... that we don't wish those things for their own sake, but rather for the good sensation that springs from obtaining them.

Drugs, then?

I don’t think that’s the answer, because...

The question is: Who feels better/ who is happier? The one who is living in a happy ignorance or the one who tries to achieve happiness through wisdom? The answer to this question seems to me to be far from obvious.

....

What would be the point of being wise if that made you feel miserable or not as happy as being ignorant? None, in my opinion, so it's inconceivable to me why some people value wisdom more than happiness.

I think it’s comparable to having a good, nutritious meal with varied, complex flavors, vs. a cheaply made, simple, artificially-flavored candy full of empty calories and sugar.

Also, think about sitting on the couch all day watching some shallow, guilty-pleasure TV — involves light pleasure and no pain — vs going out for a run, breathing fresh air, feeling a sense of accomplishment that you’re doing better every time you go out, and then finally getting to get home and sit on that couch — more pleasurable as a contrast — and watching some really deep and compelling film — something still pleasurable, just on a deeper level. I’m not talking about an “eat your vegetables” sort of thing (bad metaphor, since I really like vegetables, but...)

Also, if happiness were the only thing that mattered, what would you say to a world where everyone just floats in tanks and gets fed drugs that give them pleasurable dreams, but they never actually go and do anything? Would you find that satisfying?

And there’s also the question of, that person on that island building sand castles doesn’t know the outside world, but what if the outside world needs their help?

I’m not even just talking about a person who leaves a rich country to go out and help the starving children somewhere in a war zone, without any material comforts or clean water, seeing atrocities every day, and being horrified, but feeling like their life is more meaningful than it would have been if they’d stayed where they were.

I mean... there are so many problems in the world, big and small, personal, local, global, that... even if it were possible to completely ignore all of them, would that really be more satisfying than trying to solve them?

I am actually for deconstructing gender.

I want all children to have access to all paths in life as they grow up. It’s not just about the physical objects of the dress vs. the truck, it’s about the experiences and emotions that go along with those things.

Not only that, I think that the world is limited by creating things that are either “for men” or “for women”. Someone mentioned the nonbinary artist that couldn’t be nominated for an award because the award categories were split by gender. The awards are judged on how well the “male artist” songs express “masculinity”, and how well the “female artist” songs express “femininity”. They don’t know how to comprehend songs that express neither. They don’t know how to make songs that express neither.

I don’t want people to just be able to choose between the “male” package and “female” package. I don’t just want to expand those packages a little (though honestly, what I see people doing is just copy-pasting the “male” package into the “female” package, and just throwing out the things that were in the “female” package as if they’re completely worthless, not expanding access to those things at all.)

I want things to not be presented in packages at all.

I want everything unpackaged and mixed together. I want people to pick things up and use their creativity to figure out what to do with the things, instead of being told what to use and what to do with it.

We need a world full of nonbinary people to express all the colors besides black and white. Not just shades of grey — colors and textures and three-dimensional shapes.

The world binary people see *really is* Sharpie stick figures on a plain white paper, compared with the world people could see if gender were deconstructed.

Also, hi, I live in Japan, there’s way more nonbinary/androgynous music and theater here than in the West.

A male is...
a) an organism of the sperm-bearing type in a species with two-part sexual reproduction in which one type carries eggs and the other carries sperm.

b) the artificial, socially constructed norms imposed on individuals born with such a body; a person who desires to adhere to, and to be recognized as adhering to, those norms (regardless of what body parts they were born with), rejecting the opportunity to live outside of any gender norms.

A female is...

a) an organism of the egg-bearing type in a species with two-part sexual reproduction in which one type carries eggs and the other carries sperm.

b) the artificial, socially constructed norms imposed on individuals born with such a body; a person who desires to adhere to, and to be recognized as adhering to, those norms (regardless of what body parts they were born with), rejecting the opportunity to live outside of any gender norms.


My personal belief: We should aim for a society in which these norms are no longer imposed on anyone. We should aim for a society where the next generation will grow up seeing those norms as just as archaic as theories of humours and astrology.
We should do this by choosing to live outside of either sets of norms, and encouraging others to do the same.
I don’t believe gender equality is possible until those norms are thoroughly deconstructed.

I do think that anyone who desires to should be allowed to change their body however they wish. I don’t think they should have to adhere to gender norms in order to do so.

In a world with the medical technology that we have, shouldn’t we put away those prehistoric notions of what people had to do when childbirth was dangerous? Shouldn’t we focus on improving medical technology even more so that reproductive concerns don’t have to dominate people’s lives and diminish their opportunities? That sort of talk is irrelevant.

Also: these norms are so different in different cultures that no one way is universal. Unless you want to say your culture is just better than everyone else’s, I think that proves that all of this is socially constructed.

Clothing, for example, has no gender. It’s just a physical object. There’s no valid reason for having separate gendered clothing styles. I think, to use Western clothing as the example, that men should wear dresses as often as women wear pants nowadays, and there should be at least as many long-haired men as short-haired women.

In a just society, there would be no outward markings of gender, because a just society would not code things that way.

Okay, but question:

Do people really know what they want?

I mean... I feel the need to separate out two things here.

One: the quote the topic is based around. Well... this is obviously a hypothetical, right? Because who is granting these wishes? I don’t even know where to begin...
(Aside, but shouldn’t we be starting with the fact that the quote doesn’t seem to care about what “Jill” wants? I... feel like I’m just too different from people here if no one else is cringing at that as much as I am...)
So okay. Blatant human rights issues aside, let’s say we are just talking about physical objects, and that there is some god granting wishes (are atheists allowed here? Because... hi...)
So, I say, “Hmmm... I want the Mona Lisa.”

Poof. God sends me the Mona Lisa.

But... at any given moment, out of the billions of people on Earth, a lot of them are probably also wishing for the Mona Lisa.

So... if they all get it, what does that mean?

Did God just duplicate the Mona Lisa so there are now hundreds of them?
Did God go back in time and make Leonardo paint 100? (is it considered “back” when it’s God doing the time-travelling? Is it even travel, or is God every-when at once?)
If so, then every copy is different. (And what does the sitter think of having 100 of her portrait painted because God said that people 500 years later will want them?)
Do people get to choose what copy they get?
Do art historians get to analyze all of the copies? What if they *desire* to do so?
Do people remember the world-line where there was only one Mona Lisa? (Actually, there really are several similar paintings created by Leonardo et al., but for the sake of example) Or if the painting was duplicated without time-travel, how is that explained to the historical record?

What if a lot of people *desire* it to go back to being just one Mona Lisa in the Louvre?

What if some of the wishers *desired* to be the *only* owner of *the* Mona Lisa?

Is this a majority-rules thing? Is it one-person-one-vote, or does the person who wishes hardest get their wish? Does your status on God’s naughty-nice list come into play?

What happens to the monetary value of it? What about people who don’t care about art history at all, and just wanted the Mona Lisa as an arbitrary famous thing of high value?

(If everyone could just wish for more money... the inflation that would cause. Could they then wish away the inflation?)

I think that beneath everything someone would *say* they desire, there’s some underlying need that can be met some other, less obvious but more meaningful way.

Like, if someone wants to harm another person, what they really want is to heal the pain in themselves that they blame the other person for causing. Hurting the other person isn’t going to heal you.

So maybe the god/genie in this scenario should just sit down with the person and help them figure out what they actually want. Like an angelic therapist. One who would actually listen and not just quote self-help books at you. Now *that* would actually be worth wishing for.

I mean... I feel like maybe the angle of “but there are so many different people in the world all wishing conflicting things” wasn’t the point here... but I feel like it needed to be said.

But I think my point is, “what will bring you true happiness” does not equal “every whim and fancy” or “the thing you’ve written down as your #1 goal for 10 years” or anything else that you would necessarily know to ask for at face value.

Someone mentioned the idea that a person who spends their whole life in Plato’s cave watching shadow puppets and never realizing they’re missing anything *would call themself happy*. But is that true happiness? I don’t think it is. Or, if it is, then there are things, like wisdom, that are more important than happiness. As for the counter-example of the urban person who craves status symbols, see previous paragraph.

Aside from all that, I do agree that the process of getting to/creating the place where you want to be is an important part of the equation.