103.

Hell with coffee. No more of that. Tea all the way!

I’ve been drinking a lot of hot water too. I’m like seventy years old goddamn it.

I’ve been thinking more about earned pleasure and unearned pleasure, abstracting out a bit of what I wrote before. Same for pain. It has put some things nicely into new perspective. Writing is earned pleasure; I have to work really hard at it and it makes me feel the best. Buying things is the opposite and makes me feel like I’ve eaten an entire bag of sugar. Unearned pleasure is candy.

The pain part is more interesting. In the same way unearned pleasure doesn’t make me feel good, unearned pain should not make me feel bad, if I’m being consistent here. It’s the external crap that I have no control over, hail and arrows, all that—I should disregard. I’m saying “should” a lot here because pain, whether earned or unearned, still hurts, in the biological way. There’s no getting around a stick in the eye. But maybe now I can start sorting incoming pain into those two buckets, and not suffer from unearned pain.

It’s unfortunate that there is a lot more unearned pain than unearned pleasure in this universe, I personally think. Entropy. (And my own pessimism.) If I don’t do anything, bad things will keep on happening without my help. Good things will not. Your body won’t get stronger and younger over time. You won’t automatically get more friends or lovers. You won’t get rich sitting there. No bus is going to come by when you’re crossing the street and not looking and gift you an extra life.

There is really nothing in the unearned region of this graph for me.

Earned pain is…hmmm.