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When given the choice, most people prefer suffering over solutions. No-Buy-Friday [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-24
To avoid the new, I give preference to the old.
When given the choice, most people prefer suffering over solutions. No-Buy-Friday
Most DK readers are drawn to the flame of current events, seeking information from a combination of curiosity and a desire to either alleviate anxiety or wallow in it. Although they want to hear about solutions, and will freely offer their opinions in this direction, they expect someone else to carry the torch. They keep a safe distance, preferring not to get ‘singed’.
Their sense of responsibility ends in the voting booth (if that), yet despite accepting the viability of ‘one vote’, they slip out of further participation by disclaiming the value of individual action. Such dissonance is convenience oriented and ultimately self-serving.
Early on in my life and in a different context, I came to realize that when given the choice, most people, depending on the circumstance, will choose suffering over solutions. Already, in my teens,
I had friends who would want to talk about their problems, as if seeking advice. It wasn’t long before I learned to recognize that counsel was not what they wanted, because, when offered, rather than engaging their attention, it produced a response that conveyed disinterest. Their goal was not change, but to vent and while doing so, savor their sufferings.
This sufficed to temporarily quell their subconscious instability, by dampening the fire while avoiding the commitment true responsibility requires. ‘Friends’ of this caliber are emotional vortexes and use anyone that will listen as ‘toilets’.
~~~
We are conditioned to respond to novelty and lose interest in the familiar.
Trust in tradition and the dependability of tried and true is melting away faster than glaciers.
Familiarity no longer provides comfort, being more likely grounds for dismissal.
When presented with the unfamiliar, it may appear desirable or threatening, eliciting either curiosity or fear. While there can be useful purpose in these responses, desire or dread can both cause us to reactively give way to preferential treatment, even if that may not necessarily be the best coarse of action for confronting the change at hand. Threats that we have not adapted to handling, can trigger this extra attention, as the unknown warrants heightened response. However, if this comes at the cost of undermining ongoing vigilance when dealing with the familiar, sometimes the price can be too high. By a somewhat different route, the craving brought on by chronic dissatisfaction can lead to much the same results distracting us from seemingly humdrum, but nevertheless indispensable concerns.
There are profound psychological factors dictating the choices we make, and scrambling priorities can undermine their soundness. Our innate reactionary response to the ‘risk’ of change and our primal need to maintain our comfort zone, for which action (a.k.a. solution) is frequently seen as a hazard, often derail better judgement when determining a course of action.
In my opinion, this is the case when we falter in the support of Friday ‘buynotts’.
As most of us are subject to misplaced priorities for any of a host of reasons, what seems to be going under the radar and over the heads of most readers here, is the extraordinary potential which NB Friday has to empower us. Through aversion and avoidance, many ‘conveniently’ take this ‘gift’ to be a ‘toothless horse’.
While for some of us ‘buynotts’ have hit like high voltage, for too many others whatever charge they may have felt (if any) was too feeble to ignite the soggy mass of commitment wary ‘bleating’ liberals that now have come to constitute the ‘gangrened limb’ of political activism on Daily Kos.
A disturbingly large portion of readership here has come to value convenience to such a degree that even the Constitution does not warrant effort worthy of its preservation. Furthermore, in defense of the compulsion of comfort, they shirk the level of involvement required to save democracy — other than the ‘compulsion’ to read about it. In its way, this constitutes a form of passive intervention akin to ‘blood letting’ — with pretty much the same success rate achieved in the Dark Ages.
While being informed is critical to preparedness, without action its value bleeds away.
Even for those actively engaged in boycotting, if they’re not leveraging the advantages DK offers for promoting the survival necessity of engaging in NBFriday, they miss opportunity.
At the very least, their recommendations to diaries on the subject would provide helpful support, but for some the cost of inconvenience must seem too high.
Aside from occasional exceptions, I am the only one regularly posting about this, as I do every Thursday, both as a reminder for Friday and in an effort to maintain site awareness against the strong current of current affairs. This falls far short of the collective effort DK should be mounting to promote this movement to re-empower ourselves — through commanding the same consumption currently undoing us. Until such time, it will continue to overfeed us and guide the knife while we cut our throats.
NBFridays provides a path for us out of the narrow dark corridors we’re being shoved down by oppressive subjugating power. In doing so, it can help us recognize the patterns of our own behavior that enable it, while insuring our compliance. It is after all entirely propitiated by the ‘hydra’ traits of humanity. We are both the oppressor and the oppressed — endlessly fungible.
By committing to simply stopping your consumption one day a week, you join with others to open a door past which lies access to the power we’ve forfeited in exchange for ‘shiny trinkets’.
By taking ‘ownership’ of your buying habits to wield conscious command over your consumption, the slumbering potential for self-realization begins to reawaken, along with the possibility of a richer more meaningful life experience.
For those who continue to equate ‘self esteem’ with the privilege of ‘selfish waste ejection’ — without the moderation offered by ‘buynotts’, your ‘jig’ will soon be up. Through gluttony and mismanagement the American cornucopia while shortly be choked off.
Unending bounty is ending, making affluence unsustainable.
~~~
Misplaced in the thickets of desire, is the guiding truth that “less is more”.
Although we are genetically pre-disposed to seek simplicity, the lust for more has sent us dangerously off course. Even though these dark waters may appear to be well charted, we willfully refuse to recognize the monsters that lurk below their glittering surface…
… we appear powerless against the one called ‘temptation’.
No-Buy-Friday can help us master it.
[END]
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[1] Url:
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