[RD] Butlerian Jihad.

[Farm Boy]

Mouthwash, if your options are sitting like a bump at a desk, for work or pleasure, or constant light activity like packing boxes or hoeing a row, you'll likely feel better, overall, overtime, for increasing your metabolism some. Dont do it all day every day. 8 hours interspersed is probably solid for moving around in a day. Working out will make you, likely, feel better yet. Assuming of course that being somewhat healthier will make you feel somewhat better. So hard to get back inertia when it's fallen off.

Physically idle commercialism is in a sense a value structure. It will generally react with hostility to competition, like other value strutures.

 

[Ajidica]

I don't know. Modern society tends to produce disorientation and isolation. Some people suffer the effects more than others, but it's a fairly general experience. Almost everyone experiences to some degree or another; if they don't, they're either a Buddhist saint, or a sociopath with no baseline experience to compare against. Moreover, this increasingly seems like a feature, not a bug: not a temporary side-effect of the up-ending of traditional agricultural society, but an ever-intensifying consequence of the deepening subordination of human society to the state and to capital.

Mouthwash's error is in fact that he sees these problems as spiritual and moral in essence, not that he wants to see these as general rather than individual problems. They are in fact problems of capitalism.

Sure, but I would argue that returning to Mouthwash's idealized farming communities would produce even more disorientation and isolation. Villages of, what, 60 people with a trip into the city once or twice a year does not seem like it would produce less disorientation and isolation. If small villages in the past encouraged community involvement that seems to have been more of a side-effect of living among a handful of people with no other options for entertainment.

For an anecdote, my dad grew up in a small Wisconsin farming town and his socialization options were limited to what the local school district could provide (theater, music, sports) and handing out/drinking with friends/people you knew. I don't think he has retained any friends from his hometown. On the flip side, my mother grew up in New York and is still in daily contact with the friends she made growing up.

 

[Farm Boy]

There's also a gender difference at play. Men isolate at higher rates. <shrug> Different people are different. I met zero people worth keeping as friends in the several years I spent in the burbs and traveling in to socialize with (established) friends that moved to Chicago. I imagine there were some there, regardless.

 

[innonimatu]

I'm addicted to the internet/games, can't productively do anything for long periods, am physically weak and malformed (like most modern people), and have next to no social life.

Dude, that is your real problem. You need to meet and get to know real people. Not isolation. Not the internet where everyone wears some kind of persona for a specific purpose only. Getting to know other people is of course difficult, seems like deliberately so, on out present age, I do not underestimate that.

Spirituality is a poor substitute to not having a social life. It can be a substitute, but I doubt it would be for you. You're posting here...

Modern cities are not necessarily awful. Most modern cities have some kind of older core anyway. You are unfortunate on this to be american, perhaps? But even the new world has its old cities. Explore before you dismiss one.

And stop wasting your energy worrying about exercise. You will adapt to the life you lead, that is the natural thing. Not the other way around: seek to lead a specific type of life so that you can conform to some physical necessity you were convinced of. You said you don't want to do sports or exercise, but you want to condition your choice of life to get exercise? If you do so you're putting "doing exercise" as an even greater priority that those people who just do some amateur sport!

I don't know. Modern society tends to produce disorientation and isolation. Some people suffer the effects more than others, but it's a fairly general experience. Almost everyone experiences to some degree or another; if they don't, they're either a Buddhist saint, or a sociopath with no baseline experience to compare against. Moreover, this increasingly seems like a feature, not a bug: not a temporary side-effect of the up-ending of traditional agricultural society, but an ever-intensifying consequence of the deepening subordination of human society to the state and to capital.

The tales I could tell of the damaged people I've met... Feature indeed. And the newer generation has been having it worse than mine.

 

[Mouthwash]

How exactly would capitalism be solved by spirituality and morality?

Moral frameworks based on spiritual claims are the only thing capable of resisting the encroachment of technology and consumerism. The only communities even putting up a fight in the US right now are the Amish and Haredim.

The claim of Marxism that a new, meaningful mode of life will spontaneously appear if we just change the economic system hasn't shown the slightest fruit in its century-and-a-half of existence. As for more moderate leftists, well, look at how thoroughly they've embraced gender ideology and state-run care/welfare, both essential features of consumerist societies.

For an anecdote, my dad grew up in a small Wisconsin farming town and his socialization options were limited to what the local school district could provide (theater, music, sports) and handing out/drinking with friends/people you knew. I don't think he has retained any friends from his hometown. On the flip side, my mother grew up in New York and is still in daily contact with the friends she made growing up.

The fact that your dad no longer lives in that town would make him a suspect example, no?

Spirituality is a poor substitute to not having a social life. It can be a substitute, but I doubt it would be for you. You're posting here...

Sure, but that doesn't mean it isn't essential for living the kind of life that I want.

The tales I could tell of the damaged people I've met... Feature indeed. And the newer generation has been having it worse than mine.

One day owning a smartphone will be punishable with prison time. May I live to see that day.

 

[Farm Boy]

That's because the smart phone will have written the law.

 

[Lexicus]

One day owning a smartphone will be punishable with prison time. May I live to see that day.

Trying to sell someone a smartphone, maybe. Putting smartphone owners in jail would be blaming and punishing the victim.

 

[Mouthwash]

Trying to sell someone a smartphone, maybe. Putting smartphone owners in jail would be blaming and punishing the victim.

I don't think it works like drug addiction, except for some rare cases where people have nervous breakdowns without their phones. If society by and large isn't doing it, there's little incentive for a genuine addict.

 

[Lexicus]

I don't think it works like drug addiction, except for some rare cases where people have nervous breakdowns without their phones. If society by and large isn't doing it, there's little incentive for a genuine addict.

As someone addicted to both things, I'll tell you they work pretty much the same.

 

[Hygro]

100% of happy people I know have embraced this society and leaned hard into it. Do they suffer the same problems? Yes but the difference in scale is vast enough to be a difference in category. I’ve never met anyone happy who waits on society changing.

Who is happy? My monogamous friends with or getting graduate degrees living professional lives.

When you’re hungry you imagine you need a feast when a hole in the wall burrito would suffice.

 

[Lexicus]

100% of happy people I know have embraced this society and leaned hard into it.

Sort of like saying 100% of happy people I know have had a full-frontal lobotomy: is the price really worth the reward?

 

[Hygro]

Sort of like saying 100% of happy people I know have had a full-frontal lobotomy: is the price really worth the reward?

I don’t mean what you mean.

 

[Synobun]

Sort of like saying 100% of happy people I know have had a full-frontal lobotomy: is the price really worth the reward?

The price is one of self-design. Look to yourself if your smartphone is destroying your life.

 

[Lexicus]

I don’t mean what you mean.

I know you don't, I'm simply presenting a different view of things

The price is one of self-design. Look to yourself if your smartphone is destroying your life.

My smartphone isn't destroying my life, but I mean, yeah, let's give the people who designed the thing to be more addictive than a slot machine a pass, because Individual Responsibility and Buyer Beware, right?

 

[Synobun]

I don't really hold a tinfoil view on the rigors of technology somehow controlling us against our will. The Rectangle of Despair beaming misery into your retinas is a choice.

As an aside, I'm addicted to food and have been for three years. I can't simply "choose" to not be addicted, but the issue doesn't lay with food as a concept. It lays with me. I'm the problem.

 

[Lexicus]

I don't really hold a tinfoil view on the rigors of technology somehow controlling us against our will. The Rectangle of Despair beaming misery into your retinas is a choice.

It's not an informed choice. Most people do not know that smartphones are engineered to trigger the reward pathway and all that stuff. It isn't just "smartphones" of course, that's a simplifying catch-all term in this context.

As an aside, I'm addicted to food and have been for three years. I can't simply "choose" to not be addicted, but the issue doesn't lay with food as a concept. It lays with me. I'm the problem.

This is an explicitly Victorian view of addiction which was rejected by the medical field decades ago because it does nothing to help anyone suffering from addiction.

I wonder whether you'd apply the same logic to cigarettes? You know that the tobacco companies in the US got into lots of trouble because they were found to have been lying when they claimed they didn't know their products were addictive? They were in fact exhaustively engineering their products to be more addictive! If cigarette users were the real problem it doesn't seem like the tobacco companies could have been able to manipulate the users so easily by adding and subtracting different compounds from their product. Strange, that.

 

[Mouthwash]

As an aside, I'm addicted to food and have been for three years. I can't simply "choose" to not be addicted, but the issue doesn't lay with food as a concept. It lays with me. I'm the problem.

You have some kind of genetic defect that makes you constantly hungry? Organisms without such defects don't engage in destructive behaviors unless they are exposed to an improper stimulus.

 

[Lexicus]

And by the way @Synsensa my beef is not with "technology" as such but with the way that technology is being used by capitalists....in other words, my problem is with capitalism.

 

[Synobun]

This is an explicitly Victorian view of addiction which was rejected by the medical field decades ago because it does nothing to help anyone suffering from addiction.

Eh? Every addiction recovery program is built on the fundamental idea that you are responsible for your own recovery. Addiction is insidious and it ruins you. If it were so easy to not be addicted, no one would be. But regardless of those realities, you're still the only one in control -- even if your control has been compromised.

Connected to the rest of your post, there are obviously chemicals at work and manufacturers/less-than-moral individuals can take advantage of that. Yet the truth remains that only you can enact a denial of these substances, whether you've yet to try them or you're years deep into having your daily life controlled by them. Manipulating psychology and creating chemical dependence are both heinous acts, and they should be prosecuted where and when possible. But the core of addiction lies with the individual. Conquering your addiction requires taking personal responsibility. You'll never be able to turn your back on it if it's always someone else's design or fault.

You have some kind of genetic defect that makes you constantly hungry? Organisms without such defects don't engage in destructive behaviors unless they are exposed to an improper stimulus.

Addiction is fairly fundamental in advanced organisms, enough so that we can test its effects and its causes without needing to resort to human testing because we can just try it out on other species first.

Destructive behavior could be a defect, or it could be the "system" working as intended. We don't know enough to say. But this will likely not be a fruitful discussion between us primarily because we hold different beliefs on the "design" behind humanity. A more spiritual approach to how we're put together sort of makes my perspective bankrupt on delivery.

Addiction takes advantage of reasonable systems and manifestations in our bodies. Barring infallible fail safes, I'm not sure there's a way to prevent addiction entirely. I'm also not sure if that indicates genetic defect. Genetics can make addiction worse, but is addiction itself born from genetics?

 

[Lexicus]

Eh? Every addiction recovery program is built on the fundamental idea that you are responsible for your own recovery. Addiction is insidious and it ruins you. If it were so easy to not be addicted, no one would be. But regardless of those realities, you're still the only one in control -- even if your control has been compromised.

Connected to the rest of your post, there are obviously chemicals at work and manufacturers/less-than-moral individuals can take advantage of that. Yet the truth remains that only you can enact a denial of these substances, whether you've yet to try them or you're years deep into having your daily life controlled by them. Manipulating psychology and creating chemical dependence are both heinous acts, and they should be prosecuted where and when possible. But the core of addiction lies with the individual. Conquering your addiction requires taking personal responsibility. You'll never be able to turn your back on it if it's always someone else's design or fault.

This is very different from saying that the addict is "the problem." I agree entirely that people who are addicted to things are responsible for kicking their habits, if that's what they decide they want to do. Since you evidently agree that people who purposely engineer addictive products to make more money from addicted customers are, like, criminally responsible for the problem in a way that your bog-standard addict is not, I have nothing left to say on the matter.