“We can ignore the consequences of gravity, but remember, the consequences of gravity will not ignore us.”
(Anonymous)
The Anti-Hangover
There's a new product on the market I keep hearing about on the radio. I won’t name it here because I don’t have the bandwidth for a lawsuit. Apparently, if you drink the product prior to over-drinking alcohol, you won’t get a hangover.
Let’s think that through: Hangovers happen as our body’s way of telling us that they are being harmed by too much alcohol. This is similar to why many poisons and even allergens sometimes have an unpleasant taste or smell to us. Our bodies are screaming, “Hey! That thing? That thing is a bad idea. We can’t be healthy if we keep doing that. Please stop!”
But instead of stopping, we find ways to shut the warning system up so that we can do whatever we want to do without feeling uncomfortable (or sometimes downright awful) consequences. I have problems with this.
Thinking Like Grownups
This is a perpetuation of a common aspiration in the US. We want what we want when we want it and we don’t want there to be any obstacles or negative consequences. Doesn’t that sound more than a bit adolescent to you? The voices of those who say, “Hey, maybe you might want to consider not over-drinking instead? There are likely long-term consequences to that choice you won’t appreciate,” sound like naggy adults who just don’t want us to have fun.
For those of you who have grown past your adolescence and are now experiencing the outplay of the choices of your youth, that sounds a little different now, doesn’t it? Consequences are helpful. Pleasant consequences inspire us. Unpleasant consequences help us make more informed decisions that can point us toward greater balance.
The Pattern Underneath
Taking naturally unpleasant consequences away backfires on us in more important ways than just the issue at hand. Let’s say that you are one of those people who can occasionally overdrink and not become addicted to alcohol or make terrible life decisions when impaired. For you, this product sounds perfectly fine. However, the bigger picture is that products like this have you making decisions based on what you can get away with, rather than what you want or don’t want. That way of living feeds a pattern that, believe it or not, bottom feeds on shame.
When we make decisions based on “getting away with” this or that, we short circuit a process of deeper discovery. If we aren’t concerned about a hangover, we have no reason to do a deeper dive into why we want to be drunk. Without spending any time on that “why,” we don’t take into consideration all of the different ways we might meet that need or manage without the felt need being met. When we make decisions based on what we do and don’t want in our lives, we break away from adolescent either-or thinking, get to know ourselves better and grow more resilient for whatever life brings our way in the future.
Out of Balance
I’ve long held that “the microcosm is the macrocosm, and the macrocosm is the microcosm.” What I mean is that nearly everything in this life seems to fall into similar patterns whether it is the microcosm of how we function in this moment, how the entire cosmos seems to hold together, and everything in between.
I’ve written many times before about the common Indigenous American understanding that “All things are one: All things affect all things.” (Refer to my Against the Grain series from 2022.) Refusing balance and growth in favor of bending Biology to our will can have dramatically awful results:
A developer wants plants that look mature very quickly to plant in a new development to give the homes better curb appeal and a higher chance of selling well. S/he/they plant non-native, invasive plants. Those plants take over the native plants and completely screw up the entire biome, invite invasive bugs, and ultimately compromise the entire food chain all the way up to the humans.
Colonial farmers insisted on planting their crops in fields segregated by the plant, in neat little rows to make the crops easier to pick. They thought the 10,000+ Native American way of planting crops in their natural plant “communities” where complimentary plants help each other to grow well was ignorant. The colonial farmers exhausted their soil and their crops failed. Eventually Thomas Jefferson and his son in law, Thomas Mann Randolph, promoted crop rotation as a “scientific” remedy. (They were called “innovative” and “enlightened” for their efforts.) This firmly established the practice of “taming nature,” rather than recognizing that we are natural beings who are part of an interdependent natural system.
To that end, we started adding chemicals to the soil to make crops more profitable. We used pesticides to kill the bugs that were eating the crops before they could be harvested. Except that the chemicals in the soil and the pesticides on the plants have been proven to kill off helpful bugs and birds, poisoning the animals that eat them and corrupting food quality all the way up the chain to us. Those chemicals and pesticides are also responsible for a whole array of cancers and other serious illnesses that kill humans. But hey! Gotta have that out-of-season, out-of-region lettuce!
Innovation has also made refined sugar so readily available that the primary flavor profile of U.S. desserts is usually so sweet that they lack any of the complexity of flavors found in desserts from other countries. We’ve gotten so used to sweet being so ever present that we have run the course through numerous artificial sweeteners, thinking that the “calories in-calories out” simple formula will help us regulate our burgeoning average weight. (Spoiler alert: It doesn’t work that way.) But we have to have our sweets! Isn’t that in the Constitution?? We now have alarming rates of diabetes and other illnesses that originate in the frankensugars we developed so we could have sweet foods without calories.
What If
What if instead, we carefully evaluated what the natural consequences of our choices are, and found ways to cooperate with physics and biology to shape healthier, more desirable results? What if we let our lives constantly teach us, expand us and offer us more complete and satisfying experiences, rooted in truth? We might find that we like the consequences at every level a whole lot better.