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rory, you got so hung up on my reference to drug that you decided to ignore the point. The paragraph "Like, I'm uncertain if he's saying..." neither of those su

by rkalla 16y ago

rory, you got so hung up on my reference to drug that you decided to ignore the point. The paragraph "Like, I'm uncertain if he's saying..." neither of those summaries were what I was saying. I re-read the article twice to see if I was mis-stating something that made it sound how you described it and I couldn't see it... let me know if I missed something. It sounded to me like you saw "drug use" and "bad" in the same article and personalized the entire thing into an attack against you and "your favorite people" -- that's not what the article is about. The article points out how people chase happiness with easily accessible things; sometimes unhealthy things. I was looking at human behavior regarding over-eating highly satiating foods to quickly and easily compensate for unhappiness as an indicator that if we readily provide mechanism for even higher happiness boosts (assuming there weren't the stigma there is now around drugs) a good majority of people would likely use it. No where in the article did I comment on recreational use. The entire article was about ABUSE. From your closing paragraph, it sounded like you were talking about people using Ayahuasca/Peyote/LSD/whatever to gain moments of total clarity and shut off the mind. I think there are likely huge, legit benefits to these types of practices, but that isn't what I was talking about. Just like I wasn't saying that anyone that eats fastfood should be ashamed of themselves and are lesser people. I wrote an article about people's tendency to abuse substances to make themselves feel happy in a fast-paced world where we can't all sit on mountain tops and think. In that world, I think it's CAN BE dangerous to a large majority of people to have easy access to destructive things that make them feel happy that they might abuse. Again, I am not denouncing "drug users" as lesser humans. You could replace the word "drugs" in the article with "fast food" or "compulsive shopping" or "illegal street racing" --- the point is still the same.

rorymarinich 16y ago
Hey, Riyad! Glad you dropped by! It's not that I disagree with the larger point you're making. It's that I'm not certain quite why you outlined it in the way you did. (Actually, probably it's just that you wrote it without thinking too hard about it, which is totally how I wrote my most-known posts, so I completely understand.) If your primary issue is that people will take easy alternatives to happiness if it means avoiding more difficult but more satisfying approaches, then write an article about that specifically rather than shoehorning it in as a topic, because that's a very complicated issue that requires some breathing room of its own. As it happens, your article sounds more like: "If the thing that makes you happy hurts you, then do something else to be happy!" Well, yeah, but that doesn't really provide a novel perspective on the issue, or offer a potential solution. It doesn't even really explore in-depth what "unhealthiness" truly means. Obesity is one of the simplest forms of unhealthiness; there are more subtly damaging things that I'd love to read about. I didn't think your whole article was about drug users; that was just the one part of your article that stood out to be as particularly wrongheaded. The rest of it didn't strike me as being interesting enough to warrant comment, if you don't mind my saying so. It's a run-of-the-mill commentary on people being unhappy who ought to be happy, problem's hard to solve, society enables unhappiness, people won't you stop being so fat.

by rkalla 16y ago

rorymarinich 16y ago

Hey, Riyad! Glad you dropped by! It's not that I disagree with the larger point you're making. It's that I'm not certain quite why you outlined it in the way you did. (Actually, probably it's just that you wrote it without thinking too hard about it, which is totally how I wrote my most-known posts, so I completely understand.) If your primary issue is that people will take easy alternatives to happiness if it means avoiding more difficult but more satisfying approaches, then write an article about that specifically rather than shoehorning it in as a topic, because that's a very complicated issue that requires some breathing room of its own. As it happens, your article sounds more like: "If the thing that makes you happy hurts you, then do something else to be happy!" Well, yeah, but that doesn't really provide a novel perspective on the issue, or offer a potential solution. It doesn't even really explore in-depth what "unhealthiness" truly means. Obesity is one of the simplest forms of unhealthiness; there are more subtly damaging things that I'd love to read about. I didn't think your whole article was about drug users; that was just the one part of your article that stood out to be as particularly wrongheaded. The rest of it didn't strike me as being interesting enough to warrant comment, if you don't mind my saying so. It's a run-of-the-mill commentary on people being unhappy who ought to be happy, problem's hard to solve, society enables unhappiness, people won't you stop being so fat.