>> Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. But I would rather put in eight hours a day at a Government office than be condemned to lead a life of "pleasure"; I would even, I believe, prefer to write a million words of journalism a year.
I adore Huxley. Brave New World, The Doors of Perception, Those Barren Leaves...
I think the overmedication facet of Brave New World is so very true. We know we have an opioid problem because people are addicted and then dying. I think it would be naive to think that we aren't doing the same with everything in psychopharmacology.
Over my life I have found that some things, yes I do need medication for, but I -personally- do not need anti depressants to be happy...
However people in society increasingly take the view of 'you need medication' rather than "maybe when this person tells me what is bothering them I should reflect on if I'm contributing to the problem"
I have been blessed with some very dear friends over my life. My first brush with the ills of psychopharmacology was with a woman I knew whose mother had just passed. I went to visit her a few days after the funeral and she was rather spry. I, being a man of little regard for my own well being asked the probing question "You seem rather upbeat". It was met with a resounding "I know, and I can't even cry". She removed prozac from her life shortly after, went through a bought of horrid depression (putting off processing things means you pay later). Today she's happy, bright and successful...
I have a current friend who is "suffering from anxiety and depression". Her life is hard, for a number of reasons. Medication makes her "happy" and she does not address the structural issues in her life. You can't help those who wont help themselves, I get that. But if you dont feel the pain how do you know to pull back from the fire.
Barbiturates were a problem for how many decades? How much over prescription were there of "mothers little helpers"? How about oxy? How many people did that kill? How about benzodiazepines? DO we even have accurate data on that, or did we just stop looking at the long term effects.
We're not studying the impact of over prescription of psychopharmacology. There is NO data on what happens if you give these drugs to people who DONT need them. Zero, None. And we would be very naive to think that we dont have that problem.
Edit: The only reduction in suicide rate of those taking SSRI's vs those getting a placebo is in the over 65 age group.
But why? I resisted for years and started taking them a few months ago, and they really seem to be helping. I'm not so much ignoring the structural issues as I'm not so sore from them that I can't deal with them frankly.
The problem is that after these drugs "take the edge off" there's work to be done. I like the allegory I have hear w/r/t psychedelics:
Psychedelics allow you to pitch a tent in your backyard to renovate your home. But eventually, you make your home as you want it and stop needing renovations.
the challenge from a psychiatry perspective is that psychiatrists almost literally just do drugs (as do many MDs). therapy is almost always done by LCSW’s sometimes Psychologists, rarely by Psychiatrists. Same with PT and physical therapists vs MDs.
And as any PT/MD will tell you, even getting people to take a full course of antibiotics or their drugs properly is difficult. 1 in 3 odds? 1 in 2?
Getting someone to finish a full course of PT? Nearly impossible. Like 1 in 20 type odds.
So, the system throws medicines and surguries/treatments at the patients when possible (because they can control those things, and they work!) whenever they can, and do tell people about the other options - and they do work and are necessary for issues to really work out well a lot of time - but almost no one really does it.
Then they blame the medicine or surgury for not fully solving the problem, or when it comes back in a different form/direction.
honestly really do not think you understand SSRIs or anti depressants at all man. Never once encountered people being unable to cry or feel negative things whilst on anti-depressants. Even if you have, to disregard antidepressants as some evil big pharma mind control is so incredibly narrow minded.
I don't think GPs post generalises well(nor does any simple statement on psychopharmacology, everyone is and reacts differently), but I've spoken to many people who have reported emotional blunting from SSRIs. It's a fairly common complaint. Being "upbeat" from antidepressants also happens a lot to people with bipolar disorder, who are often misdiagnosed with and mistreated for depression before their first episode of hypomania/mania.
Well that's the thing, we really don't understand the long-term effects of SSRIs. PSSD[1] is a thing, reports of long-term anhedonia and/or emotional numbness after quitting SSRIs are widespread.
The parent poser never said anything about "evil big pharama mind control", however "pharma companies trying to make money disregarding long-term health of patients" is not a particularly narrow-minded view, anti-depressants are used to put people back to work disregarding their long-term health, and widespread over-prescription of SSRIs by physicians (not even psychiatrists), even to children, is a thing as well.
If 15 years ago, when I was 16, someone had told me that these meds would potentially make me lose the ability to feel pleasure, I probably would'nt haven taken them, but there was no such warning.
Thank you. I have just deleted a long comment because I don't want to get into this discussion for my own well-being.
I was once told that ADs were as well-understood as insulin for diabetes. In retrospect I feel hard-pressed to find any other word for that than "blatant lie". I was 21 when I was put on Effexor.
I went from 10m of Lexapro to 20 during the lock down , been cutting down to 15 for a few months now . Taking it slow ...
Cause when I quit abruptly a few years ago... I caught myself , while gazing at my 12 year old ... "I'm gonna miss him" .... that scared me, I'm not suicidal OR homicidal but .... having that thought freaked me out .... so I started taking them again . I hate it . I feel like it's why I don't care to have sex
Scared
Eh I don't know. Sometimes people do a lot of what you say "ohyou don't need medication" when in reality, if they did, they wouldn't be here in this condition and it wouldn't get this worse.
There exist plenty of I don't like taking medicine people.
So he's playing both sides, like a true philosopher. The simple fact is, work for survival sake is often mind-numbing and soul destroying. Finding work you have a passion for that creates a positive impact in the world is something everyone should strive for, even the wealthy trust fund kids that don't need to lift a finger.
>> The simple fact is, work for survival sake is often mind-numbing and soul destroying.
This would be the government work. It isnt there to satisfy, it's there to keep a roof over your head. IF it was fun they would not PAY you would they?
>> In place of the old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions - distractions which demand from pleasure-seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort. To the interminable democracies of the world a million cinemas bring the same stale balderdash. There have always been fourth-rate writers and dramatists; but their works, in the past, quickly died without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in which they appeared. To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world.
The point he's making is to find that passion elsewhere, make music, play sports ... DO rather than CONSUME. And that everyone should do this in all things. These are the "pleasures" and they should be enriching you via your participation not your passivity.
>> Finding work you have a passion for that creates a positive impact in the world is something everyone should strive for
No one wants to work at the DMV, no one dreamed that in their child hood. But we need people to do it... he's speaking out against them going home and sucking down film, tv, tiktok rather than DOING things that enrich their minds and bodies.
>> So he's playing both sides, like a true philosopher.
> No one wants to work at the DMV, no one dreamed that in their child hood. But we need people to do it... he's speaking out against them going home and sucking down film, tv, tiktok rather than DOING things that enrich their minds and bodies.
That same DMV work + household chores + family would not give time and energy enough for someone to participate actively in whatever kind of activity by the end of the day. I agree mostly that doing things is better than just consuming, but unfortunately the bigger part of the population just aren't able to do it.
>>> That same DMV work + household chores + family would not give time and energy enough for someone to participate actively in whatever kind of activity by the end of the day.
Does no one read any more?
This is the very nonsense his essay rages against.
You leave work and:
Buy yogurt on the way home, make sure your kid does piano practice and watch soccer on TV.
-- OR --
You buy milk on the way home, make yogurt with your kid, play soccer in the back yard and then amuse yourself by playing music in the evening.
Same time investment, less money spent better engagement and an enriched life.
You have to appreciate the chutzpah of Huxley, writing this sort of eutopian novel after his dystopian one. Anybody can complain, it is much harder to suggest something radically different that you think is better.
I love Huxley, but this essay is just an especially well written example of an old man yelling at clouds, which is funny, because he was still in his 20s when he wrote it.
The main guideline of my thirty years on this earth has been to optimize for least pain and and I have been blessed with much more joy than I believe the average Joe experiences.
I can assure you the curious mind, when unencumbered by crippling pain, will find in a lifetime's worth of enthusiasm for life.
The argument your making shows your missing the subtly of what the poster and Huxley are saying.
If your house always smells like bacon, if all your drinks and food are sweet how quickly does thee joy from these things fade? A life, without contrast is one that only drives you to escalation in a single direction. At some point there would not be enough sugar in the world to indulge your sweet tooth.
Huxley was a student of buddhism, he understood that this flowed in the other direction. Chasing the pretty girl, the idea of catching her, of you and her is pleasurable. If you fail in this task it is pain... Buddhism would have you remove desire to remove pain. This idea, this theme, is the focus of Huxley's works and is present to some extent in this essay (the pleasure from passive consumption is a net bad).
Fixing the toilet isnt "fun". There is satisfaction in doing a "shitty" job, one that isnt had if you call the plumber.
Yes, fine, the more repeated the pleasure the lesser it is.
Sure we need contrast, but the absence of pleasure does not have to be pain.
Pain is a signal from your body telling you something is going awry. I don't think you to have to be in pain in order to enjoy a night with friends or a good movie.
So yes pleasure does exist in the absence of pain and trying to avoid pain is a good idea.
Now if you are talking about effort that's something else. Your body and mind are normally equipped for effort and will reward you according to the result of this effort.
> Sure we need contrast, but the absence of pleasure does not have to be pain.
The contrast was the idea I was putting forward. Pain defines pleasure if that makes sense and visa versa.
> Pain is a signal from your body telling you something is going awry.
I would say it is a signal from the mind (emotions can be painful) but I agree with your general point.
> Now if you are talking about effort that's something else. Your body and mind are normally equipped for effort and will reward you according to the result of this effort.
Cue, craving, response, reward. Is the craving not painful? If the response requires an unanticipated level of effort is that not painful?
Do you see how it isn't so much about avoiding pain and more about choosing what cues you respond to and understanding what pain is unavoidable and/or what pain you are willing to endure.
It's waking up to the smell of bacon, and then 20 minutes later your nose blind to it. It is putting sugar and salt in everything and then having to add more and more to get the punch of either.
Libertines, and hedonists chasing ever growing excess because they have to to feel.
It's the relief of an ice pack on a sore shoulder vs the cold of snow in your jacket.
It's the spoiled rich kid who appreciates nothing because they have everything.
There is no pleasure with out pain. There is no point, without a counter point. It is why addicts chase every increasing amounts of their addictions...
It is possible for the best aspects of a people/society to atrophy while they simultaneously expand their wealth/technology/etc.
We can make the world an undeniably better place while also loosing vital things. It's not a zero-sum game. Have we been doing this for 2,500 years? Probably.
It feels like a contradiction only if it's zero sum. But we generate more vital things than we lose, so it feels like (is) progress. But that doesn't mean we're not losing vital things.
We see clearly the flaws around us, but it’s non-obvious that {person} 400 years ago was flawed and lazy as well. Or sick with illness for 15 years, and we vaccinate those today.
It's a commonly repeated trope, yet more often than not such concern being voiced was almost immediately followed by a period of severe decline for the commentator's civilization.
Aristotle saw the end of Athenian democracy and the rise of the Alexander the great, and the following Hellenistic period of mediterranean disorder. Horace was hardly the only one to discuss roman decline, look for Suetonius, Juvenal or Petrone for other examples of same era romans lamenting the decline of Rome.
As for Huxley, it is interesting that much of what is pointed out in this short commentary echoes Ortega y Gasset on the "Revolution of the Masses", Oswald Spengler also comes to mind.
Human history is that of the rise and decline of civilisations, we may well have already been on a downward slope for the past 100 years.
That's exactly right, Technology is always a double edged sword in that manner.
Plato in Phaedrus warned about the forgetfulness implicit in the invention of writing as oral traditions would no longer need to be remembered and passed down...
As he population has grown with the respect to the existence of recorded music less and leee people are encouraged to even make their own music than to play songs that are done by the best.
I can play the piano and I can done some improvisation but, everyone doesn’t care about my improv because I’m not good enough but frequently you will get famous song is asked to be played live.
But most people will turn on the radio or hit play on Spotify and listen to the same few hundred songs on an infinite loop, with maybe a couple of new songs (which sound very much like the old songs (or in many cases, are the old songs resung)) per week to "stimulate" their mind.
"These effortless pleasures, these ready-made distractions that are the same for every one over the face of the whole Western world, are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever the Germans were."
Well... this aged like fine milk in retrospect to what was coming 20 years down the line.
Considering how complacent everyone got in the interwar period about what was going on... I dont think any one at that point in time thought they would do it all over again, 20 years later, with Germany.
Eh, is it a matter of aging? WW1 would be fresh in people’s minds… it seems like a bad quote then, too. I bet, for example, any reader who’d been in a trench for a week long bombardment would take the record player instead.
It seems like a surprisingly weak essay, from an otherwise pretty thoughtful guy.
Huxley was talking about a time when most work was manual labor (tend the farm, smith the axe). While there was an intellectual element it was imbued into the physical aspect of the work. Today, work is more intellectual. It makes complete sense that pleasures are not so much so.
It's a great abstract discussion. Increases in technology have made it possible to use human intellect to move society forward, but also make pleasure that much easier to attain.
I don't really have a point here but I find the topic very amusing to think about. I feel guilty watching hours of TV during the week to unwind. At the same time, it helps me to relax. Pleasure that comes from physical work seems to always have a greater positive outcome for me. OTOH, mental pleasure sense to leave me depleted even more so. TV is an interesting mental pleasure that does help.
Here are the key points I took away from the excerpt of "Pleasures" by Aldous Huxley:
- Huxley argues that the real threat to modern civilization is not external dangers like war, but the "auto-intoxication" of mindless pleasures and distractions.
- He contends that pleasures and entertainments have become progressively more passive and devoid of intellectual effort. People now soak up ready-made distractions like movies, radio, and newspapers without thinking.
- Huxley criticizes the sterility and sameness of modern distractions. The same movies and dances are consumed everywhere without local variation.
- He sees the proliferation of effortless distractions as promoting boredom, atrophy of the mind, and decline of civilization.
- The essay ends with a warning that the bored populace may eventually demand ever more violent entertainments, as happened in decadent Rome. Huxley fears we may "live to see blood flowing across the stage."
I haven't read it but Steven Johnson wrote a book that argued the opposite:
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter is a non-fiction book written by Steven Johnson. Published in 2005, it details Johnson's theory that popular culture – in particular television programs and video games – has grown more complex and demanding over time and is making society as a whole more intelligent, contrary to the perception that modern electronic media are harmful or unconstructive.
American Football today is almost as dangerous as the sport in Rollerball (1975). This is probably a better comparison to Roman circuses than Kill Bill.
"Self-poisoned in this fashion, civilization looks as though it might easily decline into a kind of premature senility."
This is the Cartesian distinction between understanding and imagination. Imagination requires a peculiar effort of the soul, which AI is unable to exert. Understanding is knowing that a triangle's interior angles add up to 180 degrees. Imagination is understanding that and being able to represent the image in your mind.
This is a natural conseqence of copyright law. It is hard for local talent to compete against unnatural monopolies. We subsidized mass produced media at the expense of decentralized talent.
I might be missing your point, but I'm not sure abolishing copyright would make much of a difference, in terms of increasing the number of people who can professionally make media. Supply and demand doesn't work properly in mass media, because one movie can supply the demand of everybody in the entire world, pretty much. We don't need a singer in every town, we only need a handful of talented people who can supply the music demands for everybody in the world - it doesn't really matter who they are. I'm exaggerating a bit, but that's how I generally feel about it.
(Having said that, this article is pretty much "old man yells at cloud" for me.)
To me it seems like this paper reveals two truths.
1) Many people are happy living life and never exercising their brain.
2) Some people, like Aldous, are not. Instead they choose to more often than not.
I suspect that this has been true for a very long time. It also seems less frightening than he is making it out to be. Assuming the ratio of critical thinkers remains roughly the same then the world should continue to get objectively better, right?
> In place of the old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organizations that provide us with ready-made distractions - distractions which demand from pleasure-seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort
This feels true in some sense for every generation; bemoaning the insolence of the current youth feels like a rite of passage. However, it also seems true that the youth of today have a lower barrier of access to “pleasure” than any other humans in history.
On the other hand, maybe it would have been better to devote more effort to pleasure.
In a few years from when it was written, Germany would be devoting the full power of a modern industrial economy, not to pleasure but to wipe out undesirable people.
They would is the newly developing field of electronic data processing, not for pleasure to to better target people for death.
Planes would be built not for people to travel on vacation, but to drop bombs.
Factories would work around the clock, not producing goods for pleasure, but weapons of death.
The greatest group of geniuses ever assembled, would be given an unlimited budget not to develop new forms of pleasure but to develop a weapon that could vaporize an entire city in a few seconds.
I have to believe there is a middle ground between devoting life to pleasure and trying to exterminate a race of people. That middle ground is most of what we call life today.
It's not really "both" in the case of the US; as with most developed nations, the US devotes a certain percentage of its national budget to military stuff. With the US, it appears gargantuan, but that's because the US economy is the largest in the world by GDP as measured in USD, so of course it's going to look like a lot. But there's a big difference between how much the US spends today on the military vs. in WWII during its wartime economy, or Nazi Germany during that same time.
> ‘One summer day, 40 years ago or so, I was walking along a residential street when an rich, earthy scent wafted my way and triggered, as smells are wont to do, a vivid recollection. Like Dorothy, stepping out of her front door into the Technicolor Land of Oz, I remembered another summer’s day when I was 4 years old, playing in a bank of warm, black dirt in the back yard of my home. I had a little red toy car for which I’d made a road slanting up the face of the dirt bank and, in my recollection, I was ‘driving’ the car up this mountain road while making motor noises. That’s all there was, no real action, yet the memory, in the few seconds before it faded away, was redolent with the smell and feel of the warm dirt, the bright colour of the toy, the hot sun – with simple but intensely pleasurable sensory experience. When I read Aldous Huxley’s account of his mescaline experience, of his feeling that the colours, shapes, and textures of his books on the shelves across the room were as intense an experience as he could bear and that he dared not look outside at the flowers in the garden, I thought of my brief revisitation of my childhood’.
-- Chapter 1, ‘Happiness: The Nature and Nurture of Joy and Contentment’; David Lykken.
This essay by Huxley said exactly what I have always felt but never articulated. The problem is far worse today than it was in his time. So much of recreation today consists of binge-watching Netflix. In addition, because Netflix has global reach, the world often watches the same content, devoid of local meaning.
I have realized that active recreation, although requiring overcoming a certain threshold of activation energy, is far more compelling and fulfilling than passive recreation.
"To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world. Countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open."
"There have always been fourth-rate writers and dramatists; but their works, in the past, quickly died without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in which they appeared. To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world."
Not only did Orwell predict the total surveillance state, but his French teacher Huxley foreshadowed the necessity of the opioid crisis in maintaining the existence of such a society.
> And if they want literature, there is the Press. Nominally, it is true, the Press exists to impart information. But its real function is to provide, like the cinema, a distraction which shall occupy the mind without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single thought.
Welp, time for a re-read of Amusing Ourselves to Death. Pretty sure Neil Postman quotes Brave New World at least once.
> To-day, the inventions of the scenario-writer go out from Los Angeles across the whole world. Countless audiences soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation; they need only sit and keep their eyes open.
Wow this is exactly true today, more than one hundred years later.
It reminds me of an advertising sign I once saw outside a store, which read "Movies, Couch, and Ice Cream." It seemed to me like an apt epitaph for our civilization.
Maybe we shouldn't focus so much on predictions made in 1920. Surely living in the future, allows us to have a better understanding than Aldous Huxley ever could?
> The horrors of modern "pleasure" arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile.
Fuck me, imagine what he'd say if he had a silicon valley programming job and had to put up with HR-organized online parties and friends wearing animal onesies at social events.
The lands taken from Germany ended up creating pockets of German speaking areas in surrounding countries. This was an amazing opportunity for the nazis to claim these lands and set up false flags operations.
That alone wasn't the cause: what enabled their success (as far as their ability to rebuild their war machine) was the ineffectiveness of the enforcement of those reparations, and the victors simply allowing the German economy to build more war materiel. Debilitating reparations can be done, but you have to maintain military power and use it to prevent the losing nation from refusing to pay, or building up its military again. The victors failed to do this and the result was another war. Honestly, I'm not sure what they were thinking. It's like throwing people in prison with hard labor for a crime, and then leaving the prison doors and gates wide open and firing all the prison guards and expecting the inmates to not escape.
> has resisted the combined attacks of these enemies wonderfully well
applies to the 'dumb pleasure seeking' he warns about in this article too. Society has not collapsed and in spite of pleasure-at-the-push-of-a-button being more than Huxley could ever have imagined and
> the democracy of the future will sicken of a chronic and mortal boredom
still being an ever-present topic
I think the 'bark worse than bite' still holds, for now..
I adore Huxley. Brave New World, The Doors of Perception, Those Barren Leaves...
I think the overmedication facet of Brave New World is so very true. We know we have an opioid problem because people are addicted and then dying. I think it would be naive to think that we aren't doing the same with everything in psychopharmacology.