should I be enjoying this

This is either the most useless or most important question anybody can ask when enjoying something in the moment. Should you ask it? Should you answer it? Should we have a poll?

Did you enjoy starting this thread?

I'm still on the fence

cite: Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight"

This question and its accordant anxieties 86ed my dating life in high school. Well, that and the fact that I looked like a bespectacled stick-man with a pot-belly.

Associated question would be: was finding enjoyment my main purpose for doing this to begin with?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CdW2odiW0AAIV6U.jpg:large

This question came up the other day when I was watching the Warren Buffet documentary. Do I care about a modest, successful billionaire and watching a documentary on him? No.

I wouldn't say this is a question that I ponder with too much media though. Usually if it comes up it leads to the answer "No" and is switched off.

shouldn't that be: shouldn't I be enjoying this?

when you ask 'should i enjoy this?' do you mean bc maybe it's unethical so even if you have an immediate knee-jerk positive "enjoyment" response to something you should try to sublimate it in the interest of morality? or is this more like "do i like this?" like you're not sure and you feel like you have a say in the choice?

sometimes the body betrays itself

Underplayed, yet overrated song comes on at the bar.
Person you are attracted to does unsolicited "sexy" thing to/at you.
Fictional hero cruelly maims a fictional villain on big screen.

Same question.

Why would someone question their enjoyment of the first two?

Person you are attracted to maims a fictional villain at the bar.

I do love a good saloon brawl

To answer your question, Tombot, in order to decide whether or not something is beautiful, we do not relate the representation by means of understanding to the object for cognition, but rather relate it by means of the imagination (perhaps combined with the understanding) to the subject and its feeling of pleasure or displeasure. The judgment of taste is therefore not a cognitive judgment, hence not a logical one, but is rather aesthetic, by which is understood one whose determining ground cannot be other than subjective. Any relation of representations, however, even that of sensations, can be objective (in which case it signifies what is real in an empirical representation); but not the relation to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, by means of which nothing at all in the object is designated, but in which the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation. That's pretty much how I break it down to an extent.

Basically what Haneke's Funny Games movies were about.

I mean that in relation to the Tarantino discussion that prompted the question, have just skimmed this thread.

no you should not

doesn't kristeva discuss some of this re abject? the thing that is simultaneously disgusting and enticing? the taboo that excites us, our anger at our own pleasure, our lust for that which we hate, etc. the two are often bound in each other. sometimes what we love is the thrill of engaging w/ the abhorrent - like slowing down to look at a burning car on the highway. we crave something real + essential good or bad - i hurt myself today just to see if i still feel. we want excitement and will take it any way we can. we are feeling-things junkies and the tint of the feeling matters less than its vibrancy.

i think this is true btw and i think that i grew up a lot as a human being when i realized this and embraced moderate stability as an ideal over excitement. i think as humans we destroy ourselves in order to experience aesthetic pleasures of the first order. but destruction fucking sucks and in the end the smothering remains of our lives just give us regret. better to live in the boring present and appreciate our minor unexciting pleasures of love and being loved and listening to a good song and reading a good book and dying having done nothing important but having not hurt yourself and not hurt others in the pursuit of pleasure. we'd be much better as a species if we were wired this way i think.

True, good, right, but... that voluptuousness of doom.

if you must at least get your crew to tie you to the mast

we'd be much better as a species if we were wired this way i think.

this whole post was very very otm but god the physical and intellectual lure of its opposite

mordy don't you smoke weed every day

i've actually been off it for 2-3 weeks but why? not sure i see the relevance?

should you be enjoying that

Why would someone question their enjoyment of the first two?

Or lack of enjoyment. The complementary question ("shouldn't I be enjoying this") is implicit, imo - though thanks anyway to Aimless for pointing it out

The first one is like when I realized actually, "I Want To Break Free" is terrible

The second one is the altoid blowjob

the third one is also unquestionable btw because it's JUST A MOVIE MAN

no shots fired, I just got the impression you were too invested in experience & basically seem like too interesting a person to really go for a lifestyle of moderation

unless you are actively resentful of any un-straightforwardly-medicinal effects, I would say taking psychoactive substances seems more like the behaviour of a 'feelings-junkie' than a stable craver of moderation

oh i wasn't taking offense, i was just wondering what you were getting at. a few thoughts. a. interesting != exciting necessarily at least how i'm using it, tho i too like/hate to gawk at burning cars. but in my personal life i've definitely taken steps to reduce drama and embrace moderation. that doesn't mean i don't engage w/ interesting things (especially intellectually) but that i'm not looking to create [destructive] excitement in my life. b. even still i'm a human being and cannot always help myself and i am also attracted to vivid + intense feeling and experience. c. between the two i think weed is a pretty moderate habit actually. idk if you're a smoker but unless you're a new smoker essentially smoking is a mundane kind of pleasure (esp if you smoke every day) - the kind of thing that pairs nicely with a book, tv show or meal. if anything i think it suppresses the need for high drama + excitement and gives a kind of temporary contentment to the user.

also i primarily started using it for medicinal reasons (to treat my crohn's disease). one reason i've been comfortable taking a break from it is that my humira is working v well these days.

right, I was brought up in what was v much a modest, stable, appreciate-the-little-things, moderate household and am gently suspicious of those values and the claims made for them. I don't think it's really a binary in that sense. a very small amount of anyone's behaviour is actively ethically considered, most of it is habit/compulsive regardless of whether you're tending to the plants or indulging in substances. mindfulness and appreciation is not desirable or practical all the time and there are definitely positives to detachment and yeah suppression. the extent to which sustainability/duration is a virtue is debatable. and yes I am also a regular smoker, and although of course the more you smoke the less intense it feels, it still seems like a stretch to argue that makes it moderate

ime i'm less likely to get into fights or engage in risky behavior or really do much of anything besides play video games and read when i'm stoned

uppers are immoderate and for destructive egotists, downers are the responsible choice of the nurturing selfless

otm

mordy your post made me think of this article on "Unforbidden Pleasures":

http://harpers.org/archive/2016/05/red-light-therapy/

If we take forbidden pleasures as the essence of pleasure, as the real pleasures, what happens to the unforbidden pleasures? Do they really exist — are they derivatives, substitutes, sublimations? — and if they do, what kinds of pleasures are they? Are they all poor relations of the real thing? Are they merely for the timid, the inhibited, the cowardly, the dull? Is unforbidden pleasure merely hedonism for infants and the elderly?

If we believe, for example, that real pleasure, profound pleasure, passionate pleasure, is forbidden, or derives from the forbidden, then clearly courage is what we need, and risk is what we will celebrate and idealize. We will need to be as brave as possible in not betraying our desire; indeed, to promote unforbidden pleasures is to imagine a world in which we don’t have to take courage or cowardice very seriously. There certainly seems to be an old-fashioned story about heroism lurking somewhere in our commitment to the forbidden, in which the bold, the risk-taking, the transgressive, are, by definition, having a better time. If one of my greatest pleasures in life is my morning coffee, am I a pathetic person? If being as kind as is possible gives me the life I want, am I some kind of weakling? If I prefer friendship or political activism to sexual relationships or sexual encounters, am I just inhibited? Are the seekers of unforbidden pleasures simply bland? Are they great sublimators and displacers but poor realists? Are unforbidden pleasures sad substitutes for the forbidden ones? What has the monism of forbidden pleasure — the siren song, the abiding claim on the Freudian subject of the forbidden — stopped us from thinking about pleasure?

so much shit you just have to do isn't enjoyable but life will be better if you do it. so many things that are supposed to be enjoyable aren't and life is too short to do things that are only for enjoyment with no payoff

Moderation in all things... including moderation.

If I prefer friendship or political activism to sexual relationships or sexual encounters, am I just inhibited?

this is a little confused i think. political activism can often be one of these /exciting/ pleasures - the pleasure of protesting, engaging, fighting, etc. and by contrast, not every sexual relationship/encounter is exciting. i think as a culture we def look down on monogamous longterm relationships as boring/staid but what is wrong w/ enjoying having sex w/ the same person you've had sex w/ for the last 50 years? if anything that sounds to me like a sublime pleasure available to probably only a few of us. i hope one day i know what it's like to have had sex w/ the same person for decades and decades. boring? well, not exciting fresh and new. but sex is never really boring no matter who it's with, and there something here about depth vs. breadth. you can sample a lot of different things or you can really get deep into one particular thing. in yeshiva we called this distinction iyun (in depth study) vs. geirsa (broad study) - studying one or two pages of the talmud over the course of a semester vs. trying to finish the entire volume. you can really ruminate in a page and think about what it means and what the numerous commentaries are on it. i actually always found the pleasures of iyun to be more meaningful + substantial than the more temporarily exciting pleasures of constantly moving on to new topics.

or I should have said, things that are for "enjoyment" that aren't actually enjoyable

i'm all for branching out but sometimes the old standbys are where it's at

the siren song - lol i did mention this above. even in forbidden pleasures there are ways of dealing with them that are maybe safer than others.

yeah agree about politics being a "hot" medium for pleasure. (maybe one reason i never quite identify with the farther reaches of the left)

i'd rather live in a society of masochists than sadists, but the former can't in good faith claim to be looking out for themselves. neither the ppl I've known who are fond enough of tranquilisers etc. that they lose control of the rest of their life.

i think the trick is to see multivalence, which is what transgressive pleasures utilise to some extent (this ties into the kristeva disgusting/enticing thing & even accounts for the joys of e.g. bitter beer, spicy food, marmite, whisky etc.), and allows you flexibility and some degree of wisdom

i.e. it's not just that what you enjoy is fraught and can be seen in contradictory ways but the very act of enjoyment is often powered by awareness of those contradictory impulses

i think as a culture we def look down on monogamous longterm relationships as boring/staid but what is wrong w/ enjoying having sex w/ the same person you've had sex w/ for the last 50 years?

i think the idea of sex with one person being boring is generally stated within a social/moral framework of someone who prizes marriage and the implied monogamamous sexual relationship it entails. nearly every person I know who fears their marriage would be boring/staid also can't imagine a life where they didn't seek out a marriage partner

this isn't something i really relate to personally but i look at pop culture and it seems filled w/ this idea that long term monogamy is boring - and it seems like (tho i don't know for sure) like adultery is rampant for this reason. i'm always seeing these articles about how ppl can't really be expected to stay faithful, that humans are wired to seek out new pleasures, that humans are not wired for monogamy, etc. i mean maybe this kind of behavioral psychology is correct on the merits idk (other primates seem to have dramatically different sexual habits from us) but possibly just a part of our culture's fixation on hot pleasures?

Underplayed, yet overrated song comes on at the bar.

i don't understand this, but i'm sure there's a ILM list thread on the topic with hundreds of examples

xp I don't think that's really true, there's obv a tension there though. a lot of the griping in this thread about unforbidden tame pleasures seems borne of a weird insecurity about what everyone else is up to and what they deem boring, which reminds me of when I see people being performatively & self-consciously lame/boring/middle-class and clearly getting a huge kick out of it

xp no, it's just because the idea of sex is very exciting and universal and good for fiction and is a shorthand for thrill-seeking. there are people who are all over the place sexually, but they're kind of that way in general.

like I know people who are bad at sexual monogamy but for the most part their lives are a hot mess outside of the sexual relationship aspects, too

isn't the truly radical act to actually be very boring indeed? aren't the suburbs are the real frontier?

-are

if you think about it, having kids is the biggest risk/slowest reward payout thing you can do

I was mentioning a few places I'd like to travel to a coworker and he felt like a couple were too risky for him, but he has three kids under the age of seven. I mean, chances are low anything would happen to me on a trip, but anything could happen to any of those kids and it'd fuck up his life hardcore!

lol this just showed up in my fb feed
http://www.msn.com/en-ph/entertainment/celebrity/scarlett-johansson-monogamy-is-unnatural/ar-AAmWKp1

raising kids has a lot of enjoyable moments and can be very long-term fulfilling but if you're used to getting your enjoyment from thrill-seeking it's a pretty huge adjustment

Mordy, popular actors have insanely fucked up lives! Like, can you imagine being on set umpteen hours per day, on location halfway across the world, and having a spouse that just deals w/that? People love to read about people with lives that don't lend well to stable relationships because it makes you feel better.

but at the same time they have some blip of SJ saying she views marriage as "a responsibility"

if someone is reading that and thinking "yeah I am just like this international actor, better not have any monogamy" then lol

lol no i agree i just thought it was serendipitous

like as a boring-ass middle class person I can read that and think, wow, even insanely successful Scarlett Johansson has trouble with relationships! she's right, it's a lot of work, I don't have it so bad -- and I guess I am doing a lot of work by being in a relationship

like there is nothing in that article that doesn't put monogamy and marriage up on a pedestal, and there's no inclination SJ is divorced because she just wants to fuck around a lot

this is literally half of the content at grocery store checkout tabloids

ugh, sorry for sounding very preachy

but i have for real been trying to evaluate what brings me joy and fulfillment in life because i kind of flamed out after not finding fulfillment OR enjoyment in things i tried and have been resorting to some easy fixes in both categories to the point where things are definitely losing even their brief enjoyment factor

one reason i loved that unforbidden pleasures article is that i'm naturally inclined that way and always feel guilty about it, like i'm missing out on life because literally my favorite thing to do is read outside when the weather is nice.

I did that on a mexican beach once, would highly recommend

just figured out where the thread title came from and tbh I should have been enjoying that on a beach instead

Fomo is kinda a trait of cunts I've noticed

...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Cunts

hey now

imo it's a trait of insecurity, and only some insecure people play out that insecurity by being cunts

they're the worst, though

Ok

The fear don't make u a cunt

Typing #fomo does tho

Square?

oh wow who even does that

This statement in the thread "uppers are immoderate and for destructive egotists, downers are the responsible choice of the nurturing selfless" = totally disagree.

Blanket statement if there is one, people can do both. I would say that the downers are less destructive overall, but I don't align with calling people who do uppers egotists.

IE. you could smoke pot everyday and yes it would seem more innocuous compared to cocaine, but I cannot imagine smoking pot daily for years (which I've done) makes one less of an egotist or more self caring.

expand yr pool of enjoyment

uh hello

http://ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=60&threadid=2955

caffeine is an upper guys c'mon

do I need a friggin coffee mug that says "destructive egoist" on it

the war against drugs really jacked with perceptions

*smokes a cig*

never enjoy anything it will just break your heart

xp to ross - yeah that was supposed to be a self-evidently absurd position i was ascribing to mordy

I think we can say with some certainty anything we like

As long as one exhibits a breeziness whilst doing so

i didn't say anything about egoism? xp

if anything i think the thrill of danger/excitement has something to do w/ a nullification of the self - losing oneself in something overwhelming - but generally speaking is irrelevant to this paradigm.

My apologies if I missed that ogmor

danger is cool because your brain makes adrenaline and endorphins duh

like "oh shit i'm gonna die" doesn't give you joy per se, but you get a blast of the brain chemicals

Don't forget the pop ev-bio explanations for stupid, dangerous, and otherwise nonadaptive behavior. This is probably a dated and discredited view, but cf. Desmond Morris.

Why do adolescent males do things that are risky and stupid? Because if you do something risky and stupid YET SURVIVE, a female will mate with you. At a subconscious level, she will perceive that your genes are strong, and she wants to have children who will be more likely to survive the Starving Times.

On the other hand, if you die doing the risky stupid thing, then the species was better off without you anyway.

This explains Tom Sawyer doing handstands in front of Becky Thatcher. But it also explains beer bongs, skateboarding, keg stands, Xtreeem sports, "Jackass," stage dives, freebase cocaine, and "Point Break."

Of course girls, women, and older men will do these things too. But that's more a matter of it being in the culture than a biological drive.

Don't forget the pop ev-bio explanations

why?

Earlobes are for pair bonding, everybody

Obviously, and it's no accident that they're a popular location for piercing. Piercing is, of course, a vestige of the "I did something dangerous but I survived, so please mate with me." So are rollercoasters.

Grand unification theories that explain everything - they're a helluva drug.

Intellectualizing the habit of gawking at cleavage was, for me in my youth, almost as exciting as cleavage itself.

Now I'm almost forty and it's clear: actual boobies are the only thing that matters

I think it's in Camille Paglia somewhere: cleavage is there to make you think of a butt. Just like lipstick is there to make you think of labia.

http://www.drmartens.com/us/p/mens-boots-b%26b-smooth-backhand-pascal
http://www.drmartens.com/us/p/mens-boots-b%26b-london-backhand-smooth-pascal

I mean, I know they are hideous and yet

link not working right

please tell me you meant to link the beavis & butthead boots

I did, both versions

http://www.drmartens.com/uk/beavis-and-butt-head-collection

they are gloriously ugly