Someone here mentioned, some time ago and in a thread now lost to my mind, that perhaps our contemporary tendency toward medicating neurosis has occurred because unlike people a generation or two ago, we do not self-medicate with whiskey and tobacco.
I found this very appealing, because as I looked through annals of the past, it seemed that people did everything wrong. They ate high-fat foods with too much salt, drank like fish, smoked like chimneys and guzzled rich coffee when they weren't drinking alcohol. A normal recipe might begin with a huge wad of butter, lard or bacon fat, and it seemed common to have a stiff drink after dinner and then go for a drive.
If we read contemporary science literally, we have to ask: how did anyone survive? And yet not only survive, but thrive, they did.
It seems to me that two of these illicit behaviors, smoking and drinking tons of coffee, could explain not only part of their thriving, but the success of Western civilization in general. Coffee, like certain anti-hyperactivity medications, speeds up the mental process, which has the subjective effect of slowing the world down. Nicotine relaxes and focuses the mind. Together, these two allowed people to do well in a more complex and fast-paced society.
Without them, and with the tendency of that society to continue its frenetic activity long after technology has obsoleted much of it, people now seem more neurotic as a baseline mental state. They are not relaxed from coffee and smokes, but driven a bit unhinged and as a result, increasingly dependent on meds to make it through. The more we criminalize smoking and neuter coffee with the odious decaffeinated and low-caffeine versions, the more neurotic people get.
Welp, it's food for thought anyway. Load a bowl, pour a thick cup of death vertigo inducing coffee and ponder it, I suppose
I found this very appealing, because as I looked through annals of the past, it seemed that people did everything wrong. They ate high-fat foods with too much salt, drank like fish, smoked like chimneys and guzzled rich coffee when they weren't drinking alcohol. A normal recipe might begin with a huge wad of butter, lard or bacon fat, and it seemed common to have a stiff drink after dinner and then go for a drive.
If we read contemporary science literally, we have to ask: how did anyone survive? And yet not only survive, but thrive, they did.
It seems to me that two of these illicit behaviors, smoking and drinking tons of coffee, could explain not only part of their thriving, but the success of Western civilization in general. Coffee, like certain anti-hyperactivity medications, speeds up the mental process, which has the subjective effect of slowing the world down. Nicotine relaxes and focuses the mind. Together, these two allowed people to do well in a more complex and fast-paced society.
Without them, and with the tendency of that society to continue its frenetic activity long after technology has obsoleted much of it, people now seem more neurotic as a baseline mental state. They are not relaxed from coffee and smokes, but driven a bit unhinged and as a result, increasingly dependent on meds to make it through. The more we criminalize smoking and neuter coffee with the odious decaffeinated and low-caffeine versions, the more neurotic people get.
Welp, it's food for thought anyway. Load a bowl, pour a thick cup of death vertigo inducing coffee and ponder it, I suppose
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