From: Ian Reilly (ianreilly@comcast.net)
Date: Thu Mar 06 2003 - 13:13:37 MST
Someone wrote:. I have no interest at all in being a an emaciated
exercise-obsessed 120-year-old human; I want to be a 1000-year-old sexy
glutton.
leaving aside the point that we would all like to have our cake and eat it
too, from a strictly practical point of view, the path to a 1000 year old
glutton may be through a 120 yr old emaciated exercise obsessed human -
YET - the extropian movement does need to be "sexy" and attractive and not
imply too much personal deprivation, or else it won't catch on (in "time"
anyway). If it doesn't catch on, the mortalists rule, money is spent on the
military instead of medicine, cars instead of cures, and lots of other A vs
B tradeoffs that can be crudely reduced to slogans.
REQUEST FOR REPLY - My idea of an extropian lifestyle is a form of "long-run
ascetic hedonism". Perhaps someone could offer a better term tho - the idea
is this: minimize consumption expenditures given a set of constraints which
are individually determined to be the minimums necessary for the emotional
and psychological (and therefore, to some extent, physical) well being of
the individual. That is the ascetic part - the hedonist part is to liberate
ourselves, to a degree, from anachronistic cultural, psychological, social,
legal and instinctual constraints on our behavior which make us unhappy and
therefore unhealthy - these constraints also, of course, make us unhealthy
directly by increasing addictive & palliative habits - like eating lots of
fat, alcohol consumption, driving fast/around, smoking etc.. Imelda Marcos'
2,000+ shoes may be a function of her "gatherer" genes or something more
sexy like penis envy or genuine horniness- but the direction these
(unrecognized?) tendencies was distorted by consumerist culture. An ascetic
hedonist would advise her to stop buying shoes out the shoes and take on a
gardener. (I dunno tho, that would indeed be one expensive gardener ;-) But
the shoe lobby would rather prostitution be illegal ;-)
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