A New Drug Switched Off My Appetite. What’s Left?

This is a beautiful piece of writing for its simple, personal, but deep question - what drives us? And if we can control that, what does it mean for our sense of self and purpose to fill our lives? Are we all slaves of appetite?

> How long is it before there’s an injection for your appetites, your vices? Maybe they’re not as visible as mine. Would you self-administer a weekly anti-avarice shot? Can Big Pharma cure your sloth, lust, wrath, envy, pride? Is this how humanity fixes climate change—by injecting harmony, instead of hoping for it at Davos? Certainly my carbon footprint is much smaller these days. Are we going to get our smartest scientists together, examine the hormonal pathways, and finally produce a cure for billionaires?

Food for thought :)

> How long is it before there’s an injection for your appetites, your vices?

O.K. to pep up your language centers?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/12/20/escape-from-sp...

I had almost the same experience as the author but for my sex drive, yay medication side effects. It is such a weird feeling to just never be horny / never lust. I didn’t miss it at all, hell I couldn’t miss it because I didn’t even notice it was gone. For me it really was that my sex drive was entirely a fiction made up by my lizard brain. Sex was physically just as pleasurable but just like water thirst makes it hit completely different. By comparison other things brought me a lot more joy and all the brain space occupied by that desire was free.

So to the author’s point you can absolutely cure lust and I think in an objective sense doing so makes your life better, at least on paper. I really can’t decide if I’m happier with or without it.

For some reason, my mind made an association between this article and the one about luck appeared a couple of days ago [0].

I'm still processing everything and this can be a big leap in reasoning, but I can't help but feel that we are just slaves. Slave of our biology, chemistry... . The amount of hardship this man went through to lose weight, the mental burden. It was pure luck that he found a working drug. And it was completely random that he got a body that cannot regulate "normally" the appetite.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34609167

It’s cool hearing this story in the first person. The author raises some good philosophical questions. Its fascinating that hunger can be modulated by targeting relatively few signaling molecules. I don’t know how many other ‘vices’ are as straightforward to modulate, but it’s an interesting question.

Overstatement. I get that it’s a profound change by this is also what someone manic would write and the author admits that is a side effect.

While it is not easy a very important aspect of getting over vices is recognizing the overwhelming desire and autopilot actions and saying no to them. Losing weight, in my own efforts, I’ve felt this. I also felt the desires gently go away after some time… and then come back after some carelessness. What I eat seems to have long term effects on how I want to eat with a period of weeks to months to change those desires in a positive way… but days to lose progress.

I can say no to desires pretty easily, not everybody can. I definitely don’t always.

Reminds me of do androids dream of electric sheep. There is a mood altering machine that they use throughout the day, which brings up the fun question: “who is the actual person behind the machine? Do they even remember anymore?”

Even without reading, I thought it’s Semaglutide. But this drug does not help him, but a similar drug mounjaro helped him.

Damn I need to get me some of this stuff.