Paul Graham wrote an interesting essay on the Acceleration of Addictiveness. It wasn't my intention to use the same links on this blog as the ones on the Eating Coach blog -- however, I found this idea interesting.
Here are a few of his thoughts:
What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors....
...If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we don't want to want—when it transforms opium into heroin—it seems bad. But it's the same process at work....
...The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40....
Some interesting things to think about since we are careening through time and space with much less time to plan or set our course.
He continues his thoughts with a discussion of normal -- as in normal-what everyone does and normal-what are the ideal operating conditions for us. It bears consideration to our health to see if our "normal" is just unhealthy habits we share with our friends, family, and community. Or if our habits are allowing us to live optimally.
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