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excitement is like “oh maybe this new thing will make me happy!!!” and it fades because as you keep doing it you learn that it will not in fact make you happy but if you live in an economy dedicated to repeating this bait-and-switch as many times as possible…

the way things are supposed to work for animals is that you do things that feel good (eat, sleep, fuck) and don’t do things that feel bad (eat poison, stand still and let predators eat you). that’s the basic fundamental thing. then humans complicate the situation enormously

good feelings - happiness, joy, love, relief, satisfaction - have epistemic content and they have moral content. they encode implicit beliefs about what sorts of things are good and virtuous to do. *and* we live in an environment in which this info is being *spoofed*

2:12 PM · Jul 13, 2022Twitter for iPhone

american culture specifically, i think, has a deeply ambivalent relationship to feeling good - on the one hand it is supposed to be the american dream in some sense, on the other hand there is a deep lingering distrust of it (puritanical? calvinist?). very obvious wrt sex, eg

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imo clearing up this whole mess requires being more precise about distinguishing different flavors of good feeling. excitement and relief, eg, are different and *mean* different things. excitement involves a hope, an implicit belief about the future. relief is an unburdening

you can get people excited by making them *false promises*, giving them false hope. this is a form of spoofing good feelings to manipulate other people into doing things and we correctly need to acquire defenses against it

*and*, you can really fuck people up by convincing them that good things are supposed to feel bad - that duties, obligations, responsibilities etc. are supposed to produce suffering and you’re supposed to just take it. it is good to notice that breaking free from this feels good

sex is a good case study here and so is food. i clearly remember being bombarded by tons of messaging growing up that food that tastes good is bad for you and healthy food inevitably tastes worse. but we live in a food environment that is *actively spoofing taste!*

taste is actually supposed to be extremely simple - food that tastes good is supposed to be good for you and vice versa, that’s it. if you’ve had food made with high-quality fresh ingredients you know this. *nutritious* food is what tastes good

the more food has been processed the more you allow giant industrial machines to *deliberately break* the correlation between how something tastes and its nutrient content. artificial flavors are straight up *lying to your tastebuds*

whole foods that have been minimally processed are foods that *make sense* to your body. the relationship between their taste and nutrient content is simple and easily learnable, you can learn to eat them intuitively based on taste = nutrient content with no problems