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With Addictive Substances or Enticements, There’s No Tomorrow
If we can get strong satisfactions all the time, we can hardly just say no. We need a richer future.
James Anthony
February 27, 2025
Natural living offers us satisfactions in the present and in the future.
Everyday Rewards
Everyday living delivers full immersion in stimuli. The stimuli are especially rich when we interact [1] with people. People have intricate histories, internal lives, perceptions, feelings, and actions.
Nonfiction and stories also deliver lots of stimuli. Whether we read, listen, or watch, we learn. When content involves senses and a person’s actions, our brains engage the regions that control those same senses and actions in our own bodies [2]. We experience stories, and stories naturally reward us. On top of that, in everyday living none of us get to interact directly with all of the very-best teachers and storytellers. So compared to everyday living, nonfiction and stories provide superior, better-tailored intellectual and creative stimuli.
Infatuation delivers sustained, distracting stimuli. When we’re with our partners, we interact intimately. When we’re away, we think of our partners often [3].
Although we experience these various stimuli some of the time, we also intermittently shift to other tasks. We take care of our needs and the needs of others by spending substantial fractions of our time adding value that others are willing to pay us for. Along the way, we also gain various rewards. Often enough, we’re treated to surprises [4]. Also, we develop patience. After substantial delays, in time we’re rewarded with compelling satisfaction [5].
Continuous Rewards
Starting way back in history and increasing in scale across millennia, various individuals’ families or societies have grown more productive [6]. These blessed individuals have been able to satisfy their basic needs with comparatively-little time and effort. Various stimuli have become economically within reach.
The stimulations of everyday living are exceeded by the stimulations produced by addictive drugs primarily because of the particular way in which the drugs deliver satisfaction. Like everyday stimulations, drugs can deliver lots of satisfaction. But unlike everyday stimulations, with drugs, no further attention or efforts are needed to deliver lots of satisfaction continuously.
The defining characteristic of an addictive substance or enticement, in fact, is that at a short-term cost that’s affordable, the addictive delivers satisfaction continuously [7].
Under the addictive’s influence, there’s no longer any point in looking forward to a delayed reward, because the reward is here already, now. There’s no point in looking forward to tomorrow. There’s no tomorrow.
Under such continuous stimulation, our brains saturate with stimulation and on top of that receive over-the-top stimulation to spare. As a result as we continue to use an addictive, our brains adapt to have fewer active receptors to be stimulated [8].
Everyday living, though, still produces only fleeting stimulations, and now these everyday stimulations are sensed by fewer active receptors, so everyday living becomes less satisfying. When we don’t take the addictive, now we feel deader. This is withdrawal. Pain on withdrawal is a consequence of using the addictive.
But the characteristic of an addictive that makes it addictive, independent of the fact that it changes our brains’ receptivity, is simply that an addictive delivers satisfaction continuously. Everyday living delivers satisfactions, some of them strong, but doesn’t deliver satisfactions continuously.
To recognize whether a substance or an enticement is addictive, consider whether for an affordable short-term cost the substance or enticement delivers satisfaction continuously. Is it a continuous satisfaction-delivery system? Yes, or no.
Liberty Lost
Pornography has been developed into a potent continuous satisfaction-delivery system.
Access to sexual stimulation has been transformed from a bounty taken by kings or queens, to a license available to rich men, and now to screens continuously available in many people’s pockets and private rooms. A strong state of arousal can follow whenever a person views pornography.
Everyday living, nonfiction, and stories can wait. When sampled, they no longer stand out as being so satisfying. Even infatuation and deep relationships face competition. This competition is steepened by the fact that whenever there’s a pause in the delivery of the continuous satisfaction, we find that our feelings have progressively been getting deadened.
People have diverse preferences on specifically how they choose to spend their time. Even so, material comfort and life satisfaction have improved because people have looked past today’s immediate gratifications to invest in relationships that deepen and in purposes that endure [9], whenever people have achieved even the slightest liberty. When an addictive substance or enticement begins to outcompete the everyday alternatives, leaving some people not looking to tomorrow for satisfactions, this is a strong signal that the people who are using this addictive lack liberty.
Increasing Freedom
So then because of addictives, affluence presents a truly hard-to-wrap-our-heads-around threat.
Liberty should not be sacrificed lightly by paying no attention and not fighting back. Sadly, continuous satisfaction-delivery systems aren’t pushed back against as powerfully [10] when people are compromised or addicted in governments, civil institutions, businesses, and families.
Our ancestors, though, triumphed over many problems. Every time people have faced a problem, over time they have increasingly overcome the problem, as they have increasingly secured their freedom.
Here too, from here on out, we can make progress by taking two steps that are simple, although not easy.
First, we must admit we have a problem [11]. Second, we must start making use of all of our institutions and creativity to fight back.
References
James Anthony is an experienced chemical engineer who applies process design, dynamics, and control to government processes. He is the author of The Constitution Needs a Good Party and rConstitution Papers, the publisher of rConstitution.us, and an author in Blaze Media, Western Journal, Daily Caller, The Federalist, American Thinker, Lew Rockwell, American Greatness, Mises Institute, Foundation for Economic Education, and Free the People. For more information, see his media and about pages, overview, and fresh takes on the Constitution.
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