How People Make Poison
The difference between a therapeutic drug and a poison is in the concentration.
Drugs are safe only if given at the right concentration. The doctor must get the concentration right. Give too little, and you don’t get a high enough effective dose; give too much, and you harm the patient.
The safe concentration falls in a range. For some drugs, this range is so narrow. The doctor must take extra care to maintain the drug level within the safe range. The difference between healing and killing a patient with a drug lies in the concentration.
Similarly, a lot of good things in life are only beneficial in the right amounts. Too little of a good thing leaves you unsatisfied. Too much of a good thing kills. Unfortunately, we struggle to get the balance right.
For instance, parents that accumulate wealth through hardship overcompensate for their children. To give their children a better and comfortable life, they eliminate “healthy” difficulty from their children’s lives. They raise children that consume and spend but never really know how to create wealth. The wealth does not last beyond a single generation.
Eliminating “healthy” difficulty where difficulty serves a good purpose creates a problem. Healthy difficulty stresses you in a good way. It pushes you to find solutions without overwhelming or paralyzing you. The difficulty, in this case, is part of the solution — it is a feature, not a bug. Over-optimizing and making things too easy stifles growth.
Besides making too easy what should be difficult, you can also create problems by over-concentrating what nature gives in small amounts. By doing so, you cause harm by taking in too much of a good thing.
Creating Harm by Increasing the Concentration of Good Things
More is not necessarily better. Nature perfectly controls the concentrations of things that make life pleasant. It has inbuilt checks and balances which prevent us from harming ourselves with good things. In the quest to create even more pleasure, man bypasses these checks.
- Making food taste better
The sugar in fruits is minimal and perfectly balanced with fibre.
Natural and healthy food is coarse and unprocessed. The body has to work hard to digest it and extract essential nutrients.
In our wisdom, we have extracted pure oil, pure sugar and pure fat from rich and complex foods to delight our senses with concentrated goodness.
We have separated and processed a whole grain into pure and refined starch (flour), fibre (husks) and germ. We sell each part separately.
When digestion is healthy, it is slow and gives the stomach good exercise. The whole body benefits from good digestion. We eliminate fibre and then announce great scientific discoveries that show “fresh fruits and vegetables are rich in fibre. Increasing your intake of these protects from colon cancer”.
We create nutrition disorders when we take good food in a modified form or proportions that do not match the body’s requirements.
- Speeding up reality
In real life, events happen slowly.
Life has a few highlights interspersed with long periods of uninteresting events.
The entertainment industry condenses the most exciting events into the shortest time. Over time, ads have had to become more and more stimulating to grab our attention.
Our attention spans have become shorter, and we have become increasingly restless with real life. We have created attention deficit disorder en masse — we cannot tolerate the pace of real life.
Television condenses storylines that would need longer than our lifetimes to complete into a few minutes of a hyper-stimulating experience. We have lost the ability to enjoy everyday life. It is too slow and dull.
Social media gives us an escape from all things uncomfortable and boring. It gives us permanent release from having to sit quietly with our thoughts. It gives us a place to go where we can be alone, away from reality.
- Improving your mood
The body produces unique chemicals that control our mood — neurotransmitters and hormones.
We short circuit the system when we stimulate the body with chemicals (good and bad) outside of its needs.
The bottom line of all addiction is a chemical. You can take the chemical directly into the body — through food (sugar, salt, oil), over the counter drugs, alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, etc.
An addiction, however, does not necessarily have to be to a substance. A person can be addicted to an activity that causes the brain to release certain chemicals on which the person becomes dependent. The activity makes the brain release dopamine — the “feel-good hormone”.
The biggest global addiction probably is to dopamine — it’s the reason we stay glued to our devices — we endlessly hunt for dopamine kicks from the content we consume.
Addictions exhaust our brains. Each “high” leaves you feeling depleted and drives you to look for another high.
- Staying fit
Exercise is the mother of all good habits — when you get it right, many other seemingly unrelated habits get right.
Taken to extremes, it becomes harmful. There must be a reason why very healthy ultra-marathon runners collapse and die suddenly.
- Getting rest
Good, refreshing sleep is a wonder drug.
Too much sleep leaves you feeling groggy and depletes your energy.
- Chasing out of the world experiences
In the old fashioned world, people could not buy sex readily as is done today. They had to pursue and woo mates into a stable relationship of sorts. They had to get through many hoops.
Today, people have endless and unlimited access to virtual sex. They overdose on what should be natural until it damages their appreciation of what is part of nature. There must be a reason why soliciting and exploiting people for sex leaves people feeling dirty or empty.
Creating Harm By Eliminating Difficulty
Humans invent solutions that make life easier. These solutions save time and energy.
When we eliminate healthy hardship, we harm ourselves. We create new problems for ourselves by ‘over-fixing’ problems.
- Simplifying motion
A car solves the problem of walking long distances on foot.
When we drive everywhere, we lose the benefits that come with physical motion.
- Eliminating work
We associate being elite with eliminating menial tasks.
With enough money, you can pay someone to do all the tedious tasks for you. With even more money, you can eliminate even more jobs from your life. Freeing your time so you can concentrate on the essentials is vital.
When extreme, being sedentary and unoccupied creates problems. Our bodies and minds thrive when put to good use. Being useful to ourselves and others keeps us sane.
A person reduced to continuous servile duties is miserable. On the other extreme, a person stripped of all responsibility finds life meaningless. It’s the middle you want to be in — work because you want to and not because you have to.
Humans are designed to connect to other humans in mutual and beneficial ways. We assume that being served by others is superior when the wholeness we are longing for is in helping others.
- Simplifying thinking
Working through real problems stimulates the mind. The mind loves work. It wants to view the world through a different lens and create new solutions for old problems. It loves to discover and be left to wander. It likes to form unique interpretations of the world and events around us.
The media short-circuits your thinking. When you read news, you read the writer’s interpretation of events which may not necessarily be balanced or accurate. When you watch the news, a news anchor reads out a news item and immediately brings on an “expert” in a field related to the news item. The expert digests everything for you. He feeds you a ready-made opinion. There is no room for you to examine events through your mind and make sense of them.
The media heavily stereotypes people and places. It gives you a pre-packed opinion of the Chinese, Arabs, Russians or Africans without ever asking for your opinion. It teaches you to vilify or praise people depending on the narrative the media wants to sell. It leads you to hate, pity or adore people you have never met. It makes you feel more familiar with virtual personalities than you do with the real people around you. It makes you think you understand “Americans” even though you have never met them or been to America. You will never have the opportunity to experience and interpret the total of Americans for yourself.
By repetitively exposing you to fixed narratives, the media locks you into flawed thinking you never question. It colours and shapes a world you will never experience in reality and convinces you have already experienced it. It blurs the line between the real and unreal.
Working Our Way Back to a Safe Level of Good Things
A large part of working our way back to normal is realising that we do not fully understand the side effects of the good things we have created. By the time we begin to realize what we have done, there will be a lot of damage. There is a scarcity of people that can slow down and be deliberate about their choices. Become one of them.
