Clammed Up

What distinguishes worthy things from the worthless is that you can get hurt while doing them.

Things worth living for are hard—love, art, family, friends, and freedom require work, sometimes arduous work. The reward for your efforts is that you get to be human.

We can establish dyads of self-serving and meaningful activities—masturbation vs. love, porn vs. sex, videogames vs. sports, being a woke activist vs. taking care of your community, and so forth.

What distinguishes worthy things from the worthless is that you can get hurt while doing them. In fact, you will get hurt while doing them. But by choosing the easier path, you become an animal trapped in the tangle of your dopamine pathways.

On some level, I find it beautiful that I, as a human, have the choice not to be human. I could clam up in my shell and never come out, never see the light of day, never get burned or bitten or have my heart broken.

I could be all-powerful in my lonely fantasy land, surrounded by simulated pleasures. What made me not do that, ultimately, was love.

(I wish I could give you the example of a Greek god who, out of love for a woman, chose to come down from Olympus and become a mortal man, and eventually die. I couldn’t find any).

Things worth living for also worth dying for.