Drinks for Thought, not Food

   People drink and do drugs to feel good right? It's all about that Euphoria; the presence of pleasure, the absences of pain. But what if drunk was our natural state of mind, would we get sober for fun? I guess sobriety would feel like we're using the other 90% of our brain. Just like in Limitless, and how many describe when they abuse adderall. I feel like sobriety would just bring this overwhelming sense of clarity. If it did, would that mean that being drunk brings clarity to us now? Think about it, all that comes out of drunk people is raw emotion. And as they say, a drunk man's words is a sober man's thoughts. Maybe we're just more in touch with our subconscious when we're drunk. Can we really consider that impaired? Anyways, this idea that we get this euphoric feeling from drinking, the same euphoric feeling that we could have gotten from being sober if drunk was our permanent state of being, makes me wonder what we really are. What if we're all drugged and our brains are actually impaired??? We would never even know. 


--written "under the influence".
 

Faith

This Excerpt from The End of Faith by Sam Harris is nothing short of perfection.

"The belief that certain books were written by god leaves us powerless to address the most potent source of human conflict, past and present. How is it that the absurdity of this idea does not bring us, hourly, to our knees? It is safe to say that few of us would have thought so many people could believe such a thing, if they did not actually believe it. Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by god or that a specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Window 98. Could anything- anything- be more ridiculous? And yet, this is no more ridiculous than the world we are living in."

Darwin: The Stranger we've Always Known

I’ve lived in the same place for about seven years now. Sometimes I’ll drive through town, on the same little road that I’ve driven down a thousand times, and I’ll ask myself, when did they put that building up? How long has that house been there? It’s as if I’m so familiar to the area that I don’t even realize that I’m unaware of how it looks. Weird right?

            I’m experiencing this same feeling in the library. I’m in the library with three friends, and like any typical group of college kids, we’re at this huge table with four laptops and paper scattered everywhere. There’re about ten other tables on this floor that look exactly the same. It's such a familiar scene until I look at is as if I've never seen it before. So I start to wonder whyyy we’re doing all this work. Well obviously because we want good jobs, so we can find compatible mates, so we can feed our children, for our own sense of accomplishment.

            I don’t know if it’s because I’m writing a paper for biology, which started the semester off with evolution, but I just wonder how reading, writing, and memorization came to determine our success as people. Hundreds of years ago, the man who could hunt was the best provider for his family. People with skill were successful in their trade. I wonder how many of us pre-med students with 3.6 GPA’s will go on to med school and never adequately suture a patient. And I wonder where the artist with the steady hands is. The artist that could detect the slightest disruption in symmetry but didn’t understand algorithms or chemical bonds. The point of my random rant is that for the longest time we’ve believed “survival of the fittest,” but what’s “fit” has changed, it is changing. I wonder what the road to “success” will look like 50 years from now.

Marriage

   There is rarely any success in marriage, so what's the point? Marriage is considered successful if it doesn't end in divorce, which accounts for only 35% of marriages today. 35% of marriages are successful, including couples considered swingers, hiding affairs, together for financial reasons, together for their children, and experiencing domestic violence. Of those marriages that don't fall into these categories, how many couples are perfectly happy? How many people haven't sacrificed a part of their lives, their dreams, or themselves to please their partner and to keep their marriage "successful?" Yeah, you might die with someone by your side, but I don't think that's going to make you happy when you didn't live the life you wanted. It's believed (through studies, according to my current psych professor) that older single women are as happy, if not happier than married women. Maybe we should just join rest of the world (except for penguins) and ditch this whole monogamy virtue. It's worth a shot.

Social Networks

       What is our generation's need to document their every feeling on some social networking site?!  There was a time when complaining and showing your sentimental side was discouraged. People were considered weak; women were drama queens, and  guys lost their manliness because of it. It's great that over time we've been able to open up to improve our emotional health, but to what extent is expressing ourselves healthy or beneficial to us? Especially when we're doing it publicly and online.  

       Half of the things that people post on facebook or twitter, they would never even say to someone in person. Even when people text, they say things they wouldn't have the courage to say to someone in person. I would love one day for a guy to call me to talk or come up to me and ask me on a date so we can get to know each other. Instead, we get to know each other via text. It's hard to read a person's tone or emotion in a text, yet for some reason we feel more connected this way. Will we reach a point where we don't know how to personally interact with each other? Think about it, how many times have you been walking to class when a stranger looks at your and says "Good morning, how are you?" It's not only a rare occurrence, but when it does happen, we think that person is talking to someone else or just weird. In another time period, or in other cultures, this would be expected. Social networks are making us bolder maybe, or more connected, but I wouldn't say they're making us more social.