Enjoying things wrong

Temperance, addiction, predestination, allergies, love, Nietzsche

I have what in some circles is called an "addictive personality", whatever that means. It means in practice that my behavior roughly maps to an archetype and is to some degree predictable in certain contexts. As always I object to the whole framework, and I want a different explanation for the same phenomenon. I don't feel predictable. It doesn't feel like "just one more" is happening TO me. I feel in control: Conscious self destruction.

Other words are compulsion or low self control. I am prone to compulsive behaviors, and I have low impulse control. Again, doesn't feel quite right. When I do bad things it doesn't feel like being overpowered, it feels like being absentminded; "oh yeah right, I can't do that." It's embarrassing, not humiliating, that I don’t control my dopamine. It’s not that I can’t control it, it’s that it takes active effort to do so.

Although there were some nights like that, drinking, where I felt powerless and acted upon, but to be fair I was really drunk at the time.

I think, if I was an addict before I ever drank, then it's only fair to say that you are sober the moment you admit you have a problem.

I was looking forward to spring a great deal. I get a little moody over the winter, although I think it’s not exclusively a physical phenomenon, and there are a lot of social events I dread clustered all together there. But I am definitely also influenced by the weather, and I was looking forward to getting to sit outside in the sun and tan. So it feels like a cruel and ironic punishment by Fate that this is the year I finally developed pollen allergies. We just have a week of the most wonderful warm spring weather and I’ve been trapped inside like a rat, because if I go outside my throat starts hurting.

It’s not really that bad, and after figuring out what was going on, it’s really just a mild semi-permanent annoyance. But the thing that really bothers me, the real itch and inflammation, is that it had to happen just now. That I get to have one day of spring and sun a month ago, and then it’s dangled in front of me, and I can’t have any more. That’s what really smarts.

But like I said before, about embarrassment, and like I’ve said a hundred times other places: shame is a guide. Shame always tells you what you need to do. And although it’s cruel or harsh or bitter, there is a lesson inherent in this, and it’s a reminder that I am enjoying things wrong.

What I feel deprived off, what is my instinct, is to indulge in something to excess, to drown myself in it and lose myself. That is essentially the fantasy, treating spring as binge drinking alcohol. Doesn’t perhaps make sense, but that is the logic that plays in the back of my head. “Once I get *this*, I can totally lose myself in it”.

In music, or media, or video games, this is generally called “immersion” and is something the designers aim for. I don’t think it’s a good thing. And there is a through-line here, between a lot of strange unrelated concepts that are only really connected through dopamine: drugs, alcohol, yes, but also just eating, overeating. It’s the reason that I can’t buy ice cream, I can’t just have it in my home. Same reason I say Paradox Map Games are crack for autists. It’s all the same, in some way. Even girlfriends, sex, love.

There is a part of me that wants to be obliterated, and it doesn’t matter which path towards oblivion it takes, it’s the same drive. Even something that is otherwise good and healthy, like being a good boyfriend, can be perverted and turned into something ignoble, if you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. And if you are doing it to experience obliteration, of totally “losing yourself” in her, that might not be so good. I think this is not so much what young people do, that’s not what I mean generally. I think it’s a lot of what boomer men do with women. You see them a lot, a man and a woman, where the man adopts the woman to just fill the days with “meaning”: oh well if the missus wants it, begrudgingly going along with things, to have something to fill the days. Divorcees replacing their families. In younger people I think it’s the quirk chungus phenomenon.

Male self destruction, ravishing ego death

I was looking forward to spring for months. It’s literally the only thing I want, it’s the only thing I enjoy. Everything else is work and duty, but sitting naked outside in the sun, that’s for me. That’s the only thing I actually like. It’s the last thing left in life that I actually want. And it’s dangled in front of me, and the universe is going “nah nah can’t have it”.

Walking through the park on my way home yesterday, my nose and throat swelling and itching it reminded me of being in Paris 10 years ago and having to leave, having to let go, of everything I ever wanted.

Rehosting "The Purpose of the Machine is Death"

https://eggreport.substack.com/p/rehosting-the-purpose-of-the-machine

The point of the fictionalized retelling of those events, is that I have to let go of what I always wanted, the undefinable lacking I had always felt that was finally filled, and reject it all, because, ultimately, the desire is wrong. And sating it would be more disastrous than feeling it. No good answers, because the question is wrong. and being face to face with “everything you want” in this sense, is not really some cruel ironic punishment from God. It’s a learning experience. If it’s from God at all, it’s an attempt to save you: to show you, or perhaps even rub your nose in it, so you won’t do it inside the house again, that you desire wrong.

Temperance is not a passive attribute, it is an active force of will. Gluttony is what’s passive. Gluttony is this “losing yourself” in the consumption, ego death, drowning out. And that is why temperance is a virtue, and gluttony is a sin. The former is an active principle, the latter is passive. The former is Human, the latter is Animal. The former is conscious, the latter is unconscious. And the desire for the unconscious, for the animal, is death drive. Either/or, you are always choosing. That’s why in Christianity you have to choose eternal life: You have to always be choosing, eternally: Yes. Yes to Higher life, Yes to Will, Yes to sentience, unconditional eternal Yes. I claim Nietszche’s daemon was reinventing the wheel.

I am distrustful of any modern story that goes “ah so even though it seemed like something bad, it was really a good thing all along, and we all learned an important lesson at the end, it was all in service of this greater good”. I smell something on those things, a kind of rhetoric, a kind of rationalization. I don’t like the framework, I don’t like comparing and measuring Good and Bad, to scientifically prove that the Good outweighs the Bad. I smell utilitarianism on those ideas, and I think if you think in that way, you unknowingly program yourself into becoming a utilitarian, which as we all know is the ultimate evil, which can never be justified. I don’t like buying and selling in the temple.

But, you can’t argue with the facts. And the fact is, that one day when I sat naked on the balcony and got lobster red, a few weeks before I started having allergies, I treasure all the more now.

I think a better frame to think about it, than “good coming out of bad” or “justified evil” or anything like that, is just that Good always Beats Evil. Even when evil appears to win, it loses.

The virtue of temperance, self control, stoicism, is not passivity, it is not the absence of reaction to stimuli. It is the measure of controlled, deliberate, and focus you can enforce on the Will. It is the most active you can ever be. It is higher life, it is more complex, it is more active. And that is what makes it good, and noble, and nietszchian. Not because “ah so really in the end, the bad stuff taught us a valuable lesson about something”. But because you are strong enough to deal with it.