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- Written by: Alexey Kopchinskiy
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- Written by: Voltaire
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- Written by: Voltaire
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This seemingly simple question is actually very difficult to answer. Happiness is a highly subjective concept and applying it to even a small group of people is quite difficult. If we look at the animal and plant worlds, we will hardly find any of its representatives who are objectively unhappy. Signs of something that resembles a state of dissatisfaction, which we could call "unhappiness", appear only in higher primates (possibly also dolphins and whales, but this is too complex a group to understand). Other groups of mammals can also show behavior patterns similar to the state of "unhappiness", but they are usually focused on some specific immediate problem and pass as soon as this problem is solved.
For example, an unhappy hungry dog will become quite happy when given a bone. However, some dogs are so attached to their owners that the state of the latter can affect the level of their happiness (watch the tail!).
Happiness for a person? Who am I to judge! Let's just say I have no idea. I haven't even figured it out yet in myself. Let alone the rest.
If we approach it from a purely biological point of view, happiness can be understood as a state of the population in which its genes are guaranteed to be passed on to the next generation, thereby ensuring the survival of a particular species. For a more detailed acquaintance with this point of view, I can recommend the book "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene).
If we accept this point of view, then humanity is quite happy. Moreover, every day its happiness increases by 300,000+ potentially happy units. For reference, watch this page for a while and feel, so to speak, the rhythm of what is happening: https://www.worldometers.info/.
You can think about these indicators for a long time. They simply give an unlimited field for imagination.
If I may be allowed to be completely honest here, I will say that in my personal opinion, so many people simply cannot be happy at the same time.
To be happy, everyone needs to satisfy a certain set of their desires and needs. They are different for everyone and most often depend on the specific cultural and demographic circumstances of a given person's life. There is a set of basic concepts without which happiness is simply impossible. For example, being well-fed and healthy. For many, the life and health of their loved ones are also important. Humanity has repeatedly conducted experiments on itself, in which it tested the stability of these criteria. The religious preferences of a particular person are also important, because, as we know, even Abraham was ready to kill his son at the first command of the Almighty, without even trying to find out why, in fact, he needed it.
There are several important points here that need to be addressed. Firstly, is humanity as a whole becoming happier over time? Do all these summer cottages, cars, gadgets and the like make us happy? Unlikely. Think about it: after a while, your coolest gadget will become obsolete junk, even if you don’t take it out of the package and blow dust off it. No one knows which gadget we won’t be able to imagine happiness tomorrow without. However, we should not forget that not long ago we could be quite happy and successful without mobile phones and the Internet.
Secondly, if we consider the happiness of the human race, so to speak, from the outside, in geological retrospect, the situation will not be so joyful. The fact is that the happiness of the human race has always come at someone’s expense. Unlike other animals, which, having had their fill and satisfied their sexual instincts, can rest, not thinking about anything else and not worrying about any global problems, a person always needs something else. At the same time, he very rarely fully understands what exactly he needs, and even if he convinces himself that he knows it perfectly well, anyone else passing by can twirl their finger at their temple, because they themselves have long ago "figured it all out".
But be that as it may, what kind of happiness can there be if we suddenly stop pumping oil from the depths of our planet, cutting down forests, growing and then happily eating billions of cows, pigs and chickens? If we catch the last tuna from the ocean and cut down the last patch of tropical forest, and are left without tasty and healthy bio-bananas?
Recently, a rather strange theory has appeared, quite clearly expressed by Yuval Harari, that soon a more complex and effective type of "intelligence" will appear, namely AI (Artificial Intelligence), which will completely dominate all spheres of our lives, turning a person into a kind of weak-willed observer, unable even in his imagination to grasp all the perfect super-complexity and super-efficiency of the techno-monster he created himself.
We can indulge ourselves in such projects as much as we like, send expeditions to Mars worth billions of dollars, connect toothbrushes and toasters to the Internet, but suddenly some kind of misfortune will come, like the COVID-19 virus, and all our Martian projects will end up in ... recession.
Other experts offer simpler methods. For example, Sam Harris recommends meditating more. Harari, by the way, also meditates for several hours a day. Unfortunately, despite the undeniable benefits of meditation (I'm serious), even if we all sat in the lotus position right now, the coronavirus epidemic would most likely only get worse.
It leaves a feeling of something global. Some kind of fate haunting humanity. Here I would like to return again to the question of what exactly and in what quantity a person needs for happiness. China comes to mind, which, at some stage of its development as a separate, Chinese unit of potentially happy humanity, decided that it simply could not be happy if each of its billion-strong population did not reach the American standard of living. At whose expense are the Chinese going to achieve this? Trying to answer this question, do not forget that a virtual cow, no matter how appetizing it may seem on the monitor screen, cannot be eaten. You can only eat a real cow, one that, before it is slaughtered and packaged into steaks and shoe insoles, should at least enjoy life for a while, breathe fresh air, drink tasty water and eat delicious grass on a green meadow. After that, O2 will inevitably turn into CO2, H2O will become less tasty, and the amount of grass on the meadow will decrease. At the same time, the more of these wonderful cows are eaten, the more new mouths will appear, demanding more and more cows.
It sounds evil, but it's true, no matter what anyone thinks about it. Damn, you say, everyone already knows this, what's there to write about it! And have you ever thought about the fact that the daily population growth on our planet is approximately equal to the size of the population of the city of Balashikha in the Moscow region (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balashikha), about 200,000? Every day in Balashikha, three hundred and sixty Balashies a year. And this is not such a small city.
There are approximately 80,000,000 of us a year. In a lifetime, a person eats approximately 7,500 animals (cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, sheep, rabbits, ducks, geese, goats, etc.). Thus, humanity, together with the number of livestock needed to feed it, increases by
60,000,000,000
Let me remind you that each of this unthinkable number of creatures, and not just humans, needs to eat, drink, and breathe. If we make the same calculation for the entire population, we get about
60,000,000,000,000
So, today humanity forces the ecology of the earth to somehow bear about sixty trillion additional mammals, each of which needs food, water, air, shelter, warmth, round-the-clock medical care (veterinary care for animals), packaging material (clothing for humans), entertainment (mostly for humans), sex, love (for animals, most likely only sex, although this is not a fact). At the same time, eight billion of them really want to lead this notorious "American standard of living", which, if we theoretically admit its possibility on a global scale, will probably triple the above figure.
So, to sum it up, we must honestly admit to ourselves that there are 60 trillion of us now, but we dream of having about a hundred and fifty trillion of us.
150,000,000,000,000++ of constantly breathing, chewing, drinking, copulating beings, making up the system called "human civilization". This is the happiness we are trying to achieve, the goal of our progress, if we leave out our less prosaic virtues such as painting, poetry, cinema, science and flights to Mars.
For some completely incomprehensible reason, some citizens "do not believe" in global warming. Let alone global warming, I tell you, the earth's biosphere itself, this complex and infinitely diverse system, filled with components that have been adjusted to each other over millions of years of evolution, is not able to withstand the constant abuse of itself, the reduction of itself to bio-bananas and toilet paper.
And of course, a hundred trillion cannot help but be sick with coronaviruses or something similar, but that’s for another article.
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Recently, Orthodox Jews, who had gathered to have fun in honor of the anniversary of the death of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, staged a stampede, as a result of which half a hundred participants in the celebration were crushed and three times the same number were seriously injured. This was not a terrorist attack at all. It was just that someone slipped on the steps of one of the narrow streets of the town of Meron, after which a hundred thousand crowd of die-hard followers of Kabbalah immediately fell on him.
What is the meaning of Lag B'Omer? Shimon Bar Yochai, a disciple of Rabbi Akiva and the author of the book of Zohar, having died on this day almost two thousand years ago, managed to bequeath to his followers to celebrate and have fun on the day of his death, since on this day the disciples of Rabbi Akiva, a sage of the first century, “stopped dying” AD, who taught that our life is a shop in which everything is issued on bail.
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- Written by: Voltaire
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The “miracle” that occurs when a sperm and an egg unite, or why masturbation is more humane than abortion.
One of the hot topics around which heated debates continue is the question of banning or allowing abortions. We are talking about killing the fetus currently in the mother’s womb. The paradox of this problem is that in order to kill someone, it is necessary to at least first give birth to him, because death by its very meaning is the opposite of childbirth and the killing of unborn babies is logically a rather non-trivial task.