My take is that a lot of wants, is followed, run afoul of the Cigarette Principle: “If you smoke enough cigarettes, you will die and become unable to smoke cigarettes”.
Or to expand it, following irrational wants quite often leads to outcomes so bad as to more than negate the pleasure derived from fulfilling the want, quite often to the point of making the future happiness from following such want impossible, or very unlikely.
The problem is, the vast majority of wants, if pursued by anything less than rational moderation, leads to a form of Cigarette Principle, the prime example being that the main cause of death in modern times is lifestyle related cardiac failure. Thus preferences should be considered internally suspicious and examined carefully for traps, rather than reflexively defended.
People are relatively good at spotting when Thing I Want and Thing That’s Good For Me are the same thing, but bad at seeing when these things are misaligned, so the best course of action is to consciously train yourself to like or unlike things based on whether they are Cigarettes in disguise or not.
My take is that a lot of wants, is followed, run afoul of the Cigarette Principle: “If you smoke enough cigarettes, you will die and become unable to smoke cigarettes”.
Or to expand it, following irrational wants quite often leads to outcomes so bad as to more than negate the pleasure derived from fulfilling the want, quite often to the point of making the future happiness from following such want impossible, or very unlikely.
The problem is, the vast majority of wants, if pursued by anything less than rational moderation, leads to a form of Cigarette Principle, the prime example being that the main cause of death in modern times is lifestyle related cardiac failure. Thus preferences should be considered internally suspicious and examined carefully for traps, rather than reflexively defended.
People are relatively good at spotting when Thing I Want and Thing That’s Good For Me are the same thing, but bad at seeing when these things are misaligned, so the best course of action is to consciously train yourself to like or unlike things based on whether they are Cigarettes in disguise or not.