pain to be good and pleasure to be bad, but even more pertinently, because I think there are other matters that can be valued more highly than pleasure and that in those cases pleasure and pain are subordinate to those higher values. Of course, due to my current nihilism, I cannot say that there is anything actually better than pleasure, only that I myself am very much relieved that humanity has historically managed to find much that they valued more highly.

Two considerations always concerned me, though. While I always found a hedonistic utopia hollow, I also found any situation that did not contain pleasure to be unsatisfying. Pleasure was not sufficient, but it was necessary; if you're interested in testing this for yourself, try to imagine yourself in heaven, however you would like to conceive it, but imagine it without anything resembling what you would call a good feeling. This always concerned me because it seemed to lend credence to the idea that conceiving of something as good was the same as conceiving of it as pleasant. The other consideration was that it seemed to me that alleviating suffering oftentimes seemed important and worthwhile to me; seeing people I care about suffer, even if their sufferings were actually quite insignificant, made me want to make things better for them. However, if there were more valuable things to be concerned about, then why did I care so much about their suffering, why did it so easily become a priority?

The train of thought I had, which I think will explain those two considerations without falling into hedonism, was this: when I am sick all I want is to get better. I want to stop feeling bad, and in fact, when I am sufficiently sick, that tends to be the prime focus of my life. Once I get better, though, I move on to other considerations. The increase of pleasure and the minimizing of pain is not my prime value when I am well, but it is when I am sick. Why is this?

It occurred to me that the life of pleasure vs. pain could be seen as a kind of necessity. As an analogy, consider oxygen: no one would live their whole life in pursuit of oxygen, but take it away and that becomes the single most important thing in the world. Once access is restored, the formerly deprived person will go back to whatever he finds truly valuable in the world. There are things that are important or even vital, but which can be satisfied to such an extent that they cease to seem worth seeking until they again become lacking. Oxygen is one such thing for physiological reasons; pleasure and the absence of pain could be one such thing in a spiritual, emotional, or mental sense.

Yes, one can lead a hedonistic life in pursuit of pleasure and in flight from pain, but for most people, happiness does not consist of just matters of pleasure. Still, matters of pleasure and pain are a part of happiness, they must be tended to before we move on to our higher values. I conceive of it, now, like a pyramid, sort of like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs; on the bottom of the pyramid are all the things that must be satisfied and moved beyond.

If you need to shit, you go and shit. But who would lead a life in pursuit of shitting? Shit, and then move on.

One thought occurs to me now, though. All those “higher” values, whatever they might be (say, love, power, harmony, or creative expression), do we pursue these things because we value them so much or do we pursue them because they're permanently elusive? They either can't be completely satisfied or they are very unlikely to be satisfied, so they can only be more fulfilled or less fulfilled. If they were to ever be fulfilled, though, would they too be moved beyond? A question for another day.

On Happiness

Original Posting

Everyone spends their life trying to avoid pain and pursue happiness. The perfect world would be a world full of many diverse pleasures, and pain (not just in a physical sense, but as everything that hinders our life of pleasure) does not exist or is at least brought down to its most most minimal point.

Is this true?

Is this really what we want?

Is this really the world that our common nature craves?

I don't think it is. I don't think that we want a world without pain. Not just because the existence of pain gives us an appreciation of pleasure, but because we were grown in a world with pain and suffering. It's what we crawled out of, it shaped our nature. To deny it would be to deny a fundamental aspect of life itself.

Life is happiness; life is also suffering.

Look at our art. When we are creative, what do we create? Do we create idealistic worlds of peace, harmony, and joy? No. We claim to want them, but we spend no time creating them. No, everything we create with a narrative (with the possible exclusion of bubblegum pop) always includes pain and suffering somewhere.

We grew up in it, we crave it.

I'm not saying we're all masochists or that we all want to sit around torturing ourselves. What I am saying is that any conception of a good life or a good world without suffering is a concept that doesn't understand human nature. It's listening to humanity's mouth rather than its actions.

We desire pleasure, fun, and joy; but deep down we wouldn't be happy without pain, suffering, and a little anguish.

So, if you are altruistically inclined, by all means work to make the world a more pleasurable place. Try to remove the pain in the world. But you better hope the pain isn't completely removable, otherwise you might go too far and fuck up the world.