we constantly seem to complain or find things that are wrong with the world, raise problems rather than solutions to them, and look at everything pessimisticly (i’m pretty sure that’s a word). so i just thought i’d raise the question and see what kind of replies i got.
…i’m addicted to coke
“…Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a paradise, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy… there was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. The perfect world was a dream your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from…”
As mis-taught to hate selves as any words, humans are addicted to self-hatred and so to misery, misery coming form the word which means to hate or love less.
For instance, if i hate myself as wrong and as imperfect, I already have the wrong and imperfect attitude towards myself and I will be miserable with myself, since no matter how right and perfect I make myself, I still hate me as wrong and as imperfect. Then ditto with the world around me and with other humans.
If I hate myself as a problem, I already have a problem-attitude or attitude-problem. So when i have problems, I have 2 problems: the problem and my attitude; and even when I have a solution, i still have a problem: my attitude problem.
Hatred of my self as any word is the pessimistic attitude that affects me negatively and pessimistically even when I am positive and optimistical.
Being addicted to Love of self as all words and their opposites is the perfect addiction! since it allows you to lvoe yourself and others as imperfect, and also prevents you from being addicted to any other thing or person or place and their opposites.
all love and respect,
iloveu
I think human beings are obsessed with giving meaning to misery. I think the real obsession is trying to explain why there is misery, I think our addiction is less about creating misery rather it is about figuring out why we suffer and why there is suffering.
Humans are on the road to evolutionary perfection. And maybe at the end of this evolutions, which could be millions of years from now, we will loose the chains of misery and depression, and be able to constantly be in a state of bliss. Maybe so. I think if you put logic together, that in the end, if all goes well, and if all keeps growing, this will be the case.
As far as right now, I think our dear Buddha said something of this sort:
‘Everything is sorrow.’
That means, whatever you do, the human mind finds flaws, and eventually total sorrow in it. EVERYTHING, eventually leads to somesort of sadness, even if it is temporary.
yes
No one in his right mind could be addicted to misery because we all find pleasure in happiness. However, we all see misery in our life and so learn to identify with it and some start to identify with it so much that they fear that if they try going away from it they will not be happy anymore. That is why people who are abused will stay in that abusive situation even though it is abusive, but because they identify with it, it feels familiar and even though the unfamiliar might bring us happiness, we still choose to live with the familiar because we identify with it so much.
the first matrix wouldnt have failed IMO. it would have made a bad movie though.
according to the history of the real world, god loves misery so much that he constructed the “open” button on his garage door so that in order to push the button, he had to make a son and torture and crucify him. this is the same guy who made us, so obviously we are all crazy sadists.
in other words, christians, and muslims even moreso i think, have indoctrinated the love of pain. or the love of sacrifice theyd call it. they just want to thank god and they dont have anything to offer for charity so they stab themselves in the head.
its some kind of fallacy they are committing. “since charitable donations tend to hurt myself, simply hurting myself without charitable donations is roughly equivalent”
you can never have true peace because you can never have two perfectly identical flowers for example. nothing stays the same and nothing is ever perfect. if nothing stays the same then you must find away of keeping this peace that can’t exhist. how can you keep peace without using force??? 
i’m confused…
youre confused because for some reason you think peace and exact copies are the same thing? why cant you have two flowers that are different and dont kill eachother? as long as they both benefit from their peaceful interaction, they are peaceful forever. as long as the benefit to be gained from war is not greater than the benefit of peace, peace it is.
i don’t remember who said it and i’m too lazy to look, but someone said that we’re obsessed with giving our misery meaning. i dont think that’s entirely true, supported by the fact that we always find new things to complain about instead of focusing on the few things that are actual problems. but that did give me an idea. perhaps we’re not addicted to misery itself, but we constantly look for imperfections in life so we may appreciate the peace we do have.
I don’t think human beings as an entire race are addicted to misery (that’s a projection that’s very common and popular: “Human beings are a horrible race… but my acknowledging how pathetic we are puts me a notch above the rest”). However, I do think it might seem so because of this:
Many people have a belief that there’s nothing better. This sets up an expectation and the subconscious mind complies by filtering out most of the potentially “good” things in life while focusing on the negative. A lifetime growing up in “misery”… or at least an average level of unhappiness will create a neuro network in the brain optimized for feeling “okay” to “bad”. These mental states become comfortable and familiar over time, just like crossing your arms one way but not the other (BeenaJain said something similar to this).
All of these factors will motivate you subconsciously to act in such a way that guarantees misery will keep coming into your life. Ever watch somebody make bad decisions over and over that screw up their life, then they complain about it and somehow don’t see that they brought it upon themselves? For example, I had a friend who always complained that he never had enough time and had too much to do, but lept at every chance he could to start another project while not finishing others. Or people that keep going for the same type of bad relationships and complain that “all guys/girls are the same”. The biggest kicker is this: While it may be totally obvious to others, beliefs and actions that ruin your life can be very difficult to see in yourself.
Add in Candace Pert’s research on neuropeptides (the chemicals responsible for making us feel emotions). Allegedly, they use the same cell receptor sites as drugs, so it’s possible the biological process that creates physiological addiction to drugs may apply to emotional states as well. Anger, depression, self-pity, self-hatred, and others negative emotions could be like your personal heroin.
I could add a lot more, but this is getting pretty lengthy.
No, God cannot, ‘love misery.’ If God loved misery then we would love it too, but we don’t, so God does not love misery. At another place you suggest that He made us and that being so, are you suggesting that He made us different from Him? I don’t think so. I think that through our emotions and actions we can all turn out to be different and that’s how we see misery in the world at large, but God does not love misery. Neither do we, but we fall prey to our circumstances and actions and fate.
And it was Christ who said that He would atone for everybody’s sins by God making Him to become the sacrificial lamb, how do you know that God intended to do that? As far as I know God is just, so He would not sacrifice one for another’s sins. What kind of justice would be that in which an injustice was present? Besides, if the Romans/Jews/etc., hadn’t crucified Christ, are you telling me that God would have ensured that Christ die by some other means? No, Christ was the victim of viciousness. Moreover, ‘if Christ atoned for humanity’s sins then, humans should not be sinning now, but they are. Life should be wonderful for all but it isn’t.’ Anyways, you get the jist.
No doubt…Sorry, Morpheus, but I think I’ll take the blue pill and continue on with my idyllic life. Roll end credits…
For myself, I avoid misery. I was lucky enough to be born in the first world, so it’s really not much of an issue anyways. No matter what problems I may have, I’m still better off than the majority of people on the planet. I suppose I don’t feel that I have a right to be miserable. My “misery” is an insult to all those who don’t have clean water, sufficient food, freedom, or the opportunity to strive for the “America-Canadian dream”.
If you are a person “addicted to misery”, (and you’ve already seen a decent therapist to discount mental illness) I say quit your bitching and be grateful for what you do have.
Hi Been,
My Dad used to say that he never allowed himself to be happy in case he was disappointed. He’s dead now; I hope that wasn’t a disappointment for him.
Cheers, freethinker 
God is all-“everything” so he is also all-loving. He can love misery, the question is if he actually does. If he doesn’t, then why did he create it? Or maybe he is indiferent to it, in which case I might ask if he also created other things towards which is indiferent?
You also said that God did not make us different. However, we are certainly different. And we do lack some of his qualities and abilities, including that of understanding his will.
getting back on earth, i find it imptoper to say that people are addicted to misery. It’s lay saying they are addicted to good or bad. If one would be happy (or miserable) all his life, that would be at least boring. We have misery because we oposed it to happiness. As our experiences pile up, we obviously have experiences that we feel we want to relive (happy ones) and experinces that we don’t want to (miserable ones). Thus we create a sort of continuum for our state of mind and place each experience on this continuum. The same - with little adjustations - goes for misery in terms of conditions of living.
This limits are all subjective, so what one might describe as happiness, others might describe as a noraml state or even misery.
Given our comprehension and interpretation of the concept, we will always have misery. Having the sweetest life of all, you would eventually define the low part of the continuum as misery, even that is just a broken nail.
We are not addicted to it, we are addicted to dichotomies.
IMO, people are not addicted to missery, but are blinded by missery. Much of the time unable to see beyond the blindness. Until something or someone snapps the cycle, they just keep going and goin in circle since does not see anything beyond.
Just my two cents.
Hi,
These are some good posts. After reading the posts I could not help but wonder about the following:
Maybe we are addicted to happiness, and thus we see misery in everything else that don’t excite (you know that happy feeling) us.
Or in our quest for happiness, everything has to be miserable before we can feel happiness. Possibly, the more misery, the higher the magnitude of happiness is at the end.
Peace