Unless you are in the 99th percentile of discipline and self-control you will fall. Such excellence shouldn’t be required to make it through a day, but it now is in our casino-like modern world. If some pleasure is good, more is better. If some money is good, more is better. And so, 5 grams becomes 50. The limiting principle is, presumably, an amount that’s so high it’s no longer pleasurable, but then we will just fall back to 50 – an amount nearly impossible to resist. Or maybe the limit will be an efficacy loss from repeated exposure? You suck down 50g so many times the rush is gone and you look for the next high. And then we get to a place where all the highs have been tapped and the board suggests selling lows as the “the new high”?
Those hypothetical limits are only hypothetical in our current trap of convenient pleasure.
What a splendid pie, pizza-pizza pie
Every minute, every second, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy
What a splendid pie, pizza-pizza pie
Every minute, every second, buy, buy, buy, buy, buy
Pepperoni and green peppers, mushrooms, olive, chives
Pepperoni and green peppers, mushrooms, olive, chives
Need therapy, therapy, advertising causes
Need therapy, therapy, advertising causes
Need therapy, therapy, advertising causes
Therapy, therapy, advertising causes
You really think with billions spent selling pleasure you can resist? You think with c-corps hiring the very best to manipulate your mind, a la casinos, you can just try a little? You think your “free will” matters in this? Ha. Lay’s told you the truth in 1983: NO ONE CAN EAT JUST ONE. And just think how much more sophisticated the salesmen have become in the intervening years.
I once thought Stan was so correct:
Dad, you like to drink. So have a drink every once in a while. Have two. If you devote your whole life to completely avoiding something you like, then that thing still controls your life and you’ve never learned any discipline at all … All or nothing is easy. But learning to drink a little bit responsibly, that’s a discipline.
Sure, I still think moderation is possible, but I think the number who can do it well is rapidly diminishing as more and more and more stuff is tossed in the “Requires Discipline” bucket. Because while you may properly control your impulses with drinking, you have to fight that same battle on the tv, phone, porn, gambling, and food fronts as well. A safe haven simply doesn’t exist in 2022. Thus it’s a minor miracle if you only capitulate a few times in a day.
You’ll rebrand these capitulations as “moderation,” as if some amount of a bad thing is ok. Make no mistake, by taking cheap pleasures, your ability to capture real, sustaining pleasures, ones that are only accessible from extreme resistance to the present self’s desires, are greatly diminished. So diminished, in fact, you may well forget they exist. That is what the c-corps want, after all. They want you to think the highest form of pleasure is, indeed, eating a chip. And if you do still see that as the lie it is, can you muster the massive effort required to end the surrenders? That effort requires an understanding that the very notion of moderation is being aggressively sold by those same c-corps so you don’t ask whether nothing may well be the better choice.
I’m increasingly thinking nothing is.