The Primitives
Feb. 20th, 2006 07:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peterbirksWe humans are primitive beings really. Probably 99% of what we do is in some way hard-wired back to neolithic days or earlier. What would surprise a truly alien visitor to this small rather irrelevant planet would not be how different humanity is from the rest of the animal kingdom, but how similar we are. I mean, suppose they were sentient beings, but moved on a really slow personal timescale. We would move around too fast for them to be able to see us, and they would probably spend several decades attempting to communicate with the plants.
But, I digress. As I said, we are simple things, and one of the aspects most hard-wired into us is the concept of "reward". We do unpleasant things because we see the prospect of a pleasant thing as the end result of doing those unpleasant things. That could be something as simple as sitting at home watching your baby grow up. Or, even simpler, the prospect of getting blind-laggingly drunk on a Friday night.
Indeed, one of the difficulties of giving up drinking (or, so I am told, heroin) is that your life was built around this latter short-term work/reward dichotomy. By removing one of the pillars (the drinking/reward part), you lost any motive for the former.
My trouble at the moment is not that I don't have "reward" concepts in mind, but that the reward is so mind-bogglingly long term that it's easy to lose sight of it. There is a big shift from "if I do this, I can get drunk tonight" to "if I do this, that is one fraction towards a life of leisure in 10 years' time".
Of course, that I can think in those terms at all is in itself mind-bogglingly amazing. Most of the population have to work because they have already spent that money and are now paying off the debt (and the interest). Not so much delayed gratification or instant gratification, as gratification in advance.
But, I digress. As I said, we are simple things, and one of the aspects most hard-wired into us is the concept of "reward". We do unpleasant things because we see the prospect of a pleasant thing as the end result of doing those unpleasant things. That could be something as simple as sitting at home watching your baby grow up. Or, even simpler, the prospect of getting blind-laggingly drunk on a Friday night.
Indeed, one of the difficulties of giving up drinking (or, so I am told, heroin) is that your life was built around this latter short-term work/reward dichotomy. By removing one of the pillars (the drinking/reward part), you lost any motive for the former.
My trouble at the moment is not that I don't have "reward" concepts in mind, but that the reward is so mind-bogglingly long term that it's easy to lose sight of it. There is a big shift from "if I do this, I can get drunk tonight" to "if I do this, that is one fraction towards a life of leisure in 10 years' time".
Of course, that I can think in those terms at all is in itself mind-bogglingly amazing. Most of the population have to work because they have already spent that money and are now paying off the debt (and the interest). Not so much delayed gratification or instant gratification, as gratification in advance.
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A good distraction from the decorating
Date: 2006-02-20 10:25 am (UTC)Where I see your thinking as flawed is in seeing 'getting drunk tonight' as a positive outcome of the drinking. There are some positive aspects to being a little tipsy - it gives one greater social confidence and some of the nicest social occasions that I've had have been when I've had enough booze but not too much. For me these days, this means having between 3 and 5 glasses of wine.
Drink less and there are usually soft drinks whose taste/thirstquenchingness I'd prefer. Drink more and you embark on the down-slope that leads to (a) being a drunken bore who is talking bollocks and (b) having an increased chance of hangovers or other physical consequences.
The difficulty is in being rational about it. The first 2-3 drinks are fine and that 3rd glass makes my life better. So does the 4th. But the difficulty is that the decision to have a 5th and etc glasses is being made less rationally and is based on the state of mind after 4 glasses where the brain says "hey that was good I'll do it again". It takes iron self-control to override this and think "further alcohol will impede me from having as good a time". And if you have that control, then you aren't getting the advantages you were seeking in the first places.
A genuine Catch-22. God I hate people who use that as a label to mean someone with two difficult choices
Re: A good distraction from the decorating
Date: 2006-02-20 10:55 am (UTC)This is a problem related to age, I think, rather than to me specifically. When you are young, lots of things are exciting. As you get older, well, you've done most of those things, so you need rather larger things to get you excited. Now I've reached the stage where I can't even get excited by the concept of buying a new car. Now, buying another house, that's interesting. But, like I said, even though it's very easy to make a lot of money when your sole focus in life is making a lot of money, getting a quarter of a million quid in cash together just to "generate a bit of excitement" is a bit of a tall order.
Actually, I'm not really sure what I am getting at here, apart from the rather tedious point that, as one gets older, it's harder to find aything that surprises/excites/impresses.
Well, that's hardly an earth-shattering revelation, is it?
Re: A good distraction from the decorating
Date: 2006-02-20 10:04 pm (UTC)Did I somehow miss the fact that you have reproduced?
Re: A good distraction from the decorating
Date: 2006-02-21 07:13 am (UTC)Came close a couple of times, though.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-20 01:59 pm (UTC)Maybe this is a side benefit of my recently diagnosed (mildly) bipolar nature. During "up" periods, I enjoy boosted energy and a keen excitement about people, places and pleasures. It's as if the world switched from black and white to vibrant color. Everything has more depth, texture and possibility. You gotta love serotonin.
Of course, when I'm down, little is interesting or exciting.
Back to the subject of deferred gratification, I have a marked puritan tendency. I can count on one hand the number of times I've gotten sick drunk: twice in college, once in grad school. I've never even tried any illegal drug aside from a (literal) puff or two of pot. I'm also remain stingy and debt-free.
Maybe I get more excited about buying a car because I (happily) don't have one.
The Waitabits
Date: 2006-02-20 10:26 pm (UTC)For a dramatization of this, see Eric Frank Russell's short story, "The Waitabits" (1955).
On the rest of your piece, well, I also find it hard to work towards long-term goals. I suppose most people do. We like that instant grat, whatever it happens to be.
Oddly, although I like drinking, I don't like getting seriously drunk, and it doesn't normally happen to me, except occasionally at parties, where there may be nothing much to do for hours except drink. In all other situations, there comes a point where I feel I've had enough, and I stop.
-- Jonathan
Goals
Date: 2006-02-21 11:30 am (UTC)Re: Goals
Date: 2006-02-21 03:45 pm (UTC)The implication being that the Friday night drink-up is a kind of "reward" for a lot of people for the hard work that they have put in that week.
Now, suppose you are an ex-drinker (like me). What do you replace that with? The answer, in my case, at the moment, is that I replace it with longer-term goals. The thing about drinking is, like addictively renovating an old house, it takes up most of your time and all of your money. So, decision-making (and, thereby, responsibility) is obviated. It's a reasonable assumption that compulsive gamblers are seekers of this lack of responsibility. Money brings responsibility brings the need to plan. Therefore, no money equals no responsibility equals happiness. It's a nutty argument and I've yet to meet a compulsive gambler who sees it that way, but it has a cod-psychological backing (return to the womb, that kind of thing).
What I was trying to say was that there was a mismatch. I'm accumulating money, but why? I've kind of allocated it towards "long-term goals" mainly because no short-term goals excite me (not even drinking or heroin). I've half-heartedly thought about learning to fly, or learning to ski, but none of the ideas I think of really gets the juices flowing. Good grief, I can't even get excited at the prospect of playing a major poker tournament. I'd get a serious kick out of playing the 400-800 mixed game in the Bellagio, though. Maybe that could be a goal...
But there's an alternative. Step off the wheel. If I have no real desire to spend my money on anything, then why earn the money? That was the alternative I was hinting at. I'm not going to take it up (not least because I remember being poor and I now have a pathological fear of being so again), but even I can see that it's probably the most sensible solution. Do what a number of my friends have done and go part-time.
But goals are a bummer. You can't really create them. Either they are there, or they are not.
And I should have guessed that Palfrey would be able to mention a short SF story that refers to some hypothetical time concept that I threw out. Are there any SF books/collections that you haven't read, Jonathan? Actually, I might dig that Eric Russell story out, just to see how he treats the idea. Unfortunately I am not a fan of much SF that I read these days. Not sure why. Phil Dick retains it, but not much else does.
PJ
Re: Money, wine, and sf
Date: 2006-02-21 04:52 pm (UTC)If you earn plenty of money, you may have the ultimate objective in sight: to retire and live for the rest of your life without being tied to a job. That's my idea of heaven, but I show no sign of attaining it.
Unlike some people (it seems), I have plenty of things to do away from work and I'd be delighted to quit the job for ever, starting now, if I could afford to.
Drinking has never taken much of my money or time. Though admittedly drinking at lunchtime occasionally befuddles me so that I don't get much done for the rest of the day. More to the point, for health reasons we're not really supposed to drink more than a large glass of wine per day, and my stopping point usually comes after several large glasses (it varies somewhat). So I worry about damaging my health, but not about the cost of it. A drinkable bottle of wine can be bought here for a few euros.
My Spanish mother-in-law likes wine, but her stopping point is one to two small glasses. I don't know how she does it...
Eric Frank Russell's "The Waitabits" is a classic that you should have read before now. Run, don't walk. They don't make 'em like that any more. He wrote some other classics too.
I've been thinking that all the sf I read is old, so not long ago ago I bought a Dozois collection of the best sf stories of two recent decades; and I'm gradually ploughing my way through it. So far, I'm inclined to wonder why I bothered. The stories are better written than sf used to be; but good writing, although it's nice to have, isn't the point of sf. Some of these stories are amiable enough, but the vital spark is absent. I'm amazed that Dozois, a veteran, managed to get excited by them. I suppose he must read an awful lot of worse stories, which may affect his judgment.
-- Jonathan
The Waitabits!
Date: 2006-02-21 05:24 pm (UTC)Amazon UK has it in a collection called "Far Stars", which I've just ordered, although it's apparently hard to get hold of and may not arrive until April.
-- Jonathan
Re: Money, wine, and sf
Date: 2006-02-21 08:33 pm (UTC)Why earn the money? If you've been poor, you should know the answer to that: to live on whenever the income dries up. As it surely will do, sooner or later, unless you die early.
Precisely. But this brings us back to the deferred gratification that is, in a way goalless. There's a big psychological difference (for me, anyway) in thinking "I'm earning this money so that I can buy a CD at the end of the week and go out with my friends" and "I'm earning this money for some unspecified purpose in the unspecified future, but I'm sure that I will need it".
I remember when I was 18 in my first proper "summer" job. as I took home my £23 or thereabouts, I bought myself an album (it was "Tarkus", by Emerson Lake and Palmer, actually) for £2.30, or something like that, at a shop in St John Street near the Angel tube station. Two things operated here. The first was that it was a kind of instant gratification for my week's work, and the second was that it was something I would not have been able to buy without having done that week's work. Now, if you fast-forward to today, there isn't much in the way of consumer durables that I couldn't go out and buy tomorrow, let alone a single CD. The link between work (unpleasant) and spending (pleasant) has been all but shattered. As it happens, I don't dislike my "work", although it does restrict some of the pleasurable things I might do (because of the time factor). This makes the unpleasant/pleasant relationship even more complex. Should I play poker (which I sort of enjoy) and earn $15 an hour, or go to the opera (which I really enjoy) and spend $100 an hour?
There's a hell of a lot of complexity here in a number of different areas. Marginal use of current time, deferred vs instant gratification, and general entire aims in life. In this sense, I feel that my "balance" is wrong (but not horrifically so), in shades of Koyaanisqatsi. I guess that I am embarking on a kind of quest to find a solution.
PJ
Some problems are good to have
Date: 2006-02-22 10:40 am (UTC)Yes, my first job, I was 17 going on 18, and got 30 kwacha a week (in Zambia), which I think was worth about £17. I remember buying a cheap guitar -- nominally for my sister, but in the end I got more use out of it, she wasn't really interested.
-- Jonathan