Originally <a href='/showthread.php?p=16403200'>posted</a> on 10/16/2012:

Quote Originally Posted by ZetaPsi808 View Post
Rogue i did not intend for my 2 paragraph speech comment to be an attack at you. i do enjoy your posts even tho you are often burying me or patty or ttwarrior
No worries, Zeta. As you've probably guessed by now, I don't post to be popular or to join e-cliques. I post because I've got a point of view to share that I haven't yet seen expressed in the conversation.

My only comment to Patty would be to ask him to consider that his preoccupation with Stoicism tends to focus only on the denial of pleasure and not the dedication to cultivating willpower. There are lots of schools of thought that advocate the triumph within us of logic over passion, but none of them have yet to find any reasonable benefit in the half measures that Patty lives by. What, exactly, is the point of denying yourself love and affection, only to repeatedly suffer at the hands of your other passions?

The way I see it, he has the worst of both worlds right now. He's powerless to effect a change in his self-identity as a helpless degenerate, and allows that to make him feel unworthy of loving and being loved. You can say that women/sex/love are -EV all you want, and if we were immortal you'd be able to make a marvelously strong argument of it, but as soon as you start to factor in the reality that you might not be alive tomorrow, suddenly a little -EV pleasure makes a whole lot of sense.

Even more pressing than death in this discussion is the fact that you're only young once, and the reason young people get preoccupied with sex is because it's fukking amazing when things are tight and everybody's body looks good. If you're going to eschew carnal pleasures in your life, let it be after you have a hard time getting hard, ya know?

Animals evolved with a powerful sex drive in order to perpetuate the species, but humans have been sentient long enough to let go of that instinct if it didn't serve us. We haven't because the price of self-awareness is mental anguish, plain and simple. Too seldom do we acknowledge it, but when people pair off and share mutual attraction, they are just trying to replace that anguish with a sense of well-being that's extremely hard to duplicate in solitude.

In conclusion, I have a hard time believing there's genius at work when a guy who works very hard for relatively little pay, and who donates most of that pay to Costa Rican bookies, then tries to tell me that the secret to happiness is spending the night with my own right hand instead of a cute frat boy. It's not even about the sex, it's about letting someone get close enough to you to see your flaws and finding that they see still more to love. That might be the most +EV experience available to anyone to whom tomorrow is not promised...

In 2,800 years of recorded philosophy, the most profound realization we have is that nobody has yet to find the answer to how best to live a good life. It could be right around the corner, but even so I doubt it's first going to be described on SBR Forum.