If someone asked you what your favorite emotion was, how do you think you’d answer? For many people, I suspect they would answer “Happiness”, “Joy'', or some variant of exclusively positive emotion. Someone may think more meticulously and answer with “Contentment”, which while a positive emotion has a lot of nuance attached to it. However my answer to that question is what I feel others would consider more orthodox: Bittersweet. Pleasure accompanied by suffering, not exactly most people’s first pick but from my perspective pain is necessary in order to enjoy the pleasure that life gives you. Perhaps I'm over-romanticizing but there’s something to desire from looking back fondly at times where you were hurting and seeing yourself in a better place in the present. Perhaps you finally have moved on from “The one who got away” and can look back on those times with fondness. Perhaps you are sharing stories of a friend or family member at their funeral and though they may never w
Of course cultural degeneracy shouldn’t be “normalized.” The fact is, the recent conversation propelled by some right-libertarians has been entirely fallacious from the get-go. Cultural decline is the direct result of central bankers manipulating the rate of interest & in no way justifies the initiation of force on otherwise peaceful people. It helps to understand the root causes of social phenomena. Degeneracy is a function of time preference. Those with a high time preference generally place a higher value on present conditions than future conditions. These folks are more likely to engage in risky behavior like drug use, sexual promiscuity, & binge eating - preferring present satisfaction over the long term consequences of their behavior. In contrast, those with a lower time preference place a higher value on future conditions than present conditions. Since adults with children have a vested interest in future conditions, they tend to fall in this category. Also, since consu