[Narz]

Smoking, drinking, staying up 'till 4AM, etc.

Thread inspiring by 50 Cent's "In Da' Club".

Materialism could be added to the list above also.

[SpringCreekFarm]

It's only destructive if you feel the need to bond 24 / 7.

There is nothing wrong with breaking out the acoustics, pints, doobs, hor'derves, shots, etc once in a while.

[dooberheim]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Shannymara', 'A')dvertising (it's all about money).

Also we're living in a way that's unhealthy (most of us are detached from nature, from our food production, etc.) and it makes us nuts so we don't know how to connect in a healthier way.

Just my opinion.

Oh yeah - also from listening to stuff like 50 Cent.

[americandream]

If a culture is simply a collective of parts yet the bonds binding it are destructive of those parts by varying degrees, where's that culture headed long term?

[Pixie]

Social activities are self-destructive because work and daily life are so flat boring or stressful. The more wound up or less satisfied people are with their professional or home life, the harder they unwind when they socialize. They go looking for escape or adventure or some sense of being alive. Ironically, the things that give the strongest sense of being alive tend also to be the things that will kill you.

[uNkNowN ElEmEnt]

I think that with the advent or the public relations and advertising industry, we've slowly been condidtioned to find satisfaction from outside ourselves. It makes us empty and more susceptible to the other things they are trying to sell us.

Also as the Roman empire fell the gladiator was highly idealized, we have been seeing the same thing in our world for several years now.

We are just being good peons and using things that will kill us. Like cigarettes and febreeze and swiffer (that originally came out with warnings taht they can seriously harm children and small animals).

Then we wonder why we are all living fruitless, empty lives before dying of cancer.

[gg3]

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Good question and good topic, Narz!

First of all, "all things in moderation," even smoking, drinking, and so on (as for staying up to 4AM, some of us are naturally nocturnal!).

A pint of micro-brew over dinner is hardly enough to do damage. Yet I always wondered what, exactly, people found appealing about drinking so much that they got stupid, and then drinking even more to the point where they would throw up. "Hey ol' pal, let's go have a good puke!"

Part of this, as Pixie pointed out, is a reaction to stress. Consumption of food, alcohol, tobacco, etc., increases when an individual is under stress. Some of this has to do with overt coping mechanisms: consumption of caffeinated beverages in order to keep up with a workload is a key example. Some of this has to do with the homeostatic nature of organisms: the more you get wound up at work, the more you need to do something (via whatever means your culture provides) to wind down after work, in order to maintain a basic equilibrium.

Part of it has to do with advertising, and more specifically with the need of capitalist economies to maintain constant growth. Thus, products of all kinds, and the consumption patterns associated with them, tend to be designed to produce a constant increase in consumption levels to the point where immoderate behavior becomes normalized, and with it the harms that go along with. The one-car household gives way to the two- and three-car household; the sedan gives way to the SUV; coffee becomes "instant;" tobacco use changes from cigars and pipes to cigarettes (the equivalent of instant coffee); the size of the house itself doubles from 1200 to 2400 square feet; the increase in house size spawns an increase in furniture and appliances; and so on. Meanwhile financial pressure increases, job stress increases, and alcohol consumption increases in an attempt to deal with the stress.

All of this is "good" for the economy, but bad for the humans and life on Earth at-large. Thus we can reasonably conclude that "the economy" and "humans and other life on Earth" have, after the point where basic human comforts are attained, opposing needs and goals.

[TheDude]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('uNkNowN ElEmEnt', 'A')lso as the Roman empire fell the gladiator was highly idealized, we have been seeing the same thing in our world for several years now.

[mmasters]

A good amount of this stuff has been financed, advertised and sold on the public for decades. All cultures are being slowly and systematically destroyed to aid assimilation into the NWO.

[uNkNowN ElEmEnt]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TheDude', 'R')omans were notorious for their excesses, too - read Satyricon.