0 comments Love; The Views of

Love cannot be defined. You may ask yourself, “How can we talk about something that can't be defined?” The answer is that there are so many different ways to define and describe love that there is no one definite way of saying what is right, wrong or bizarre in love. Everyone has different views and opinions on what love is and what it involves. It could possibly be seen as heinous to try and attach a single sentence to what love is. Love, the feeling not some biological mumbo jumbo, is purely opinionated.

The most noticeable traits about humanity is that we have wars, violence and death that are now generally thrown with full force at us from the media. However, there is also love and acceptance that all humans seem to strive for. We have songs and shows and movies and novels dedicated purely to love and sex.

Some people even put more faith in love than faith in any higher power. My only guess at why this could be is that it's the hope that one day said person could fully connect and know another living being. Many of us have probably experience love in one way or another – love for a family member or friend, a pet, a childish crush.

Some may argue that it isn't love. That love in no way, shape, or form even exists. I do not intend to make it seem as if I have any right saying that it does or does not, I'd just like to carefully lay out what everyone I've spoken to thinks and believes. I have received both short and humorous replies and in-depth replies, as well. The variety of responses will hopefully reveal different paths and thoughts about love that most of us haven't even dreamed of.

"What is your idea of love?"

GB:

A ridiculous bond between people that defies all logic and basically throws common sense out the window, but a basic necessity.

WT:

She reminds me of the first time I discovered masturbation. That's how you know it's true love.

TF:
That's a hard one...I guess it can't be put into words. It's just something wordless.

SL:

I don't know. I kind of think of it as something both infuriating and cool at the same time. I kind of agree with Chris Rock, love is kind of a fine line between itself and hate. At some points you get so mad you want to kill the other person, but then you get the other extreme where you can't imagine living without them. I think deep down everybody has an idea of someone that they fall in love with and at times the person doesn't mesh with that idea so you get super angry with each other because you can't understand why you don't see eye to eye. And I think if you consider love in the long term sense, it's being able to reconcile that idea you have with the person you're with.

VJ:

I'm not sure what you want me to say, like that if I think its real or not? Or that it's like a chemical response in your brain? ...Well I see love as kind of like when you spend time with someone, or realize your attracted to them your body makes like a chemical that makes you happy (maybe? i dont really know) and you remember the feeling it gives you and it makes you want to be with the person more. That's my guess. I don't really know...does that make sense?

PR:

Well that's a bit random. My idea of love? Hmmm. I guess for me it was finding someone who I could see spending the rest of my life with through thick and thin. I mean, I also have a girlfriend. I don't know. It's more then just fucking. [Love] makes me feel great. I remember when I was dating that I always wanted to spend time with the person I loved.

CZ:

Honesty, loyalty, monogamy and, of course, actual love for the person. Its hard to describe love, I think love is a type of insanity. But it's a good type...sounds corny and stupid but you don't need to know its exact science, you just feel it. That's what I think and how I feel about it, at least. Two different type of love too, love you can have for your family and friends and romantic love; for me both are pretty strong. I do think romantic love is a tad more powerful though, you can share feelings and thoughts with a friend but when you have a boyfriend or girlfriend and you engage in something sexual or intimate, it makes things more serious. Sex is when you let down all your walls and barriers and you let another person "see you."

LL:

Feeling of and expression of attraction to another for various reasons. Anything that makes you attracted to another person. I have my love down pretty well, I think. Just that while some may think crushes are not love, I disagree. It's just blind love. Everyone loves another to a certain degree and they want to try and show it in a way appropriate for the type of relationship. Also, it's not some magical force but nor is it a confusion for the need to mate. I think people find it difficult to define in most cases because there's little to compare it to. It's so unique.

GP:

Giving someone the power to hurt you and hoping that they don't. Allowing someone to make you feel both incredibly happy and incredibly sad or angry, someone who is like an emotional steroid for you, someone who makes you feel not only alive but alive as a human. It's something much more complicated than fuzzy hug and kisses and stuff. Love is a complicated state of affairs that is as beautiful as it is harsh. That's my idea of it.

LN:

It's to always speak your feelings, always go for a hug, always cheer, always be there, always be honest, but in the end it only confuses people. It freaks them out, or it makes them indifferent. And then they begin to think if it's all true. And they think too hard. So in the end, they realize that true love doesn't exist, when in reality, it does if you WANT it to be. I realized that not a single time she ever believed or even considered that I would leave all my friends and family behind for her.

The thing that stunned me, and perhaps continues to do so, is that very few people mentioned sex. In no way do I think they all totally exclude sex, but I think there is some different path of thought for many in this particular group that involves a need for their version of love with their sex.

This also raises a potentially hypocritical point: How can you believe so absolutely in love, but brush aside a god or religion on some scientific grounds? I would like to say it's because we all experience those small crushes, those infatuations with someone else. We witness others loves daily, as well. We see kissing and hugging and the smiles of pure joy that light faces when they see someone dear to them. It may not be absolutely scientific but it is something every single person feels.

Personally, what I believe is this:

Love is a thing that must be experienced. It shouldn't be explained away by science or put on a time table. There are different tiers of love, at the very top is a mix of absolute trust and absolute love. That one top tier is the one people seem to strive for because it means complete and total acceptance and trust without any fear of rejection. It's about being more than a just a best friend or just a lover, it's about being a mixture of the two. And sex? Sex is about absolute trust, which, for me, requires absolute love.

0 comments The Choice of Addiction

When people think of addictions, they think of alcohol, tobacco, or drugs. But does anyone think about food, sleep, or other necessities in life? Can one be addicted to food? Most certainly. But what defines the boundary setting apart addiction from life's necessities? To the addicted, the substance used has become a dependency of living, hence the term "substance dependence"; one is dependent upon consuming food and one who is addicted to alcohol is dependent upon its consumption. The defining factor here between these two, however, is choice.

The line between addiction and necessity blurs when one is never presented the option of leaving his addiction. If one smoked for his entire life and never realized he could stop, then why would he ever? At that point, smoking would simply be a small, yet required, part of his every day life. When this happens, when and how does one snap out of it to face the truth?

In the 1999 film, The Matrix, Morpheus offers a choice to the protagonist, Neo, to take two pills with opposing results. In one hand, he held the blue pill, and said, "the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe," while in the other hand was the red pill, where he said, "you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." This was a choice of fantasy versus reality. In the film, Neo chose reality and came to know the harsh truth that came with it. Later on, he asked Morpheus if he could ever return; his answer resulting in another question, "Would you ever want to?"

Do we all have such an opportunity to take a red pill? And if we do, would we take it, knowing full well that we may jeopardize the safety of our dream world by doing so? After realizing the harsh truth of reality, one may indeed be tempted by fantasy, wishing he had taken the blue pill instead, the addiction.

0 comments Love ep2: Happiness Effect

Before I start, I'd just like to say that I'm not sorry for the lack of LSTE last Monday after I said I'd deliver it on that day. I reserve all rights to feed you guys with complete bullshit. There was absolutely no way I could've finished last week's addition on a week day. As such(!), I will do the best I can to continue delivering it every Sunday.

Three weeks ago, we defined what love was and also whipped together an illustration of it in the form of an axis. Wasn't that nifty?! But we only briefly went over causes and effects. Initially, I was going to go over all that here, but for now, I opted to stick to what we'll call the "Happiness Effect". Creative naming, isn't it?

We're all happy when we spend time with our loved ones, and whenever we can, we seek out opportunities to pursue that happiness with them. We go out and get lattes, play a game, or plan out events and projects together. Happiness, in its own right, is an addictive high that we actively pursue, and an even greater one when we can accomplish it with another person. But like any other high, is there a danger presented here merely by wanting to be happy with our loved ones? Possibly.

Let's do an experiment. Place a small, helpless child in an empty room. Observe how he perceives his current situation as dull and unexciting. Give a toy for him to play with and continue watching. See how content he is? Now be the cruel monster that you are and pry it away from his hands and smash it to pieces in front of him. Now see how he's in tears? Isn't that fascinating?

What's important to note in the observations of our experiment was the change in behavior in relation to the introduction and removal of the toy. From happy to sad, yes? Wrong. That's not important. I told you to observe his behavior before introducing the toy to the child but you obviously weren't paying attention. The child was bored and relatively neutral in emotion before the toy. The whole point of the experiment was to notice how when you smashed his happiness to pieces along with the toy (you sadistic monster), he became sad instead of returning to his neutral emotional state. This is true for any situation when love in someone's life has come under siege. But why is this so? It's because sadness and happiness are like two ends of a simple gravitational pendulum.

Real quickly, a simple gravitational pendulum is a weight on the end of a massless cord suspended from a pivot, without friction. When given an initial push, it will swing back and forth at a constant amplitude. It's this constant amplitude that takes effect between happiness and sadness. Take a look at this pendulum:

In it, we have two sides, happiness (yellow shade) and sadness (blue shade). The initial push on the weight is the introduction of love. When that happens, it swings into the yellow shade. The amount of happiness that comes from love determines just how hard the push was, and thus, how far the weight swings into the yellow shade. At the point where love is threatened, the weight will then swing into the blue shade with the exact same amplitude. When we lose someone not so incredibly dear to us, we are not so incredibly devastated by the loss. It's a good rule of thumb for realizing just how much or how little you loved someone after a soured relationship.

Keep in mind that this effect is not exclusive to losing your loved one. It also occurs when someone we love hurts us in some way. The greater we love someone, the greater damage they can potentially inflict. This is due to the amount of trust, secrets, and the pieces of our mind we impart from ourselves, turned around and used as a weapon against us. Basically, the love we give can be used against us.

All in all, the point of this topic is just  to act as a reminder that when you're feeling torn, you are only subconsciously thinking of all the wonderful moments you had that gave you a smile and it's time to pursue them again.

0 comments Unexpected Delay

Due to medical reasons (recovering from grenade blasts), K. Rabbit won't be able to provide this week's addition to LSTE until tomorrow.

1 comments Privacy

One of the things I love about growing up in the US is growing up with the concept of privacy.  Did you know that such a thing is only associated in western culture? Many languages like Russian (along with all other Slavic languages) don't even have a word for "privacy" and so rely on creating complex terms from existing words or borrowing the very word from the English language. Not only that but Anglo-American culture sets it apart from even Western European countries. It's a fundamental view derived from old isolationist movements to secede from the British Empire and live separately from the rest of the world.

Privacy is important for the well being of a human's mind. It's security for thoughts that would otherwise conflict with society's views. But why is providing protection for such a thing so important? It's because it's this conflict that defines the existence of individual thought from the unanimous thought of society. Without individual thought, there are no internal conflicts, no impurities in humanity, and we are left as a single collective with human beings as its cellular structure. Some may call this paradise because of its harmonic, utopian value where we progress in the universe with great efficiency. I call it stagnation where culture becomes synonymous with human survival, and creativity & art cease to exist.

To destroy a person's privacy is to destroy his mind.

0 comments Love

We all say "I love you" to one another at some point, often on a daily basis, but what do we mean when we say this? Is it an action? A feeling? Is there a set standard to abide by, and if so, how is it defined? These are among the most frequently asked questions involving love, but sadly, none of them are easy to answer. The problem doesn't stem from the fact that people are uninterested in the subject. On the contrary, there are countless sources available to the public that provide definitions. So then what is the problem? These definitions contradict each other.

In Greek mythology, Pygmalion was a sculptor who crafted a statue of a woman that was so realistic and perfect that he fell in love with it. This representation of love is something of a physical desire. From the bible, love has a more divine meaning, where God is love, and seems to be represented by the intent of gifting to others, such as God's promise of immortality. These are classic depictions of love, but today, there are numerous definitions found around the world and with media outlets like the internet, this can seem very daunting. So rather than try and point out which theory is correct, I will instead confuse you further by adding my own opinion onto the mess about what love is.

Religious love, friendship, familial love, romantic love, they're all the same thing. Love is an axis measured by the level of attraction to another person. This ranges from negative values (hate) to positive values (like). Plain and simple, as depicted by this nifty illustration here:

However, what isn't simple is determining what factors contribute to changes in level on this axis because they're defined differently for each individual. For example, some may separate sex from love, some may include it, and others base love entirely upon it. It's all personal preference. Of course, sex is ambiguously used here to refer to a broader range of things, from physical attraction to that favorite sex position of yours. Factors are different depending on the situation of the loved one as well. If you felt love towards your family, it wouldn't be because they were physically attractive... usually.

Another thing to note here is that in addition to there being varying factors responsible for changing the level of love, there are also varying effects taken due to this level. This is basically how you would express your love. Again, this is all personal preference and largely dependent on the situation of the loved one. Obviously, you wouldn't want to fuck your family but you may rank "Let's fuck" alongside "I'd do anything for you", or you may swap the polar opposites of the axis itself if you so desired (you sick fuck). 

Causes and effects of love are a subject for another time,