You Make Me Mental
Love is a serious mental disease."
— Plato (c. 424 BC to c. 348 BC)
Friends Among Us (2020) by Philosopher Daniel Sanderson
You Make Me Mental
Love is a serious mental disease."
— Plato (c. 424 BC to c. 348 BC)
The titled responsion is...
Surrendering to your passions and using your rational self to cope is an infectious effect on your other-self. Friendship is love worth cultivating, nourishing, and protecting. The lesson here is a best friend is genetically engineered to submit to our whim and often discarded on the same branch of thought. That would make thinking dendritic in nature, does it sounds argumentative or is it a sound argument?
Plato
Plato said that 'adoration is a grave mental infection' (with a Hellenic accent) and, in the event that you've ever been infatuated you would most likely concur with him. Isn't beginning to look all starry-eyed and somewhat like doing battle with no shield? Isn't it like abandoning an infant little cat? At the point when you begin to look all starry-eyed at your heart is all the way open which implies that somebody can get inside and jumble everything up. The inclination is obviously fundamentally the same as being dependent on heroin, in truth researchers have found that a similar substance measure that happens with illicit drug use, happens when we experience passionate feelings for you know who.
Thus, you arrive at adulthood glad for not having succumbed to the companion strain to manhandle drugs, you don't smoke so you imagine that you're at long last out of the threats of habit. At that point, abruptly, somebody appears unexpectedly, and for some unexplainable explanation you let them meander into your life, you even give them the best piece of you and the ability to transform it into a cheeseburger patty.
This is the point at which your heart can be abducted by a lot of affection psychological militants outfitted with the most recent programmed weapons. This is additionally when your spirit is taken to a mystery refuge, choked up, attached to a seat, and made to drain only for kicks. Furthermore, in light of the fact that we're all powerless addicts, you hold tight, despite the fact that it's excruciating, in any event, when you're being overlooked, or when your confidence has been whipped almost to death. Once in a while we even stick around when they reveal to us that they love another person, so we tail them, long for them, and sincerely accept that we would never be glad without them.
The cycle begins right off the bat throughout everyday life – when we hit adolescence we are infused with a terrible invention of desire. Without this deadly portion of estrogen and testosterone that jumbles up our cerebrums we could never at any point locate that unique individual, on the grounds that in our correct personalities, we could never be intrigued enough with regards to an outsider. Desire is the thing that keeps us 'glancing around', while our longing for sentiment is the thing that drives us to fascination... what's more, they proceeded with failure to think soundly.
The familiar adage 'love is visually impaired' isn't totally exact, on the grounds that in the early tosses of a relationship love isn't just visually impaired but hard of hearing, idiotic, and now and again exceptionally inept. Now we are negligent of any defects that our accomplice may have, we can't get our psyches off them, and we are disgustingly keen on everything about their life...and to the determent of our companions' mental soundness, we additionally imagine that every other person is. In the event that all works out in a good way, when this stage is finished, we become joined enough to one another to remain together when the smoke from this concoction bomb has subsided.
In opposition to prevalent thinking, clinicians at the University of Texas in Austin have presumed that the individuals who admire their accomplice remain seeing someone longer than the individuals who can't or don't – "Ordinarily, this involves one individual putting a decent turn on the accomplice, considering the to be as more responsive than the person truly is" says Ted Huston, the examination's lead agent. Along these lines, if this investigation is valid, notwithstanding all guidance despite what might be expected, it's really not a smart thought to keep your feet on the ground. Perceiving the truth about your accomplice, without a portion of the sparkle that your mind drummed in the primary period of your relationship, may in certainty be the start of the end.
This is likewise the motivation behind why pathetic love keeps going the longest, harms the most profound and feels the most grounded – love that we can't have doesn't permit us to experience the ordinary cycle of desire fascination connection, so it stays suspended somewhere close to one of the stages making our neurons insane!
The purpose of the issue is that the happiness that we feel when we first experience passionate feelings for - that dashing heart, flushed skin, and sweat-soaked palms - is basically an aftereffect of dopamine, norepinephrine, and phenylethylamine that together deliver a joy mixed drink into our circulation system. Yet, it is critical to recollect that there is a consistent and clear motivation behind why the manifestations of delight, exceptional vitality, restlessness, loss of craving, and centred consideration, are limited to that 'insane, can't consider anything besides you' stage.
During this phase of a relationship we can just zero in eagerly on the relationship and on little else, and this is exactly what makes it totally unsustainable. If this inclination needed to keep going forever we'd need to quit any pretense of everything else, on the grounds that if I'm not mistaken individuals with chronic drug habits can barely continue themselves not to mention have effective professions and cherish families.
So when the underlying mirth and butterflies die down, don't freeze. Your relationship isn't finished. No, it's not time to proceed onward to another person. This is just life's method of letting you continue ahead with it.
Lamentably as much as I might want to guarantee it as my own, the last point that I might want to make has just been made by Woody Allen. So I leave you with it to consider:
To adore is to endure. To abstain from enduring one must not adore. In any case, at that point, one experiences not adoring. In this manner to cherish is to endure, not to adore is to endure. To endure is to endure. To be glad is to cherish. To be upbeat at that point is to endure. However, enduring makes one despondent. Accordingly, to be miserable one must love, or love to endure, or experience the ill effects of an excessive amount of satisfaction. I trust you're getting this down."
Can You Feel My Love Buzz?
All you need is love; love is all you need”
— some dead hippie who had no idea what he was talking about
Love is a serious mental disease”
— a very wise man who was way ahead of his time and unfortunately left us far too soon
I ain’t afraid to admit it: I was a sucker for love, man. I bought into the whole con - hook, line, and sinker. As a matter of fact, up until about a week or two ago, I was all in on the love train. I mean, shit, I was about to get that Prince “love symbol” tattooed on my left arm at one point during college. To borrow from Ziggy Marley (one of Bob’s five hundred sons...dude got around), “love [was] my religion”.
You know what? I shouldn’t be saying “was”. Love is very much still my religion. In fact, I still believe that love is the solution to every single problem that humanity is facing right now, and has been the solution all along. I believe that love is the most powerful force on Earth. I don’t just believe that actually - I know it to be true. When I used to perform spoken word poetry at open mics (up until the ‘Rona came around), I used to end my set with the following, audience participation heavy refrain:
“Love is power
Embrace it
It’s the only antidote to hatred
Love is power
Embrace it
It’s the only antidote to hatred
Love is power
Embrace it
It’s the only antidote to hatred
And in this world so full of haters
Don’t forget to love your neighbor
In this world so full of haters
Don’t forget to love your neighbor
Don’t forget to love your neighbor
Don’t forget to love your neighbor
Don’t forget - please don’t forget!
To love your neighbor
Love your neighbor
Love your neighbor!”
Man, just writing that out gave me a huge rush of nostalgia. Ah, man. Those were the days. I miss the pre-pandemic world. Anyways, my point in including that (besides inducing pleasant flashbacks to my glory days) was to illustrate that the love that serves as the foundation for how I live my life, the love that guides every single decision I make, the love that I have placed all of my faith in, is an infinite, unconditional, divine (if you’re into that sort of thing; I teeter back and forth but I know that the power of love transcends all rationalization and defies all logic and reason) love. It is not a fleeting, flavour-of-the-month type deal. Once you stumble into this school of love, it is impossible to unenroll. You have become a student of its inscrutable wisdom for the rest of your life.
I could talk about how incredible this kind of love is for the entirety of the foreseeable future, without ever even taking as much as a piss break (although I could sure use one right now, after drinking all that damn Irish tea). I could go on and on and on (& on) about how, currently underway, is a new wave of unstoppable love that is being ushered in by those in our generation that have attained a level of awareness to understand the necessity and urgency of cultivating as much of it as possible. I see the folks on the ground working at building this foundation for a more sustainable, less destructive future. This is the stuff that keeps me waking up every morning and allows me to at least get a few hours of sleep at night (ironically, it is the love I have for the cat that prevents me from getting any more than that).
I am not going to spend too much time discussing this type of love, though. Frankly, if you don’t know by now, I am not sure you ever will. Actually, scratch that; Biggie Smalls would not have approved (and he was all about spreading love - after all, it is the Brooklyn way). If you don’t know, well, now you know. There. Much better. Much more...loving.
Do you know the Buddhists have a term for such a flavour of love (yeah boiiiii)?
Metta. Metta actually translates to something more like “loving-kindness” and is akin to a kind of compassionate approach to your fellow oxygen-reliant creatures. Interestingly, it is also what the NBA player Ron Artest - who infamously beat the living daylights out of members of the opposing team, as well as several spectators, at a Pacers/Pistons game in 2004, in what is now commonly referred to by basketball fans as the “Malice At The Palace” (which sounds like it could be the name of a live album by former Misfits frontman Glenn Danzig) - changed his name to back in 2011; indeed, up until as recently as May of this year, the man was known legally by the name “Metta World Peace”.
What a world, man. What a freakin’ world.
At any rate, we must, rather, unfortunately, voyage wayward from this love and get into the other love - or, as it is often called (quite erroneously), “true love”. You know, the one that is responsible for every corny, cheesy, Hallmark holiday bullshit movie, song, novel - whatever it seeks to infect. The one that makes my skin crawl to even think about. The one that leads people to believe that they should have to completely discard everything that they hold to be true about themselves, to abandon all of their principles, to leave their personality - their soul - behind. Because, apparently, “true love” means having to change who you are in order to pacify someone else.
Do I sound a little bitter, a little jaded, a little...acrimonious (I just learned that word last week and have been waiting for a chance to use it - this was the perfect opportunity)? Maybe I am. Alas, the reason behind all of that is part of a very long, ultimately irrelevant story that I really do not care to delve any further into. Let’s just say my achy breaky heart got stomped on harder than Ed Norton stomped on that guy’s skull in American History X by someone that I thought was my “soulmate” (an even more pernicious concept).
We are not going to get into any of that, though. The wound still stings.
Ouch.
You see, for the longest time, I thought love was only true in fairy tales - meant for someone else but not for me. I was most emphatically not a believer that I was destined to ever receive it from people that did not share my bloodline (and even among them, pretty much just the ones that share my last name...honestly, probably just my mom).
I saw all of my friends in relationships. I assumed they were all so happy. But then, I thought back to my mom and dad. I thought about how they were trapped in a miserable sham of a marriage (which just recently ended in divorce, much to everyone’s relief) for over two decades, with only the responsibility of rearing two children and a Shih Tzu keeping them together for that long. And then, I thought about all the times that I would be palling around with my mates when, all of a sudden, they would get up and walk into the other room with their cell phone, and then return with this gloomy look, informing us that they had to leave early because their girlfriend “made plans” (plans = the cancer of anything fun).
And I concluded to myself that maybe this whole “love” thing ain’t exactly all it’s cracked up to be. I mean, after all, everything else the media has tried to push on me and condition me into believing is valid since I was a child has proven itself to be utter rubbish to me. What makes “love” any different?
That was my mentality for quite some time, even after I discovered the power of that other love - the higher love. I still felt that this fleeting love, this commercial enterprise of a feeling, was all a ruse by those in charge of things to keep us docile, distracted, and, naturally, spending plenty of money.
And then I saw her face.
I was a believer.
I thought I had found the one.
But then, as time went by, the initial glint began to flicker into opacity. Then, of course, came all of the red flags. The first one - the one that should have ended it all, frankly - was the fact that she would never tip. Ever. Not when ordering delivery, not when dining out - never, ever, ever. She was like Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs; even worse, in fact, as Mr. Pink at least had an ethos. When I asked her about it, got a lacklustre excuse of an answer, and countered with the very real fact that servers make less than minimum wage and that tips are pretty much the only way they can afford to pay their rent, and that if you can’t afford to tip then you shouldn’t be eating out in the first place, and that if my mother found out about this she would slap me upside the head for even continuing to talk to someone who didn’t tip their servers, and that clearly she lacked an adequate inventory of empathy, and that maybe I could help her see the light, yadda yadda yadda, you know - the whole spiel you’ve got to give to somebody who doesn’t tip (actually, hopefully, you don’t know, because hopefully, you don’t surround yourself with such nefarious individuals) - her only response was “why are you judging how I spend my money when you spend your money on cigarettes and alcohol?”
I was just looking for some action, okay?
And then, just like that, I realized that I literally couldn’t leave her if I tried - and believe me, I tried. Everything. From constantly playing songs about breaking up to writing her an elaborate poem about why the relationship wasn’t going to work out. All of that went in one ear and out the other. “Oh, look, he’s playing songs for me - what a swell guy. And he wrote a poem for me? That must mean he really loves me!”
“Love means never having to say you’re sorry”, right? Or at least that’s what the movies would you have you believe. Honestly, though, I do concur with this conclusion. If you truly loved someone - again, not love in terms of the modern, perverted, corrupted bastardization of the word but love in its pure, authentic sense - then you would never have to apologize or expect apologies. Whenever one of you did something that the other didn’t appreciate, you would simply be able to hash it out. Like two people who legitimately respect each other’s autonomy and individuality should be able to. There should be no attempts at exerting some sort of standard of control over another human being.
That’s just wrong, mate.
‘Tis indeed.
Now, I must once again remind you all that the type of love I have just spent the past several paragraphs ripping a new one like some presents on Christmas morning is not actually love - it is a disease that inflicts some of our best and brightest minds with the inability to ever perceive what love really is. They are far too caught up in the game of “love” to realize that all the love they really ever needed was within them all along.
As for me, well, I plan on never letting go of this love. It is truly a well that never runs dry. It’s just a shame, though. Because I really wanted the other type of love to be real. And, honestly, I am still holding out hope for it to be. I am not completely closed off to the idea of it being out there for me, somewhere, in the distant future perhaps. Then, I’ll finally be able to belt out those words from the late Whitney Houston:
“AND I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU!”
For now, though, I guess I’ll just defer to the wise words of the late John Warren Giels, Jr:
“LOVE STINKS!”
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Daniel Sanderson