Can you take it?

Cat Ladies.

 

Only in New York. They get the Africans to deliver the cat food from Gristedes or Agostino's.

 

I can suggest a few although I have not read a lot about the subject and I feel like the answer is so obvious as to not require written evidence: Hunting, farming, building, drinking, pissing, shitting, eating, meditating, thinking, walking and various other requirements of day to day existence- do not need the presence of other human beings

A lot of the initiation rituals for tribal peoples involved sending the subject away on their own to live independently in the wild for weeks or months on end. A single person able to feed and shelter themselves by nothing but their own skills. You can look at this in a dozen of ways but I'd like to think the significance of that is that the person's strength to the tribe is their non-dependence to the tribe. Ie. They want to be a part of the tribe and yet they are a force and asset to the tribe in that they have the ability to survive independent of others. That is what you are not seeing here.

I have a strong feeling that you just don't like the idea of hermitism (I just made that up). I have a feeling that you don't like the people who pursue these sorts of activities and see yourself as superior to them. I have a feeling that you think the idea is naive and very silly.

You seem incapable of seeing this, but I think that I am the one on the middle ground here. I am trying to argue in favour of both points of view. I am trying to argue in favour of independent values over universal values.

I personally have no interest in becoming a hermit, if not for short periods of my life.

I think it is obvious that a healthy human being with the right knowledge, in the right place, can live without other people. Lets just assume that they are perfectly able to live without other people, how do you actually know that such a person will be less happy than you? Because epicurus says so?

Also, I think it is kind of sad that I have had to go to the length of trying to justify living on a desert island, because this argument was not about that. This argument is about the fact that on some level, our relationships with others are purely conditional and subject to choice.

Also, I believe epicurus used the term "friends" and advocated relationships between like minded people as a condition for happiness. Therefore bringing the idea of relationships into this argument was very divisive and sneaky of you. I happen to like how intelligent you are and I like a lot of your beliefs, but not the way you argue.

 

That is a belief. I would have thought that you of all people would understand that we have something that all of those animals do not possess: The ability to understand and manipulate the environment around us.

Also, what was the point of this argument if you weren't making a moral prescription? That humans can or cannot live on desert islands? How sad. How terribly sad because that is so far from the point I was trying to make in the first place.

Epicurus said that you need friends to be happy. I disagree. That is my point. If you have anything else to say keep that in mind and forget everything else. This is getting so ridiculous.

EDIT: Actually I have been a little over-fixated on a few things. Forget everything I just wrote. I don't think you're getting my point either though.

My question is, do you or do you not believe that it is possible to be happy without friends?

My next question in response to your answer is, how do you know?

That is all.

 

Criticism, pretty much. Ever hear the saying, "so and so can't take it, but they sure know how to dish it out?"

 

OK.

Yes. And I don't know.

My prejudice is, however, that in such an eventuality that person is going to define him or herself in the absence of friends, like thenmax does. So friends are still a defining feature of that person's life in their absence (which takes effort). To have as little interaction as possible with other human beings, one needs to relate to them in terms of avoidance. Because, again, we cannot physically survive for long unless we're in society (surrounded by others).

Our bodies are structured for language acquisition, long nursing periods, the psychological importance of touch, division of labor, our bodies are too weak to protect against predators single-handedly, etc.

But yeah, human beings have the capacity to counter all that: it will just be an anomaly and in most cases unsuccessful in terms of survival, is all.

 

i can take it better than i can dish it out, for some reason. maybe i'm too nice or something, but there are those days that i have that i do dish it out, and when that happens i usually just have to not be around people.

 

same here. taking it seems to be a weakness to some. & some don`t like it when you dish it out.