The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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If you have some time to invest, I'd suggest you read "Sadly, Porn." In either case I'll poorly summarize with many assertions without evidence (as goes the source material)
The urge that ensures we eat is hunger. The urge that makes us social is a type of pleasure from preventing someone else getting what they want. It is equivalent to our will to power. However this can be deeply antisocial and in modern times you'll be excommunicated for stating the truth.
The lie we most commonly tell to convince others (and ourselves) that we never hunger is the ledger. They don't deserve that because it is not fair. They owe me for how I helped them. Justifications for dessert. The ledger is pro social if your accounting is good, but the point of it is to cook the books.
Your envy is you trying to use the ledger to get to dessert. But the ledger is fake and your math is bad. There gain is not your loss and even if it were that's not why you are here.
Your prescription is to either to stop lying to yourself that there is a ledger. Satisfy this hunger when it doesn't truly hurt someone, not just when you have moral cover. Alternatively you could get better at accounting so your attempts to cook the books aren't convincing to yourself. I'd recommend the second because it is easier.
I've read that book, but I didn't understand this part as well as you have (I just assumed it was because I hadn't read Lacan, but maybe I just missed something) I do want to point out that the ledger is of course nonsense, but also that it's useful to create the concept, because it makes life into a meritocracy. That human beings manipulate reward systems (wireheading or goodhart's law) rather than just chasing the rewards like they're meant to, is a different problem.
It's not just hunger, suffering works the same. You're hungry until you eat, and you make yourself unhappy "until you reach that goal, after which you will deserve happiness". We're afraid of letting go of suffering though, because of the belief that we won't reach our goal if we do (or the belief that we might even forget about the goal (this is why using a calender can reduce ones anxiety by a lot)). The "wireheading" when it comes to suffering is avoidance, procrastinating, distracting ourselves from what we're meant to do. Another example is shame and guilt. It's "invented" in order to motivate certain behaviour. You can dismiss them as nonsense, but then you also lose the benefit they were created to bring (for instance, if we accept that we're just a product of our environments and thus not to blame for anything, then how do we convince eachother not to be criminals?)
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You've arrived at something quite insane and act like it's some forbidden truth...
Mostly just offering a different perspective. I'm significantly less convinced than my writing would suggest, but I haven't really seen many/any good competing theories to be honest. I'd like to point out that your response makes less sense than mine despite probably being more helpful. If it is "plain stupid to be envious" why would we have created envy. It is a part of human society we've been struggling with forever.
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Wait what?? No it's not. On a fundamental level humans need allies. You don't get together with people just to harm them. Friendship is much closer to a stag hunt than a prisoner's dilemma.
The rational/evolutionary reason for wanting a social impulse is making allies. The mechanism by which that is implemented is crude.
Also just because you are denying them something they want does not mean you are making their life worse.
I don't know where you're getting this but it just isn't true. There are a thousand ways to interact with people and a thousand ways to derive enjoyment from those interactions. Sociality is how you win allies, find potential romantic partners, learn new information, make connections, etc.
I suppose in some very limited way there is some pleasure in denying others what they want, inasmuch as you're playing a status game, but that's quite a small fraction of the emotion involved in human interaction. At least for emotionally healthy people.
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