My Broyhers Peculiar chicken free essay sample

What hard liquor, cigarettes, heroin, and crack have in common is that theyre all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. Most if not all the things we describe as addictive are. And the scary thing is the process that created them is accelerating. We wouldnt want to stop it. Its the same process that cures diseases: technological progress. Technological progress means making things do more of what we want. When the thing we want is something we want to want, we consider technological progress good. If some new technique makes solar cells x% more efficient, that seems strictly better. When progress concentrates something we dont want to want—when it transforms opium into heroin—it seems bad. But its the same process at work. Could you restrict technological progress to areas where you wanted it? Only in a limited way, without becoming a police state. We will write a custom essay sample on My Broyhers Peculiar chicken or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page And even then your restrictions would have undesirable side effects. Good and bad technological progresses aren’t sharply differentiated, so youd find you couldnt slow the latter without also slowing the former. And in any case, as Prohibition and the war on drugs show, bans often do more harm than good. No one doubts this process is accelerating, which means increasing numbers of things we like will be transformed into things we like too much. Technology has always been accelerating. By Paleolithic standards, technology evolved at a blistering pace in the Neolithic period. As far as I know theres no word for something we like too much. The closest is the colloquial sense of addictive. That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. And its clear why: there are an increasing number of things we need it for. At the extreme end of the spectrum are crack and meth. Food has been transformed by a combination of factory farming and innovations in food processing into something with way more immediate bang for the buck, and you can see the results in any town in America. Checkers and solitaire have been replaced by World of War craft and Farmville. Television has become much more engaging, and even so it cant compete with the most famous of nowadays-Facebook. The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40. The next 40 years will bring us some wonderful things. I dont mean to imply theyre all to be avoided. Alcohol is a dangerous drug, but Id rather live in a world with wine than one without. Most people can coexist with alcohol; but you have to be careful. More things we like will mean more things we have to be careful about. Most people wont, unfortunately. Which means that as the world becomes more addictive, the two senses in which one can live a normal life will be driven ever further apart? One sense of normal is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best. These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people dont think youre weird, youre living badly. Societies eventually develop antibodies to addictive new things. Ive seen that happen with cigarettes. When cigarettes first appeared, they spread the way an infectious disease spreads through a previously isolated population. Smoking rapidly became a (statistically) normal thing. There were ashtrays everywhere. We had ashtrays in our house when I was a kid, even though neither of my parents smoked. You had to for guests. As knowledge spread about the dangers of smoking, customs changed. In the last 20 years, smoking has been transformed from something that seemed totally normal into a rather seedy habit: from something movie stars did in publicity shots to something small huddles of addicts do outside the doors of office buildings. A lot of the change was due to legislation, of course, but the legislation couldnt have happened if customs hadnt already changed. It took a while though—on the order of 100 years. And unless the rate at which social antibodies evolve can increase to match the accelerating rate at which technological progress throws off new addictions, well be increasingly unable to rely on customs to protect us. Unless we mass produce social customs. I suspect the recent resurgence of evangelical Christianity in the US is partly a reaction to drugs. In desperation people reach for the sledgehammer; if their kids wont listen to them, maybe theyll listen to God. But that solution has broader consequences than just getting kids to say no to drugs. You end up saying no to science as well. I worry we may be heading for a future in which only a few people plot their own itinerary through no-land, while everyone else books a package tour. Or worse still, has one booked for them by the government. Unless we want to be canaries in the coal mine of each new addiction—the people whose sad example becomes a lesson to future generations—well have to figure out for ourselves what to avoid and how. It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to suspect everything. In fact, even that wont be enough. Well have to worry not just about new things, but also about existing things becoming more addictive. Thats what bit me. Ive avoided most addictions, but the Internet got me because it became addictive while I was using it. People commonly use the word procrastination to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe whats happening as merely not-doing-work. We dont call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working. Most people I know have problems with Internet addiction. Were all trying to figure out our own customs for getting free of it. Thats why I dont have an iPhone, for example; the last thing I want is for the Internet to follow me out into the world. Several people have told me they like the iPad because it lets them bring the Internet into situations where a laptop would be too conspicuous. In other words, its a hip flask. This is true of the iPhone too, of course, but this advantage isnt as obvious because it reads as a phone, and everyones used to those. My latest trick is taking long hikes. I used to think running was a better form of exercise than hiking because it took less time. Now the slowness of hiking seems an advantage, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption. Sounds pretty eccentric, doesnt it? It always will when youre trying to solve problems where there are no customs yet to guide you. Maybe I cant plead Occams razor; maybe Im simply eccentric. But if Im right about the acceleration of addictiveness, then this kind of lonely squirming to avoid it will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. Well increasingly be defined by what we say no to.