Café Philos: an internet café

Yesterday, Thanksgiving, I had a pleasant surprise. A friend I hadn't seen in over two years showed up on my doorstep, healthy and happy.

The healthy and happy bit was very much part of the surprise. Suzanne has suffered over many of her 28 years from a nearly debilitating emotional disorder. But yesterday she was quite happy and seemed healthier than I remember as being usual for her.

So far as I know, Suzanne is the world's only former Victoria Secrets model to join a traveling circus.

She lasted a year in the circus job, which is a long time for her to last in any job. She's energetic, exceptionally intelligent, and hard working. But then there's that emotional disorder thing. It impairs her judgment, and she tends to screw things up with the result that she's had very little stability in her life.

She was 16, I was 39, when we first met at a coffee shop. It's been a dozen years now, and that circus stint is still the longest she's held onto a job. She says she's known me longer than nearly anyone else in her life outside of family, and I believe her. I've lost count of the number of apartments and rental homes she's had. It's as if Suzanne repels stability.

Like so many people with an emotional disorder, Suzanne has been in a protracted abusive relationship. He was twenty years her senior and the sort of man who habitually preyed on much younger women. Quite charming at first.

She had two sons by him. She finally left him when he began to abuse her sons, too.

I've always admired Suzanne's buoyancy. No matter what else that emotional disorder has done to her, it hasn't taken her resilience. She always bounces back. And maybe her buoyancy has something to do with the fact she and I can laugh together at even the worse of her misadventures. Yesterday, during her visit, we laughed so hard recalling her miscalculations and misjudgments that I had to wipe my eyes -- several times.

I don't recall who started it, but there's a running joke between us. It's a bit crude, and she's a bit more likely to express herself crudely than I am, so maybe she started it. At any rate, each time I bail her out of some distress she's gotten herself into, she swears she owes me a blow job for it. In return, I tell her that I'm not feeling like one at the moment, and so I'll put it on her tab. Yesterday, she reminded me that she now "owes" me 53 blow jobs for the number of times I've bailed her out of some mess since we started that joke years ago.

In truth, Suzanne has taught me a great deal about giving. Even before I met her, I had learned to give without most strings attached, without most expectation, or most hope, of gaining anything in return. But there was something I hadn't yet learned. There was something I still expected to come from my generosity.

I expected improvement.

Without being consciously aware of my expectations, I hoped when giving to someone that they would learn from their mistake -- from whatever mistake put them in a position to need a hand out -- and that they would improve themselves. I even unconsciously considered a gift wasted if the person did not learn from their mistakes.

Someone once defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. That's a pretty good insight into what a severe emotional disorder can do to a person's judgment. Suzanne is like that.

Suzanne will repeat a mistake again and again, without being aware that she is doing the same thing over and over with only insignificant variations. Her disorder is a cruel one.

At first that frustrated me. When I examined my frustration, I saw it was because I expected her to improve. When I thought about my hope she would improve, I discovered my hope for her was a string I was attaching to my gifts to her. And then I was struck by how unrealistic and unfair to her it was of me to do that.

It was through giving to her I learned to give without even that expectation of any reward for my generosity.

If you yourself make a practice of giving without strings, then you know how liberating it is to do so. And because I myself know that feeling of liberation, and value it, I am grateful to Suzanne for helping me realize it. Perhaps that's her greatest gift to me. If so, it's a good one.

She has many fine qualities, and there's nothing genuinely evil or humanly indecent about her. If life were a child's fantasies of life, then life would be fair; and if life were fair, the Suzannes of this world would never be afflicted with cruel emotional disorders. For someone with her talents and abilities could accomplish a lot of good, both for herself and others -- if only she were healthy and not such an habitual screw up.

Is it just my imagination or has anyone else noticed that when teenage girls talk about having "spiritual yearnings" it means they're horny?

I don't mean to put down teenage girls here. They face a lot of challenges and don't need to be dumped on. Yet, at the same time, I believe I've noticed on many occasions how the word "spiritual" can seem almost synonymous with the word "horny" as it's used by teenage girls. Not always, but often enough to be noticeable.

I even have a theory about it (why, of course I do!). My theory is that most of us, when we enter puberty, don't make an instant connection between the new feelings we experience and horniness. In both boys and girls, feelings of horniness are created by the hormone testosterone. But those feelings don't come labeled "horniness". Instead, we must learn to interpret them as horniness. And while we are learning to properly interpret them as horniness, we often interpret them as something else, such as a "spiritual yearning".

What are the feelings produced by testosterone? Well, one of the most common feelings is sometimes described as "a desire or longing to hit the road". You can see how easily that feeling could be interpreted as spiritual if you listen to Led Zeppelin's famous "Stairway to Heaven" while Plant sings, "There's a feeling I get when I look to the west and my spirit is crying for leaving."

Testosterone also produces a feeling very akin to "emptiness" -- and I've long noticed that when adolescent girls talk about their spirituality, they often talk about it in terms of feelings of longing and emptiness.

I speculate it might be a little harder for girls to make the connection between the feelings produced by testosterone and sexual yearning because girls don't come equipped with an appendage that frequently rises up and points out the connection to them. Boys do. But perhaps a bigger reason it might be more difficult for girls to make the connection is that society expects and accepts that boys will get horny, while at the same time, society more or less still frowns on girls getting horny. Therefore, there might be some pressure on girls to find a more socially acceptable label for their testosterone induced feelings than "horniness". What could be more socially acceptable than a "spiritual yearning"?

None of this is meant to discount the genuine spiritual needs of adolescent girls. I merely wish to point out my impression that girls (more often than boys) sometimes confuse horniness with "spiritual yearning". Adolescence is usually the first time in our lives that we become intensely concerned with spiritual matters. It is also usually the first time in our lives that we become intensely concerned with sexual matters. Since both concerns are in many ways new and unfamiliar to us, it seems possible that we might at times confuse the two.

If so, I wonder how often an exceptionally fervent teenage interest in religion is due to good, old fashioned horniness?

"Satan is the one who plants wicked thoughts in our minds." I read those words on a site yesterday and they stopped me for a while as I wondered what kind of fearful struggle their author must experience to believe that each time he has a wicked thought it comes from Satan. Can you imagine?

Suppose he thinks, as it seems so many religious people do, that even his sexual desires are wicked? Well, according to some psychologists, one thinks of sex every few minutes. Does he feel he's wrestling with Satan every few minutes?

How can one cope with such a monstrous notion -- the notion one's mind is wrestling with Satan? How could one ever be at peace with oneself?

I'm certain I have thoughts he would consider wicked, and therefore from Satan. But I don't see my thoughts the way he does. I'm not in a struggle against any of my thoughts -- to struggle against an unpleasant thought just prolongs it in consciousness. To be frightened of a thought reinforces it, makes it stronger. To condemn a thought just fixes it in memory.

As best I can, I watch my thoughts. I'm attentive to them. But I don't struggle with them. I don't condemn them. I just idly watch them come and go.

I think that poor man must go around in circles, like a puppy chasing his own tail. Perhaps he's struggled so hard against his wicked thoughts that he's committed all of them to memory, where they ever lie in wait to pop up again and again. Perhaps he's reinforced the neural pathways of those wicked thoughts so much they are extremely robust and crowd out most other thoughts.

It would be ironic if I had more wicked thoughts than he did with the difference being I forget my many while he never forgets his few.

"Pride is never justified. It is based on a mistaken evaluation of oneself, or on successes that are only temporary and superficial. We should remember its negative effects. We should also be aware of our defects and limitations, and realize that fundamentally we are no different from those we see as inferior."

- Dalai Lama

"Jealousy, that dragon which slays love under the pretense of keeping it alive."

- Havelock Ellis

I was cruising the internet the other evening, recklessly swerving my way from one blog to another, happily dashing down the electron road, when I crashed into a notion. The notion I crashed into -- on blog after blog that evening -- was that unless God exists, life is meaningless. Several people were saying they had lost their faith in God and now felt "empty", "hollow", "full of angst", or "devoid of meaning". I checked, and none of them were teenagers. Teenagers typically mistake horniness for existential despair. But these folks were adults and it can be presumed they were not simply mistaking the emotional effects of testosterone for a crisis of meaning.

What all the bloggers shared was having been raised as Christians in churches where it is common to teach people the meaning of their life comes from God.

That is, the idea seems to be that without God, our lives are meaningless because after a few decades at most they end in oblivion, rather than continuing on in some fashion. Thus, it is argued the meaning of life depends on whether we -- that is, our soul, metaphysical spirit, or true self -- endures for all of eternity.

Yet, is it actually true that life has no meaning unless we continue on in some fashion after death?

I sometimes feel fortunate that I mostly escaped ever harboring the notion my life was meaningless without eternity. As a child, I attended church because my then agnostic mother believed it was important to expose me to the dominant religion of my culture -- Christianity (She also believed it was vitally important to get me out of the house Sunday mornings so she could stay home and indulge herself in the wonder of a few hours without having me under her feet). My exposure to Christianity led me to think quite a bit about it, but my exposure failed to make me a Christian -- except for a single month while I was in middle school. Other than that one month, I grew up agnostic like my mother. So, it was quite some long time ago that I examined the question of whether eternal life made temporal life meaningful and somehow I never bought into the notion that it did. Thus, I did not feel "empty", "hollow", and so forth upon leaving Christianity after my one month gig with it. But the bloggers I swerved into the other evening at one time certainly bought into that notion because giving up God and eternity for them has resulted in their feeling life is meaningless.

Our assumptions and expectations have much more to do with whether we feel life is meaningless than we might at first suppose. If we are successfully taught at a young enough age that life is meaningful if and only if we last forever, then we will feel life is meaningless as soon as we give up our belief we last forever. Yet, if we do not assume the meaning of life depends on how long we endure it in some form or another, then we look elsewhere for the meaning of our lives -- and many of us will succeed in finding a meaning (or meanings) for our lives that satisfy us.

It's quite often said these days that "if women are oppressed, all of us are oppressed." I believe there's enough truth in that to make it a viable statement, and it is one reason I support many feminist positions. But last night, I came across a blog post arguing people should not support feminism for that reason. The author was sure anyone who supported feminism for such a "selfish" reason was ignoble and a detriment to the cause.

Instead, she believed the only sound reason to support feminism was because supporting it was the "right thing to do" if you believe in "justice."

In other words, she is an idealist.

She believes that people can and ought to support something for an ideal reason, rather than because their skins and the skins of their friends might happen to be at stake. Well, I have to disagree with her on that.

Very few people are genuinely motivated by ideals. Most of those who say they are motivated by ideals are really motivated by some kind of self-interest -- and too often a perverse one. Moreover, the few who are genuinely motivated by ideals tend to be much too familiar with human nature to ever ask anyone else to do something merely for an ideal. Instead, they appeal to other's self-interest even when they themselves are doing the thing for selfless reasons.

You cannot find enough people in this country to support feminism -- or any other cause -- for purely idealistic reasons to fill a convention held in a small country church, let alone enough to change society. The average joe and sally are going to support feminism -- if they support it -- because it's somehow in their own self-centered interests to support it. Maybe I'm just too old and cynical to see it any other way, but that is indeed how I see it.

Last year, scientists at the National Institutes of Health discovered that altruistic actions activate the same pleasure centers in the brain as are associated with food and sex. It therefore appears the brain is hard wired for altruism in the same way it is hard wired for eating and procreation.

Besides the National Institutes of Health study, researchers elsewhere are compiling large bodies of data on human moral behavior -- all of which seems to suggest the day when morality can be exclusively attributed to learned behavior is rapidly ending.

Of course, that doesn't mean human morality is rigid and inflexible. Look at procreation! While sexual desire is hard-wired, the range of human sexual expression is huge. So, too, is the range of human altruistic behaviors. Certainly, morality has an innate component. But it is at the same time learned behavior.

I think a good part of the American problem with sexuality is caused by good ol' envy.

Some people who aren't completely content with their own sex lives envy others theirs. And of those who envy, some seek to assuage their envy by attempting to put restrictions on the people they envy.

I think that might be why so many "moral" people eventually break down and have affairs with their secretaries, prostitutes, or the occasional goat. That is, their moral aversion to sex is not based on anything that's wrong with sex, but on envy -- so when they get a chance to grab some, they take it.

I don't think envy is the only factor that causes the American hysteria with all things sexual, but I think it plays into it in a big way. And I think it's a weak foundation on which to build one's sexual morality.

I'm not sure I thoroughly care at what age women are typically the sexiest, but the question still amuses me enough to pose it this morning. Especially since silly American culture seems to insist that real women are not sexy -- rather, mere teens are. Fashion is driven by 16 year olds. So, at what age are women typically the sexiest?

My hunch is most of us will think first of the age at which women look the sexiest. Nothing wrong with that. The women who are held up to us as sexy are almost always women we know through the media, and the media emphasizes not only youth but looks too. So it's almost natural for us to think, "sexy = pimping good looks". But can we think outside that box?

In real life, isn't sexy, like charisma, most often associated with behavior rather than merely with appearances? And if that is true, shouldn't we take into account such things as the sexual confidence of women when asking the momentous question?

I've read psychologists who assert that around age 35 most women undergo a sea change in their attitudes towards sex. They gain vast sexual confidence. Let's suppose that's true. If so, would that explain why -- in real life -- a 30-something woman can often create in men more sexual excitement than her younger sisters? I don't know, but I'm tossing it out as a definite possibility, and my nomination for the typical age at which women are sexiest.

Of course, I don't mean to imply by any of this that women older or younger than 30-something cannot be drop dead sexy. Instead, I'm merely suggesting that women in their 30's tend to reach a sexual peak. There are exceptions to every rule. Besides, the real point of this exercise has been to question the common American notion that female sexiness belongs almost exclusively to teenagers. That's just silly.

It is a mistake to confuse pity with compassion. We pity those we believe are in some way weak or helpless. In that respect, we condescend to pity. But we are compassionate towards those we consider equals.

When we pity ourselves, it leads to cynicism and bitterness.

When we pity others, we encourage them to pity themselves, leading to cynicism and bitterness.

A person who pities himself cannot be happy in his self-pity. But a person who is compassionate towards himself can be happy in his compassion, and is at least on the road to compassion for others.

Perhaps the best way to understand the role certain neurochemicals play in our thinking and feeling is to get drunk.

Not only is that without a doubt the very best way to understand the role of those neurochemicals, it is surely the most fun way. So go ahead! Have a few glasses! By drinking yourself into a senseless stupor while reading this, you will prove to all the world how admirably dedicated you are to understanding neurochemistry.

As you drink, you will notice that alcohol changes both the way you think and the way you feel. That observation should rightfully astonish you. If it doesn’t, you are not yet drunk enough. Have another!

It should astonish you because the common wisdom is that thinking and feeling are two very separate things. On the one hand we have thought. On the other hand, we have emotions. And some say the two shall never meet. Yet, here we have evidence that a single substance – alcohol – changes both thinking and feeling. Thinking and feeling not only meet in alcohol, but they get married.

Now, your astonishment at that revelation can only increase beyond all bounds once you reflect that it’s an actual physical substance producing the changes in your thinking and feeling. The way that works: There are neuroreceptors at various locations in your body that are specifically receptive to alcohol. When molecules of alcohol latch onto those neuroreceptors, you begin to think and feel in the ways you are currently experiencing if you’ve taken my wise advice and have been drinking as you read this.

Certain neurochemicals do precisely the same thing that alcohol does. Those neurochemicals have receptors at various locations in our bodies, and when they latch onto those receptors, those neurochemicals change both the way we think and the way we feel.

Good examples of neurochemicals that change both how we think and how we feel are oxytocin, testosterone, and the cortisols. Of course, by now, you should have drunk enough that you’d be inclined to amiably agree with me even if I said cat litter was a good example of a neurochemical that changes both how you think and feel.

So what does all this mean? Allow me to suggest that your last thought before passing out might be this: Since at least some emotions change both thinking and feeling, it is wrong to assume those emotions are mere feelings alone. Rather, we must believe them to have a cognitive aspect as well. And perhaps that cognitive aspect can best be described as a way of perceiving, a way of looking, a focus, or a perspective.

When we have sex, our bodies release certain neurochemicals that cause us to bond with the person we have sex with.

For instance, our bodies release oxytocin. Oxytocin is a neurochemical that does a number of things in humans, but it should be noted here that it is addictive. That is, oxytocin is as much of an addictive substance as is alcohol or nicotine.

Most people readily describe the emotional effects of oxytocin as having "a warm and fuzzy feeling towards someone". If you gave someone a shot of pure oxytocin, they would experience a rush of warm and fuzzy feelings, among other things.

So what does all this mean? It means that when you have sex with a person, your body releases an addictive chemical that you come to associate with that person. If you cease having sex with that person, you will be able to go a few days with no problem. Then the withdrawl symptoms will set in and you will yearn for him or her (you are really yearning for more oxytocin, but your mind doesn't know that).

This pattern is why so many couples break up, are happy with their break up for a few days, and then plummet into yearnings for each other. Not realizing that they are chemically addicted to each other, they think their yearnings mean they are in love with each other. So, they get back together again. Only to face the same problems that caused them to break up in the first place.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is this: Be careful who you sleep with. If you sleep with them often enough, whether inside marriage or outside of marriage, you will become addicted to them. That is especially true for women: Estrogen multiplies the bonding effect of oxytocin.

I am not making an argument here for restricting sex to marriage, but rather am merely saying that sex has consequences we don't always think about, but should. Sex, after all, is something that evolved in us not just for procreation, but (at least in humans) also for bonding us to each other.

When I was going to school some 30 years ago, a friend of mine was working on artificial intelligence for the government. The two of us were both night owls and so we fell into the habit of discussing everything under the moon with each other.

One night, I asked him whether a thinking computer would have emotions. "It would be too intelligent for emotions", he responded. "How's that?", I asked. "Emotions are undeveloped thoughts.", he said, "The computer would think too fast for it to have much in the way of undeveloped thoughts."

Thirty years ago, the notion emotions amounted to nothing more than "undeveloped thoughts" was certainly not exclusive to my friend. Psychologists of the time barely studied emotions, focusing instead on behavior and cognition. Most of those psychologists, if asked, would have told you that emotions interfered with thinking.

The idea that emotions interfere with thinking goes far back in Western Culture. At least as early as the ancient Greeks and Romans, people thought feeling was inferior to thinking, and thought emotions were at odds with clear thinking. When you have a prejudice that deeply rooted in your culture, it's no wonder the psychologists of 30 years ago still clung to it.

All that seems to be changing now. Recently, psychologists and neuroscientists have discovered emotions as a subject of study. And some of the early results are astonishing to anyone familiar with the idea that emotions interfere with thought. According to Jonah Lehrer:

When [Antonio] Damasio first published his results in the early 1990s, most cognitive scientists assumed that emotions interfered with rational thought. A person without any emotions should be a better thinker, since their cortical computer could process information without any distractions.

But Damasio sought out patients who had suffered brain injuries that prevented them from perceiving their own feelings, and put this idea to the test. The lives of these patients quickly fell apart, he found, because they could not make effective decisions. Some made terrible investments and ended up bankrupt; most just spent hours deliberating over irrelevant details, such as where to eat lunch. These results suggest that proper thinking requires feeling. Pure reason is a disease.

Of course, it will take quite some time before the culturally ingrained notion that emotions interfere with thought is discarded by most people in favor of a more sophisticated model based on research. For one thing, there are ways in which the old model is true enough. Everyone has experienced a time or two when a strongly felt emotion impelled them to act rashly. And because there is some truth in the old model, it will take a long time before that model is replaced. Yet, we now know it's overly simplistic to say emotions are merely at odds with clear thinking.