Clearly I should not have used alcohol as an example, since it served to mislead. I mentioned it because I remember a quote from an AA meeting some 20 years ago. Late on Friday a journalist in Fleet Street (who was in AA) looked over the road to his friends who had finished work, and saw them in a bar, getting lagged. He turned to a friend of his in the office and said, "Why am I torturing myself like this?" The firend said. "Look, they are just dogs celebrating over a bone. You've moved on from that".
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.
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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