I’ve been hearing the siren song of gluttony lately.
Because my Demon Hunger has returned and while so far I have kept it mostly in check, wrestling with it all the time is really hard on my nerves.
I’m hungry all the fucking time. Sometimes even right after a big meal. All the meal does is slow it down a little.
And this has physical consequences, albeit minor ones, because being hungry stimulates my stomach into generating more acids and that leads to me being hungry AND suffering from a little bit of acid indigestion.
And that just makes the hunger bite into me more sharply because I know what will end the acid indigestion and that is FOOD.
It’s like my stomach is an angry beast that I have to keep feeding or it will start tearing up the carpets and humping the furniture.
Or vice versa.
And this all inexorably leads to cravings for carb laden junk food in mass quantities. The urge to go back to my wicked ways when I used to use junk food as a side dish for every meal has reared its ugly head for the first time in a decade.
Looking back, I can’t believe I used to do that shit. How mindlessly gluttonous! And just yesterday I remember that I used to have sugar free cookies as a dessert with every fucking meal in addition to the piece of fruit I still eat for dessert.
So it was like I ate two desserts with every meal. Insane.
How the heck did I afford all that? Well I guess not buying around $18 worth of trail mix every week yet helped a lot.
And, sadly, junk food is very cheap. Le sigh.
And it would be oh so easy to start eating like that again. And that would be horrible. My health would nosedive and I would be in serious trouble almost right away.
The lowered Paxil dose is probably partly to blame. With the greater access to my emotions comes a greater desire to “eat my feelings” and self-soothe with food.
Hopefully I will find a more healthy way to soothe myself. Right now, I can only think of one, and there’s a limit to how much one man can masturbate.
Seriously though, right now I am running on discipline and willpower. The hunger attacks and I just grit my teeth and push it down again and continue my day.
And so far that works, but willpower is never a truly effective long term solution. I need to redirect the urge to eat into something else rewarding.
Because that’s what cravings always are : a desire for the activation of the reward center of the brain. And that’s nothing to sneeze at. That is, as I have said before, the mainspring of life you’re dealing with there. Cravings keep animals alive.
But the fact that what we really want is not the food (or the booze or the drug or whatever) but the reward means that it is possible to substitute another, healthier reward stimulus and get the same effect.
Not easily and not immediately. You will still have the fixation to deal with. Addiction forces us to fixate on that exact source of reward and that alone can make us feel like we will just die if we don’t get it.
It is impossible to convince an addiction that something other than feeding the fixation can be “just as good”.
All you can do is starve the fixation and hope the new, healthier source of reward will eventually take over.
Anyhow, back to a vague afterimage of the point : I’ve been struggling with that Demon Hunger again and it’s wearing on my nerves and that sucks.
More after the break.
Truth or… something
Consequences! That was it.
Early into my adulthood I internalized a very simple moral formula :
“I am responsible for all the reasonably predictable consequences of my actions. ”
And like a lot of the ideological relics from my younger days, it makes irrefutable logical sense and cannot be countered yet it is nevertheless wrong both in theory and in application for reasons well outside its scope.
Kind of like how I present myself to the world :
“Everything you see is real but you don’t see everything. ”
Both catchy and confusing, n’est-ce pas?
Within my moral rubric lies the innocuous seeming word “reasonably”, which I put in there to make sure it could not be interpreted as requiring omniscience.
But “reasonable” is a very slippery concept when you try to pin it down to an actual definition. We all think we know what is reasonable and what is not but I doubt any two people would have exactly the same things on both lists.
And lately I have been wondering if my little definition needs further refinement because I am beginning to wonder if even my seemingly modest moral formula is in fact something that does not run well on human hardware.
It may well be that in order to function, the human mind needs some well defined limit to the responsibility we take for the consequences of our actions, even ones which might fit the definition of “reasonable”.
We may need to be able to say, “OK, past this point, fuck it. People are on their own. ”
Not to the point of moral nihilism, obviously, or anywhere near it. Just to the point where the responsibility of anticipation reaches a reasonable limit that takes into account the limitations of the human mind.
Even a mind like mind.
I’m not really sure where I am going with this. It began as just a feeling that on some level, my moral equations were crashing due to running out of mental space and that this is obviously not acceptable.
Exceptions need to be made. Code needs to be altered in order to stop all these stack overflow errors from crashing my cranium. I must define a space for myself, one that does not routinely get overwritten by whatever I am thinking at the moment just rudely shoving it out of the way.
There has to be some way to create structures that persist in my mind.
Or I will remain lost at sea with no land in sight forever.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.