Hope is a Feather

Update: Some of the things that I wrote in this article about visualization and how it can help with pornography addiction I no longer believe in. See my blog post for further details.

In today’s world, you can no longer rely on the min-maxing of certain brain chemicals to live a fulfilling life.

It used to be that you’d get a dopamine hit from stumbling upon a grove of fruit trees that would feed your entire tribe for a week.

Not so in today’s world. Today, you can obtain the same amount of dopamine you would’ve gotten from hours of searching through a forest by going to the nearest supermarket and buying a bag of chips for $3.

Or maybe you’d get many dopamine hits from procreating with many people, back when birthrates were high and death rates were higher, and most of those hits would precede the birth of many new babies born into the world.

Not so in today’s world. With an internet connection, pornography is even more accessible today than food or water and promises instant gratification.

It’s obvious that no longer can you rely on the utilitarian principle of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. Because the ultimate manifestation of that principle in modern life is probably taking a lot of painkillers and never waking up.

But what else is there to do?

I’ve thought about this for so long in my struggles with pornography use. Every relapse is tempting, so pleasureable in the moment, but leaves me with a feeling of emptiness, loneliness, and a question of: why?

Recently though, I’ve started reading some articles about ADHD, and how ADHD could be said to be a problem with the knowledge and experience of time. Brendan Short has recently made some excellent posts on Substack regarding ADHD, time, and procrastination that have helped me greatly in the short term I’ve put them into practice.

I think what he writes is true. I think that, in retrospect, examining all the times I’ve used relapsed in the past, it cannot be enough to just devalue vices and junk food. I think that beginning to value something else is equally, if not more important.

What I’m talking about is a whole different value system. One where you can look at a task, and not discount it based off of the short-term pleasure or pain you’d derive from it, but rather from its longer term effects. That you’d be able to look at a task and believe you’ll exist long enough to see it to completion.

Now immediately after hearing that you might be thinking: even if I win that competition, or make that game, or run that marathon, there’s no guarantee that I’ll be recognized. There’s no guarantee that the world would even exist for that long, or that the U.S. wouldn’t collapse before then for that matter.

Logically, I’d say that you’d be right. There’s no guarantee that a meteor wouldn’t strike Earth in the time it takes for you to complete your task. That you wouldn’t have a sudden heart attack and die. Or that the U.S. would descend into anarchy. Or that, much closer to home, you wouldn’t give up on completing the task.

But speaking to the spirit, I think that you know that if you really wanted something, there’s not a whole lot in the world that can stop you. That if you really believed in something, and looked at your dreams with hope, it would come true. I think that Brendan put it best in his Substack post about visualization. Bredan presents visualization as a skill. When you practice visualizing what winning that competition will sound like, when you practice visualizing what your finished game will look like, when you practice visualizing what finishing that marathon will feel like, that’s when the long-term side-effects of an activity will begin to crystallize. That’s when your hope will override the fear of what could go wrong in the future, when you begin to value something for more than its current and next-moment implications.

Civilization has caused the world to become more stabilized. It’s easier than ever to go with the flow and take it easy. But is that flow really meant for humans? Salmon must go through tremendous effort to climb the rivers of their birthplace. After they lay their eggs there, they wait around to die. That final climb is a marathon. A trial of endurance and strength. I wonder, when it approaches the river delta, does the salmon ever hesitate in making the climb? Both paths seem to lead to the same thing for the individual: death.

I think it’s human to go both up and down that flow. But I think if we wish to live a fulfilling life, there’s only one direction we can swim. We’ve no choice but to believe our dream can come true. To believe that there’s a future worth fighting for, and that future is real and within our grasp.