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. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=10179