Can The Pursuit Of Pleasure Be An Addiction If It's Also Normal Human Life?

When I saw this headline -- "The pursuit of pleasure is a modern-day addiction -- I thought the piece might be some kind of joke or parody.

I mean, I know some people have expanded the scope of "addition" so that it includes things like shopping and carbohydrates, and I know other people can get agitated about that expansion, as if it implies that a chocolate habit and a cocaine habit are somehow on a par. But at least shopping and carbohydrates are actual specific things. And there's no question that these things can be "addictive" in the sense that the more you get the get the more you want.

But pleasure? I mean, that's not a thing you do or ingest, it's more a part of the human experience. How can you be addicted to a part of the human experience? Plus, isn't pleasure the mechanism through which those other things become so habit-forming? What does it mean to reduce the addiction to the very mechanism that makes them work?

I'm no expert on human psychobiology, but isn't pleasure supposed to be one of the main motivating forces of life? Isn't the pursuit of pleasure one of the central reasons people do things? How could it also be a pathological addiction?

And finally, what's a life without pleasure? The author of the piece, Robert Lustig is famous for his view that sugar is a poison. So is the idea that anything pleasurable is also bad? So .. even healthy food shouldn't be consumed because it is enjoyable to eat? WTF?

When I read the piece, it didn't seem quite as absurd as I thought it would be. When you get past the headline, there are more specific examples of ways in which particular pleasures are out of control. A fondness for soda leads to the "big gulp"; the love of likes leads to chronic Instagram checking. Constant stress and anxiety create the backdrop in which we're in constant need of the feel good chemicals in our brain, just to feel OK. To get the feel good chemicals, we do more and more of the "pleasure things," and get less and less out of them, and so on and so on. I guess you could describe that as being addicted to pleasure.

As regular readers of this blog may expect, I can never read things like this without thinking of the ways that these effects are sort of built into the whole capitalist system. What's more successful in capitalism than a commodity that the more people have of them the more they want? Armies of food technologists work day and night to bring about exactly this state of affairs. Whole university departments exist to train people how to do it. How is it surprising that this is where we've ended up?

Later in the essay, Lustig goes back to the more general idea that somehow it's pleasure itself that is the problem, and there he says that to live the right way we should seek "happiness" rather than pleasure. It's funny, because I was just getting ready to teach Mill, and we were going to talk about his "greatest happiness principle" where he says that "actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.  By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness pain, and the privation of pleasure.” So maybe Mill things happiness and pleasure are the same, or at least that he thinks we can use the words interchangeably. On the other hand, Mill famously distinguished between "higher" and "lower" pleasures so who knows.

Lustig says that "the more pleasure you seek, the more unhappy you get and the more likelihood you will slide into addiction or depression" and that "our ability to perceive happiness has been sabotaged by our modern incessant quest for pleasure, which our consumer culture has made all too easy to satisfy."

I see what he's getting at, but there seems to me something strange about the formulation. People have always sought pleasure, haven't they? So it's the world that's changing, not human nature. It seems to me like we just have a lot more easy sources of pleasure. As we've long said on this blog, easy sources of pleasure are difficult for humans: you think you want treats, but by definition a treat is a thing you don't get all the time. So.. how do you keep it in check? Before you know it, it you've cascaded into a misery of self-denial, living both as tyrant and supplicant, begging yourself for those treats that you yourself decided you can't have too much of.

But again, I think people have always been like that. It's OK to love pleasure. It's our modern surroundings that are the problem, not us.

Diagnosis: Hypersobriety. Or, What's So Bad About Self-Medicating?

I love to drink. I drink more is recommended by the medico-establishment powers that be, but I think in 2015 that's not the shocking thing. The shocking thing is that I don't really worry about it too much.

There are several reasons I'm not in a moral panic about my own drinking. For one thing, I used to have a wide range of bad habits and I've managed to quit almost all of them. Even Diet Coke, which I love and regard as the pinnacle of human taste perfection, I haven't had in about five years. Really, you can't expect a person to give up everything.

For another thing, I suffer zero noticeable bad effects from my drinking. I never have a hangover or feel bad, and pace the omnipresent freak-out over "relationship problems," my loved ones agree: drinking makes me, if anything, kinder, happier, warmer, more patient, and more fun.

Also, and as I've written about before, I feel like drinking makes me more me. A better version of me. I don't know if you remember that book Listening to Prozac, from the early 90s? The author, Peter Kramer, argued that some patients on anti-depressants experience a sense of being more themselves. The widespread fear that psycho-pharmaceuticals always make you less you is wrong, just a prejudice, based on some implicit mistaken metaphysics of personal identity.

Listening to Prozac quotes one patient as saying that being on Prozac makes them feel "Unencumbered, more vitally alive, less pessimistic" -- and when I read that I was like, "Yes!" That's how drinking makes me feel. Without drinking, I tend toward sadness and low life-force. When I stop for a while, I run into trouble: my mind gets filled up with stuff, clogged with emotion, the mental equivalent of a hoarder's living room. Drinking, I'm fresh and alive.

Pursuing the medical model analogy, I was thinking about what it is about me that makes this the appropriate treatment, and I noticed that I often have the feeling that two drinks makes me feel normal, well, brought to some imaginary baseline. Feelings of sadness and dread are kept at bay. I was struggling to interpret the underlying feeling. What is this? Anxiety? Depression? Melancholia?

And then it hit me: if drinking is the solution, maybe my problem is just sobriety. I have an excess of it. Hypersobriety. Though there are probably many, this condition has one obvious and natural treatment option: namely, drinking.

The diagnosis actually fits my personality in other ways as well. I'm organized, I don't really procrastinate, and I read books for fun. Plus, I often feel excessively clear-eyed about the world, a characteristic of sobriety that is known to lead to trouble: as we know, self-deceiving, overly optimistic people do well with life while seeing things as they are leads to sadness and depression.

For me, part of being excessively clear-eyed is a deficit in the repression direction. I seem to have trouble blocking out those kinds of facts that, when you're aware of them, get quickly overwhelming. We are all going to die in the not so far away future. And we're either going to die young, or get old. This is going to happen not just to you but to your kids and all the people you love.

The only healthy response to these facts is to frequently repress awareness of them. But if you suffer from hypersobriety -- well, you need a little boost in the repression direction.

I feel like there's a lot of resistance to the use of alcohol and other fun substances to make people feel better. Some of this is based on the very real fact that for a lot of people, using fun substances doesn't work so well in the long run, leading to addiction and other problems. But what about the rest of us? If it's working reasonably well, what's the big deal?

I think a lot of the resistance comes from the idea that self-medicating might come with health risks or side-effects, and this leads to free-rider type indignation, like "OMG, you are doing this thing to make yourself feel better, but that might lead, in some vague and long-term way, to some way in which the rest of us have to pay more to help you down the line. Even though lots of treatments come with other health effects down the line, we'd hate to think that somehow your self-medication might be enjoyable, so that you're somehow having a good time."

But I think this form of indignation is a little overblown and ridiculous. Lots of medical treatments come with downsides and side effects, many of them serious. Just yesterday in the New York Times Ezekiel Emanuel wrote about how astonishingly often more medical care can lead to much worse outcomes. Having the best, most senior cardiac doctors led to more deaths. Stopping medications in elderly patients made them better off.

Again, I'm not denying that in some circumstances self-medication doesn't work. But I don't think the relative frequency of failure justifies the negativity. I guess what I'm saying is, next time you see someone eating a lot of cake or chewing nicotine gum or drinking a lot of Diet Coke or Pinot Grigio or whatever, don't think you have to immediately moralize about it. Maybe overall, it's just the thing they need.

World Citizenship And Its Discontents

I feel like there's an idea out there that we should think of ourselves as citizens of the world and that somehow the internet, by connecting us all up together, is part of making that happen.

Whether a person lives on your block or lives halfway across the world, no matter: with the click of a mouse you can find out what they had for breakfast or whether they're being shafted by their local city council or law enforcement or what their views are on the latest celebrity sex scandal.

It's a nice idea, and when you're looking at one of those pictures taken from space of the whole earth it's easy to get into that "big blue marble" mood. . 

But honestly it's not really working out for me.

For one thing, I can only care about a pretty limited number of people at a given time. I care a lot about the people in my actual life. I'm sad when they're sad and I'm happy when they're happy and I'm worried when they're in trouble. But I can only do that for so many people.

The rest of the world? Sorry, no. The truth is, when I read about the sadnesses, thrills, and troubles of strangers I often feel overwhelmed, annoyed, envious or impatient. And then I feel like a cold, surly, heartless son of a bitch. It's not good.

Also, I'm tired of hearing so many opinions. Why is so much of what people have to say to one another their opinions about things? "Cats are mean and destroy wildlife." "No, cats are cute but you must keep them inside." "Person X is a hateful monster." "No, person X is doing the best they could, is so much better than person Y." "X is bad." "No, people who criticize X are bad."

I have nothing against opinions per se. They're often very important. But I can only handle a few at a time. A lot of opinions send my brain into overdrive, because I don't know the backstory, or because I know part of the backstory and have to suddenly decide whether I should be learning more of the backstory which causes me to have to think about the sources of my information, or because I do know the backstory and I don't really agree and I have to think about why that is.

Worse, being a citizen of the world often seems to require having a lot of opinions. Once you've heard a bunch of things about what happened and then you've heard a bunch of opinions, you're often then asked to have an opinion. Again, nothing against opinions. I have lots. But I can only handle a few at a time. For me, forming a bunch of new ones can be a serious drain on my mental energy.


Before I started studying philosophy I studied math. And one of the things I loved about studying math was how few opinions I was called on to form. Mostly I just learned mathematical concepts and struggled to prove some things from some other things. I could go days without hearing or forming opinions.

One of the few things I heard my math professors express opinions about was the relative difficulty and merit of different kinds of math. The topology people thought that category theory was stupid and easy, or the algebra people thought analysis was dry, or someone thought the "best years" of set theory were over. It's a narrow range, and, especially as a student, it was easy to just let it go in one ear and out the other.

Once I started studying philosophy and hanging out with humanities people, I was stunned by the number of opinions I was expected to have right off the bat. "What'd you think about that article?" "What'd you think of the talk?" " What do you think about so-and-so?" "What do you think?" "What's your view on things?" "What's your take?" "We want your opinion!" Phew.

World citizenship means you can have opinions on anything, anywhere, happening in any context. It's exhausting.

But honestly, I think one of the biggest discontents of world citizenship for a lot of people is the way it constantly hammers home at you that you are a tiny speck in a gigantic world.

If you think of yourself as part of a smaller community unit, and you use that unit as a comparison class, it's likely you can achieve something great relative to that group of people. Maybe you're smart or accomplished, or maybe you're just really funny or nice, or maybe you make really great potato salad or something.

When you're a citizen of the world, you see everyone's eyes on someone else, twenty-four seven. You're either super brilliant world famous amazing person, or you've got something viral, or else ... or else you're nobody: just some fruit fly in the banquet of life.

Sitting Quietly In A Room Alone: It's The Boredom, Stupid!

Gene Wilder, Young Frankenstein

By now I'm sure you've heard about those recent studies that found many people would rather give themselves painful shocks than sit quietly doing nothing. Reading about this research in the popular press, I was like "Can you say Rorschach Test?" It's like everyone who encountered the basic facts had their own spin on how to interpret what happened.

The facts are roughly these: when told to sit quietly alone for 6 to 15 minutes, almost everyone found the experience unpleasant, and many people -- in one case 12 of 18 men and 6 of 24 women gave themselves painful electric shocks rather than just sitting there.

The conclusion in the abstract for the actual scholarly paper says simply, "Most people seem to prefer to be doing something rather than nothing, even if that something is negative."

OK, I admit to being a little bit surprised about the shocks -- but really, is it really news that people find it hard to sit quietly doing nothing? Almost no one ever does this by choice, when people do manage it it's a whole special activity called "meditation," and people who regularly ponder things just in their own minds for long periods of time are considered strange and even sinister. So: how is this a surprise?

After all, it's only been like three-hundred and fifty years since Pascal said that "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

But everyone had their own ideas about the significance of the findings.

The Guardian, and some of the researchers quoted, seemed to emphasize the "being alone with your own thoughts" aspect of the whole thing -- as if it were the thoughts people were having that bothered them, as if people just use activities to avoid thinking about things.

This makes no sense to me. People are constantly thinking about things -- I mean, it's not like brooding and worrying are nineteenth-century activities.  The fact that people want to brood and worry while pacing, listening to stuff, and texting doesn't mean they're not brooding.

Many Guardian commentators wanted to pile on the whole "Kids Today! They Can't Think!" ridiculousness. Yeah -- I'm sure you guys all sit around alone contemplating the mysteries of quantum mechanics all day.

Predictably, The New York Times linked the whole thing up to the OMG modern society is so BUSY we have no time to THINK we're always RUSHING AROUND! As if we're the first generation in the history of the universe that spends a lot of time doing things and talking to other people.

Personally I was astonished that no one mentioned boredom. Isn't it just boring to sit alone with your thoughts doing nothing? I spend a lot of time thinking about things, but I'm almost always reading, typing, writing, talking, listening, drawing, or doing something other thinking-associated activity. Often I'm also doing other activities, like drinking coffee, or looking out the window, at the same time.

The fact that I almost never just sit quietly alone in a room thinking about things doesn't mean I don't contemplate. I contemplate all the fucking time -- I'm a philosopher; I'm stuffed to overflowing with contemplation.

The fact that I almost never just sit quietly alone in a room thinking about things is because sitting quietly alone in a room is BORING.

It might seem like this boredom hypothesis is less exciting or revolutionary than the "people can't be alone with their thoughts" hypothesis, but in my view that's not the case. Because the fact that boredom can make people crazy and self-destructive is a profound and unreckoned with truth.


Often our modern western theory of people sneaks in an assumption that beyond basic needs what people want is best described as pleasure or happiness. It depends on what you mean by those things, of course -- but given the depth of the hatred of boredom, it seems to me that pleasure and happiness are barely scratching the surface.

Interestingly, the Guardian subheadline for the story says "Report from psychologists at Virginia and Harvard Universities tackles question of why most of us find it so hard to do nothing."

But as far as I can tell the report does nothing of the kind. The report tells us HOW EXTREMELY most of us find it so hard to do nothing, but it tells us nothing about WHY most of us find it so hard to do nothing.

In that area, we haven't really made any progress-- we're just back with Pascal, observing the human condition. 

I Have A Thinking Problem

 A few days ago I sent myself an email that said "Is thinking about things ruining my life?"

You know what they say: "The first step is admitting you have a problem."

So yes: I have a thinking problem.

As the offspring of a chemical engineering professor dad and a letters-to-the-editor type mom, I probably started off with a genetic predisposition for problem thinking, and a lot of my youth was spent pursuing a more non-thinking lifestyle. Mostly that was through the classic methods of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.

In college I studied math, and I might have been OK if I'd been able to stick with that. Because even though math is thinking, it's not thinking about anything. It's like the mental equivalent of wholesome but pointless exercise: you do it, it's fun, and when you're done, you're pleasantly worn out and ready for rest.

But as we all know that didn't happen. And opting for philosophy -- well, it's like a sugar addict committing to life in a candy store. Thinking thinking thinking, and then when the day is over, you just can't stop. A movie? Food? Music? Ooh, I have some thoughts!!!

The other day I happened to pick up a book by Colette -- the first of the wonderful Claudine books, Claudine at School. You know about Colette? Belle époque writer and music-hall performer, celebrity with a complex and varied romantic life.

When I was in my late teens I was a maniac for Colette's writings and I was especially crazy about the Claudine stories, which begin with the story of teenage small-town Claudine and her crushes and romances with other girls, her flirtations with teachers and adults of both sexes, her intellectually sophisticated jokes, and her ultimate seriousness about life. The Claudine stories get more complicated, but always, they are books that make me feel at home.

When I picked up Claudine at School last week, I began with Colette's Preface, and was reminded of the fact that her famous wit and charlatan first husband Willy (full name Henry Gauthier-Villars, he claimed to be a fancy aristocrat) had told her to write the stories and had told her to "spice them up."

And because my thinking is now out of control, this led me into a spiral of reflection. Were the things I resonated with in Colette partly there because some guy wanted to sell more books? If they were did it matter? How did feminism come into play?

My friend assured me that there was really no cause for concern. The things I loved in Colette were the things she continued to write about for the rest of her very long life, during and after her other two marriages and her many other affairs and her many romantic friendships. Even if Willy  had prompted her thoughts on that occasion, they were her thoughts, and they were of a piece with the way she wrote about life and love and sex for the rest of her life.

Though I'm persuaded by this answer, I feel something in this thought process has not been good, that the thoughts themselves dampened or mediated something that had been bright and unmediated, in a wonderful way, before I started thinking too much about them. I feel I used to be able to access that brighter more immediate relation to the world, before my thinking got out of control.

There is no real answer to this problem. Like eating, thinking isn't the kind of thing you can just give up cold turkey. And it's not like I can reimmerse myself in the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll lifestyle. Because as we all know, the way of the adolescent, though it's not wrong, is just not sustainable.

Inequality And Well-Being: A Fable About The History Of "Efficiency"

From Mother Jones

Once upon a time there were some philosophers who came up with the radical idea that what mattered in life was bringing about the most happiness and pleasure possible, and the least pain and suffering. "Everyone counts for the same amount!" they said. "The greatest good for the greatest number!" You add it up. It was a moral requirement: always act so as to bring about the most pleasure for the least pain. They called this "utilitarianism."

Whatever your reservations about this view (and I have a few), you have to admit that it is a pretty radical idea.

Since a dollar given to a poor person will bring about a far greater increase in well-being than a dollar taken from a rich one will cause pain, there are immediate and deep egalitarian implications. Since animals feel pain and pleasure, they are immediately included in the moral calculus; since their factory farm life and death is worse for them than your hamburger pleasure is good for you, veganism for everybody. Since you have to take each person into consideration equally, you must foster the pleasures and ease the pains of strangers on the other side of the world equally to the pains and pleasures of your friends, your family, yourself. Since people can be mistaken about what is good for them, it's true well-being we must maximize, not just the satisfactions of, say, consumer items.

Status quo: demolished.

Back in the day, economists had the sensible idea that utilitarian concept of maximizing would be a good concept for evaluating policies, schemes, and social frameworks. One thing they noticed early on, though, was that measuring pleasure and happiness in an objective way is difficult. For this and other reasons, they shifted from measuring pleasure and happiness directly to measuring the satisfaction of personal preferences. Of course, preferences in the mind are also hard to measure. To address this, they started using the idea of "revealed preferences" -- which are preferences you reveal through your actions. When you buy some cargo pants, you are revealing a preference for cargo pants over the money and over other things you could have spent that money on.

I'm not sure exactly when the term "efficiency" came into use, but the idea was to maximize the satisfaction of revealed preferences at the least cost of frustrating them. As is often pointed out, there are immediate peculiar implications of a strategy of maximizing revealed preferences. In our ordinary lives we do not treat all preferences the same, as things to be fulfilled. A preference for cruelty, harm, or racial discrimination isn't the same as a preference for risotto. A problem gambler who loses his home "reveals a preference" whose satisfaction hardly seems to be maximizing his well-being.

And on top of all that: where do preferences come from? Efficiency as preference satisfaction doesn't concern itself with this question, but it's no secret that our preferences are deeply influenced by our cultural surroundings, our family and friends, and advertising. In a capitalist society like ours, there are armies of people working 'round the clock to instill in us preferences for cargo pants, Ford Probes, and giant television sets.

While there are still egalitarian implications -- the preference a dialysis patient has for a cure is stronger than anyone's preference for a new yacht -- maximizing revealed preference now says that for anyone who wants to buy cargo pants, Ford Probes, and giant television sets, maximizing well-being means delivering those things.

Status quo: altered.

Often these days, though, "efficiency" is measured not in terms of preference satisfaction, but in terms of maximizing goods and resources. A policy or social framework is efficient if it produces those things.

Bam! This immediately undercuts the egalitarian implications of efficiency. If we're counting dollars, the benefit to a poor person of getting or keeping a dollar is now equal to the cost to a rich person of losing, or losing out on one.

Indeed -- political rhetoric these days often invokes an idea opposite to that of moral utilitarianism, claiming that since a rich person might be a "job creator," efficiency requires preferring them as recipients of goods and resources (why increased assets, rather than increased demand, is thought to be the key issue, I've never understood). There are people who believe this benefits the poor indirectly, but the point here is that conceptually, it needn't whatsoever. Efficiency as maximizing goods and resources just counts the total. It doesn't track who is getting what. Increased efficiency is 100% compatible with poor people getting poorer.

You might think it couldn't get any worse, but in fact "efficiency" in economic and policy talk often refers to "Pareto efficiency," which means that no one can be made better off without making someone worse off. This just assumes some starting point and looks for improvements that come at no cost. As Wikipedia says, "Pareto efficiency is a minimal notion of efficiency and does not necessarily result in a socially desirable distribution of resources: it makes no statement about equality, or the overall well-being of a society."

Status quo: reified. Rich get richer; poor people can suck it.

I'm not claiming to have given a full history of this important concept, just to have connected the dots in what I think is an illuminating way. There's more in the economist Joan Robinson's brilliant 1962 book Economic Philosophy.

I'm always astonished to see things in the news where people are like "OMG inequality is rising, what could explain it??" as if equality were somehow a natural state of things and we'd need a special explanation for a rise inequality. This makes no sense to me. In a world with unequal starting points and reasoning processes that don't incorporate fairness or justice, never mind equality itself, how would it be any other way?

My Life Force Theory Of Human Nature

L. A. Lakers fans, after a big win.

Where we are going with this post:  an explanation of why people riot when their team wins.

Where we are starting with this post:  a consideration of some unified theories of human behavior. 

In the middle:  an explication of that under-recognized and unappreciated force of human existence:  The Life Force.  

When it comes to theories of human behavior, it always drives me crazy when people say that what humans really want out of life should be understood as just "pleasure" or "happiness."

You hear the first most often when people are talking about motivation, the idea being that humans are primarily motivated by the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. 

You hear the second when people are trying to give big psychology theories about the nature of desire and its role in our lives.  There's a whole new mini-cottage industry now of books about happiness and how to achieve it.

But I'm just not buying either of these.  Can't you want things knowing they'll bring you displeasure and unhappiness?  Think about the last time you broke up with someone, or were broken up with, romantically.  In the immediate aftermath, couldn't you have a burning, itchy, crazy desire to call that person, even while knowing that calling them will make you not just miserable but also wildly unhappy?

And I've talked about this before, but can't you sensibly want children even if you are convinced by the studies that show taking care of them is boring and displeasurable and parents are less happy overall than non-parents?  If you're thinking about having kids, are pleasure and happiness really the only things you're considering?  It seems bizarre to me to think that they would.

Anyway, there is one basic desire, one burning human drive, that these theories always seem to me to leave out.  That is:  the need to feel alive.  I call it The Life Force.

The way the Life Force manifests itself in our modern western culture, when your Life Force is high, you're engaged.  You're full of appetites.  You want to do stuff:  make lentil soup, improve your golf game, learn German.  You have a burning desire not only to be alive, but to imprint yourself on the world, to make things happen. 

When your Life Force is low, you don't see the point of living.  You don't care much what happens.  You have no need, or you're afraid, to exert your force, to exert your identity, on the world around you.

If you're at all in thrall to the harmony myth of human nature, you might think that The Life Force is good and its absence is bad.  But I don't think that can be right.  Because much as The Life Force can be the amazing power of creativity, it can also be the insane passion of rage, or the rabid desire for destruction.

If you're angry at someone and you sink into sadness and depression that is Low Life Force.  But if you lash out in a rage, and shout, and throw dishes, that is actually High Life Force:  you're imprinting yourself on the world, being you, and making things happen.  It's just that those things are bad.  

High Life Force might be good for you, but it might be bad for the rest of the world.  Because the desire to make things happen, it doesn't really distinguish between the good and the bad.  It just wants.

The Life Force involves wanting things, and it is often disturbing to me the way wanting things feels good.  Because as we all know, wanting things can be as frustrating as hell.  But then when you're faced with the opposite -- with NOT wanting things -- you're like Oh, wait, sorry, can you bring back the wanting please?

The desire to eat more food than is good for you:  frustrating.  Insufficient desire to eat enough food than is good for you:  heartbreaking.  Did you ever read stories by cancer patients who've lost their appetite and need marijuana just to be able to eat at all?  It makes insufficient desire seem like the saddest thing in the world.  Same thing for sex.  If you think wanting is bad, think about not wanting for about five minutes.  You'll change your mind.

In my theory of The Life Force, the desire, the need, to have The Force, and thus feel that want and desire, is basic and doesn't come from something else.  The problem arises when you have it, and now you have this need to make things happen.  It's a need that can sometimes be met in a constructive way, but not always.

Everyone's familiar with the pattern when it comes to sex.  When you want sex, you feel alive, even if you also feel frustrated.  And then if you get to have sex, you're making things happen, and that feels fantastic.  After, your Life Force is dissipated, especially if you've had an orgasm.  Orgasms:  very pleasurable, but they do not add to your life force.  After, you have to wait a little for the secret vial in your heart to replenish itself. 

The way The Life Force functions in a consumer culture like ours is particularly interesting, because in that culture, shopping mimics the Life Force pattern of sex without the attendant difficulties.  You set out:  you're wanting, you feel alive.  You buy:  you're making things happen, and it feels good.  After, instead of the dissipation from orgasm, you have clothes/shoes/toys/food to bring home and enjoy.  The Life Force just settles itself down very nicely.  When you think about it that way, it's not surprising that the average credit card debt in the US is almost 16,000 dollars. 

But getting back to the rioting.  I don't watch sports, but it is not hard for me to picture the Life Force pattern of important sporting events.  Was there ever more of a context for wanting and for feeling alive?  But since you're watching, there's not much outlet for making things happen.

If your team loses, your Life Force dissipates and you feel like crap and you have to wait for time to pass for your Life Force to come back.  But if your team wins, your Life Force goes through the roof:  BAM!.  What are you going to do with all that?  You've suddenly got to make things happen. 

And if you're with eight million other people in exactly the same mood, and you're out on the street, does it surprise you that those things include destroying things and setting cars on fire?  Well, it doesn't surprise me. 

The pleasure and happiness theories don't do so well explaining the winning rioters.  Destroying cars isn't on most people's bucket list, and no one expects it to bring peace and contentment. 

But the Life Force theory of human nature makes the whole thing very obvious and clear.

Critical Notice: RuPaul, Workin' It

The full title of this work is Workin' It: RuPaul's Guide to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Style.  I bought it after hearing RuPaul as the celebrity guest on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!

I didn't know much about RuPaul, but I found his philosophy of life very appealing (his? hers? from what I understand, they're equally appropriate).  Basically, that philosophy combines a kind of insistence on living in the moment -- not as "mindfulness" but more as "fabulousness" -- together with a healthy dose of "also, don't be an asshole."

Not everyone appreciates the important distinction between being "sassy" and being "bitchy," but RuPaul puts it front and center, explaining in Chapter One of the book how, early in his career, he had to rewrite the whole script for the VH1 fashion awards in 1996 because the writers thought a drag queen had to be bitchy and mean.  I'm committed to anti-meanness, so I'm all over this.  I also liked the way, on the show, he talked about the politics of drag, and how he got into performing that way as a transgressive political act, which I thought was sophisticated and smart. 

So I bought the book, thinking it might have some real life advice for me on living fabulously.

Results:  overall, a little mixed, but definitely some great and intersesting moments:

Most Mom-Like Advice

Be punctual! When you're late you're disrespectful of others and disrespectful of yourself.  Also, stand up straight and don't smoke!


Most Surprising Intimate Moment 

This would be the description of RuPaul's first colonic irrigation.  OK, I wasn't surprised a discussion of this weird trend appeared in the book, because there's lots of "health" advice of the kind you typically get from celebrities, and who knows why, but celebrity health is all about removing everything from your intestines in whatever way possible.  

What surprised me was that in the middle of a description you would almost call "family friendly" in its blandness, we get the following:  "She then instructed me to insert the tip of the hose into my rectum.  Well, I'm no stranger to ass insertion.  'Just the tip?' I asked." 

It's pretty much the only reference to sex in the whole book, which makes it awesome.  You go, RuPaul.


Most Actually Useful Advice

The most actually useful thing in the book is the reminder that you can't be fabulous without being healthy, and health is often boring.  OK, she doesn't put it like that, but it's the same idea.  Go to bed early, get plenty of sleep, eat right, and don't drink too much.  Only then will you have the basic materials you need to put on a pair of huge false tits and two huge wigs (yes! two!) and get through the day.  Or do whatever other difficult thing you need to do in life.

Also useful is the emphasis on effort that is worth it.  If you love beauty, it's worth it to work at making yourself and your surroundings beautiful.  It may be kind of a pain, but most good things are kind of a pain. 

This view of things is, I think, important in its contrast to the "harmony" view of life, in which all the good things are sort of similar and fit together.  I've never bought that.  Some things are bad, but you do them because the outcome is so good.  That is not mysterious, so I don't know why it's so often denied.

Anyway, if things are a pain, you can count yourself lucky that, unlike RuPaul, you don't have to get up at 4am, wear super-giant false eyelashes all day, and get regular colonics.

Also, stand up straight and don't smoke!


Most Depressing Detail for Femininity and Feminism

I was distressed to learn that RuPaul never eats in public when she is in drag.  Not distressed because of anything this says about RuPaul, but distressed to think that femininity involves ideals that are actually incompatible with basic activities needed for survival.  This is shocking, but I think it is true.

Traditional ideals of femininity and feminine beauty involve a certain kind of delicacy that's impossible to combine with anything that verges on being a little gross.  Indeed, RuPaul says part of the problem is if you're trying to talk and eat at the same time, it's kind of disgusting.  Just so.  And it seems to me that somehow it's OK for masculinity to be a little disgusting -- indeed, if current movies are any guide it is part of masculinity to be a little disgusting.  But not for femininity. 

Now that women live in the world, this is a problem.

I don't know what the answer is.  I'm not ready to give up on femininity altogether.  I take it the very existence of drag shows femininity has interest and appeal beyond functioning to harass women who want to do things and eat in public. 

So maybe a combination of changing ideals and more workable compromises.   Certainly we can say that with respect to changing ideals, having someone in the public eye who is six foot four and buff and wearing a dress can only help. 

Why Don't We Have Better Designer Drugs?

Just one of the millions of cool pictures of pills you find when you google images of pills.  I got the image here but I don't know where they got it from or what it means.

Do we, or do we not, live in the most advanced consumer culture ever?  We do.

Has there ever been a world so focused on, and so successful at, meeting the immediate desires of its citizens?  There has not.

So why, exactly, am I still relying on caffeine and white wine as my go-to recreational drugs?

It's weird.  In most domains we have far transcended the idea that for something to be worth buying it has to solve some problem.  No one thinks shoes are just for keeping your feet from the ground; no one thinks cake is pointless because it's empty calories; no one thinks that "having a high quality TV" means you can't buy a higher quality, HD TV.  We make and buy stuff that we expect to enhance our well-being, not just treat our difficulties.

But in the drug domain, we don't use this approach at all.  Instead, you got two kinds of drugs:  those to treat medical conditions, and those that are illegal.  OK, we have three kinds of drugs:  treatment, illegal and "alcohol and caffeine."

What is surprising is that the taboo against recreational drugs persists even in the face of a tidal wave of free-market, desire-satisfaction, if-it's-something-you-are-willing-to-pay-for-someone-will-make-it  commodity approach to virtually everything else.  I mean, you're telling me it's less weird to pay someone to carry your baby than it is to pay someone to develop some feel-good drugs?

I think the prohibition is really a lingering effect of some kind of puritanical you-shouldn't-be-having-too-much-fun kind of thinking.  But there are two kinds of arguments that get trotted out for why people shouldn't take relatively harmless drugs.  The first is that they're bad for you:  they're addictive, they have side-effects, they'll hurt you in the long run.  The second is that being fucked up is, like, somehow "letting other people down" and "not being there for them."

I hope it's obvious that the first kind of argument isn't an argument against recreational drug use, it's an argument for better recreational drugs.  It's true that a lot of drugs -- recreational and therapeutic -- can be addictive and harmful, but clearly this means we need more research and better recreational drugs, ones that aren't bad for you.  It's funny.  I mean, in this past week's New Yorker there's a story about saving the banana from some huge blight by genetic engineering, like putting the genes of some animals and other plants into bananas so that they don't respond to the virus by killing themselves.  And I'm thinking, You mean, we can put worm genes into bananas but we can't come up with an anti-depressant that doesn't cause a page of fine print conditions like decreased libido?  Very strange.

The second kind of argument -- that you're letting people down -- is more complicated.  Sometimes it's a sensible thing to say, like if someone is zonked out on some narcotic all day, then it's probably true that they're not really cutting it as a parent or sibling or friend or even pet owner.  Even a dog can't live with someone who is out of it all the time.  But here, of course, we're just back at point one, because if there were subtler recreational drugs we could feel good without being all zonked out.

Other times it's a less sensible thing to say, like when people make the claim that there's something wrong with having four glasses of wine on the weekend because gee, if something happened you wouldn't be able to drive someone somewhere, like, to the hospital.  I'm sorry but that is a really weak argument.  For one thing, it actually is possible to live where you don't have to drive.  And secondly, Hello, You're supposed to call 911 in an emergency, not try to drive.  The idea that we have to be in driving condition all the time is like driving-mania taken to an absurd extreme.  Forget drug addition; that is like driving addiction.

Anyway, I was thinking about our need for better recreational drugs just the other day, when I woke feeling really tired, and also kind of sad.  And on thinking it over, I realized that the reason I felt kind of sad was that I was so tired.  I'm a person who really likes being involved in projects and doing stuff, and when I don't have the energy to get all involved in things, I start to muse on the pointlessness of life, and then I get depressed. 

I think on this given day, I just had a bit of a cold.  But it was a powerful reminder of how much a mood or feeling depends on physical elements of the body.  I mean, you may be feeling sad, but maybe you're just physically worn down.

And if that's true, then wouldn't a harmless pick me up drug be a wonderful thing?  You could have a whole day of being happy instead of unhappy.

Most of the recreational drugs consumer culture needs are familiar, because people have wanted them for a long time:

1.  We need a kind of caffeine-like drug that has a higher quality high and doesn't make you feel bad when it wears off.

2.  We need a drug that mimics the effect of alcohol but doesn't have any calories or bad health effects.  Preferably one that doesn't make you feel bad or hungover when it wears off.

3.  We need a kind of Adderall-for-everyone drug.  A drug that makes you concentrate better, but doesn't have bad effects and doesn't make you feel bad when it wears off.

4.  We need a good aphrodisiac.  Don't we?  Am I wrong?  Preferably one that doesn't make you feel bad when it wears off.

5.  How about something like nicotine?  Almost perfect as is, except for the bad health effects.  Oh, and the addictiveness.  And make sure it doesn't make you feel bad when it wears off.

The common theme, of course, is that we need the upsides of drugs without the downsides.  Shouldn't that be possible?  I mean, we can put a man on the moon, yada yada yada, surely I can have my cake and eat it too?

Can't I?

Work-Life Balance Made Difficult

Everyone is always talking about how modern life is such a drag, so busy, so stressful, no time to stop and smell the roses but no way to slow things down.  Inevitably, the next thing they say is it's really important to have some work-life balance.

It always bugs me when this is presented as a kind of personal choice.  Like all you have to do is prioritize, and get organized, and voila! you'll be sitting at home at 6:00 pm starting a healthy supper, listening to Mozart, and talking to the cat.

My feeling is, if it were that easy, everyone would do it.  The problem isn't that people aren't getting with the program; the problem is that the problem is really difficult.

I have a theory about why, just now, it's especially difficult.  My theory involves two ideas that all seem right when you consider them alone, but when put together make things impossible.

The first basic idea is reward for merit and achievement.  We live in a competitive society, in which being able to accomplish more, and actually accomplishing more, are rewarded by better jobs and the things that follow:  more money, nicer stuff, better schools for the kids, etc. etc.

The second basic idea is social and political equality.  There used to be times when some people lived ordinary autonomous lives while other people made dinner, cleaned the kitchen, fluffed the towels, and fed the babies.  In some times and places it was servants -- servants for everyone who could possibly avoid actually being a servant.  I'm always amazed:  you'll be reading a book about Victorian England or turn-of-the century India or nineteenth-century America, and there will be a description of some "poor" family, who can only eat butter every so often or whatever, but who obviously has at least one servant to clean and cook and make things nice.  Then of course it's often just the whole category of "women" who have to do all the boring work of life so men can be the ones living normally.  But now we don't have that anymore.  People are equal.

If you think about it, just putting these two ideas - of competition and equality - together, you get a powder keg.  Each household has some certain number of adults; each adult is rewarded in the same way for working harder longer hours.  No one is constrained by culture or law to staying home to take care of things.  Since every other household is doing the same thing, just keeping up requires each person to work a lot.  You have to keep up, since prices for things like houses are set relative to what each person can pay.  So who's going to pick up the dry-cleaning?  You are, on your way home from working late.

Actually there's a third thing which makes the clash between the first two even worse, and which comes from the realization that when everyone does the easy version of life's boring tasks, we got problems like climate change, pollution, and health problems.  Sure, you can respond to the first two ideas -- and most of us do, to some extent -- by eating lots of prepared foods, getting your coffee in convenient disposable cups, driving your own car to work since it's faster than taking the bus, drinking water out of individual plastic bottles every time you're thirsty.  But we hear all the time that collectively these solutions aren't working out so great for us.  It would be better if we could slow down a little, eat dinner with the family every night, walk to the bus stop, cook some roasted vegetables.

But no one has the time for these things.  And that's because of one and two.  Everyone works; everyone is rewarded in the same way for more time spent working and less time spent cooking; everyone has to make as much money as everyone else to be able to afford things.  So no one has any time at home.

If I'm right then work life balance isn't something an individual seeks as much as something impossible for us because of forces beyond our control.

The diagram at the top of the post comes from the Canadian Government, of all things, at a page about, yeah, work-life balance.  Of course, I found it by googling "work-life balance" and "images," which, as you can imagine, yields mostly the expected assortment of Dilbert-like cartoons and zen stones piled on top of one another.  The Canadian document ends by saying

The workplace is where there is a convergence of the major changes in Canadian society and economy. Government's big policy goals, rooted in the desire to enhance the economic and social well-being of Canadians, can be played out in the workplace.

which honestly I find almost incomprehensible.  Yes changes in society manifest themselves in the workplace, and then ... what?

So if it's a clash of culture forces, what should we do?  My own feeling is that since we're obviously not getting rid of equality, it's really the first idea that's gotta go. It sounds nice, reward for accomplishment and achievement, with the answers sorted out by competition.  But when you put it into practice it doesn't always work out so well.  As long as working more hours gets each person more success, and as long as prices are partly determined by what people are willing to pay, the end result is going to suck.

Trois Sourires (Three Smiles)

You know what I'm sick of? I'm sick of listening to people complain. Since I'm visiting Paris just now, I'm particularly sick of listening to people complain about Paris: waah, it's crowded; waah the bathroom's dirty; it's hot; the line is too long, waah waah waah. But it's not just Paris I'm sick of hearing about; it's everything.

The worst part of it is, the person I'm most sick of listening to is ME. Complain complain complain.

So in the interest of shutting up about everything I don't like in the world just now, I thought I'd write about three things I saw in Paris today that made me smile.

First: the Solferino metro sign.

I have a soft spot for all the metro signs in Paris: they're big and blue with nice bold white letters. But the ones I love best are the old ones. They're ceramic tile, and the letters are really big and really blocky. When I see these signs, instead of a soft voice saying "You're now at the Solferino station," I hear a voice like James Earl Jones's booming out, "SOLFERINO." Isn't this sign just so pretty?

Second: some weird art.

I love the Pompidou museum, and I often go to the cafe there. The Pompidou isn't just an art collection; it's a whole complex commitment to public space. There's a huge open area in front outside that anyone can use -- and there are performers and homeless people and little kids and everybody all hanging out there. There's free wireless access for anyone. There's a spacious and low-key cafe. There's even a place to buy stamps and mail letters. It's like a tiny tiny town all in itself.

Anyway, I went today and there was this crazy funny work of art that is a giant gold plant holder. I don't know why I like this so much but I do.

Third: plastic ants in a window display.

This is the window display of a little pharmacy near my house. I don't know what the point of the ants is exactly, except maybe it's to say, Hey Guys!! It's Summertime!

This Week I Was An Angry Feminist

This week I got mad about some stuff. You'd think being mad would be the perfect state of mind for blogging -- and I think, for some people it is -- but not for me. I get mad about stuff, I just want to go home, get under a blanket with a novel and a glass of wine, and sulk.

At first I was just a little mad. I went to see Star Trek, and while the movie is delightful, I got mad about the whole Bechdel-test-failure problem. Maybe you've heard about Allison Bechdel's famous comic strip, where one woman says to another that she only sees movies in which one woman talks to another woman about something other than a man? The punch line is that the last movie she was able to see was "Alien," because two women talk about the monster.

OK so that was a while ago, but how many movies have you seen lately that would pass the test? The Devil Wears Prada. Sunshine Cleaners. Um ...?

The thing with Star Trek is it's not like it's just in violation of the letter of the law; it's in violation of the spirit. The women in this movie are either 1) giving birth 2) symbolizing "motherhood" or 3) Lt. Uhura. Uhura starts off OK, but immedately becomes just a source of love, support, and sexual intrigue for Kirk and Spock. And did you notice how many women were on council of elders or whatever that was on Vulcan, or on the board that administers the hearing for Starfleet? Oh yeah, its ZERO. And of course, all women in the movie obey the cardinal rule of being an accomplished woman: it only counts if you can look super-cute while you're doing it. Why else are all the female cadets in mini skirts and boots?

But I got madder later in the week when I made the mistake of clicking on Ross Douthat's piece in the The New York Times, "Liberated and Unhappy." Douthat discusses the "paradox" of declining female happiness: women are more liberated and yet less happy. How can this be?

While some of Douthat's conclusions are reasonable (we need to think about work-parenthood balance issues), the title and frame of his ideas are enraging. Isn't it obvious that the point of liberation is not happiness, but freedom, autonomy, and self-directedness? It is offsensively patronizing to suggest of any group of people that they're "better off " when someone else looks after their interests and tells them what to do. People want rights not -- or not only -- because the happiness they might expect to enjoy, but because freedom and autonomy are good in themselves.

And anyway, lots of thing worth doing don't necessarily increase happiness. Research suggests parents are less happy than non-parents. Does this undermine the good of having children? Of course not. Likewise, it's not a "paradox of parenting" that people want to have kids and value parenting and yet are less happy than non-parents. It's just part of the obvious fact of life that some things worth doing are difficult.

So I was pretty mad about those things, and then Dr. George Tiller, provider of late-term abortions that saved women's lives and protected their health, was shot and killed at church on Sunday morning.

A good blogger would some interesting thoughts and news analysis, but me, I'm just mad.