X-Message-Number: 10179
Date: Wed, 05 Aug 1998 10:31:02 +0100
From:  (John de Rivaz)
Subject: Happiness

No one seems to have mentioned, or maybe I have missed, the following:

People are usually happy doing different things - you can go for a bathe but 
you never want to go on bathing forever - you may then decide you want to 
walk along the beach, or along the cliff path. Eventually you may want to go 
back home and read the internet or whatever. 

Many people like spending a day on the beach, but if they are shipwrecked on 
an island with an abundant supply of food they don't say "Oh good, I can 
spend the rest of my days on the beach just like summer holidays". They 
start worrying about how to get back to civilisation.

Therefore any device that one could produce to generate "drooling pleasure" 
may well burn out, as indeed does drug addiction. People are said to move 
from drug to drug until they get to one that exterminates them. I wonder if 
none of the drugs exterminated people, whether people would eventually get 
tired of taking them and go on to something else for pleasure? (I appreciate 
that this is a simplifcation - some drugs burn out the ability to feel 
pleasure in anything.)

My point is that there is more to happiness than just pleasure seeking.

People who write of "the tedium of immortality" also miss this point - there 
are many things that people can be happy doing, and this range of things 
will increase in future. Queen Elizabeth Ist of England was never able 
to be happy watching a soap opera on television, surfing the Internet, or 
composing a novel on a word processor, for example. Yet today most people 
can be happy doing these things, regardless of their social status.

There are things we cannot even imagine today that people in the future will 
have great enjoyment in doing.

-- 
Sincerely,     * Longevity Report:  http://www.longevb.demon.co.uk/lr.htm
John de Rivaz  * Fractal Report:    http://www.longevb.demon.co.uk/fr.htm
**************** Homepage:http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JohndeR
    In the information age, sharing can increase world wealth enormously,
        because giving information does not decrease your information.

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