yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

The Modern Struggle Is Fighting Weaponized Addiction


2m read
·Nov 3, 2024

In some very deep level, all pleasure creates its own offsetting pain and fear of loss on the other side. I had a tweet recently where I said, in an age of abundance, pursuing pleasure for its own sake creates addiction. A Miyamoto Musashi line: do not pursue pleasure for its own sake. Musashi was a Japanese swordsman in his time; when you pursued pleasure, it might mean a very different thing. He didn't have unlimited processed food, he didn't have internet pornography, marijuana, or alcohol available on demand.

Now that we're in an age of abundance, if we pursue pleasurable things directly for their own sake, we land into addiction very easily, which is hard to get out of. I think the modern struggle is really about individuals, disconnected from their tribe, disconnected from their religions, disconnected from their cultural networks, trying to stand up to all these things that have been weaponized: alcohol, drugs, pornography, processed foods, news media, internet, social media, video games.

With these things, you can basically engage in fake play and fake work. Before, you would have to go socialize with your friends and get drunk with a bunch of strangers; and it was easy and good. Before, you would have had to go find a mate, have sex, create children, and raise a family. Now, you just watch a lot of porn. Before, you might have needed to go climb trees and hunt and get fruit for a little bit of natural sweetness.

Now, you can aspire to all the gelato that you want. The modern struggle not only is trying to stand up to these things that are weaponized, which are giving you small doses of pleasure, but desensitizing you and exposing you to the misery of their loss in their absence.

More Articles

View All
TAOISM | The Power of Letting Go
Mastery of the world is achieved by letting things take their natural course. You can not master the world by changing the natural way. Lao Tzu Our civilization is in a state of ongoing strivings, in which control seems to be the highest virtue. We don’…
The Biggest Market Crash Of Our Generation Is Coming
What’s up, guys? It’s Graham here. So, I have to make a comment on probably one of the most impactful videos that I have seen in a long time from Patrick Bet-David on Valuetainment, with a warning that the biggest market crash of our generation is here. T…
Column chromatography | Intermolecular forces and properties | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
In our previous video, we talked about Thin Layer Chromatography. It was this technique used to figure out how many things you have in a sample or maybe say the relative properties, say the relative polarity of the things that you have in the sample. An…
Worked example: Interpreting potential energy curves of diatomic molecules | Khan Academy
In a previous video, we began to think about potential energy as a function of internuclear distance for diatomic molecules. What do I mean by diatomic molecules? Well, we looked at molecular hydrogen, which is just H₂, which is just two hydrogens covalen…
You Don't Type Alone.
Hey, Vsauce. Michael here. And thank you for clicking on this video. But how many times a day do you click? And how many times a day do you type keys on a keyboard? You might be surprised by the answer. And one of the best ways to know exactly how many ac…
How to Take YOUR Business from Good to GREAT | Ask Mr. Wonderful #4 Kevin O'Leary
Chris Brown decided, “I’ve got a love album the same exact day that mine come out,” because you could do. “I hate it when guys do this! Really?” “Hey, Mr. Wonderful here and this is another episode of Ask Mr. Wonderful. Now what I like about this is no-…