140 - Temptation pleasures us with borrowed time

When you buy a pack of smokes, the branding minces no words about the risk to your health.  Smoking causes mouth, lung and throat cancer, harm to unborn babies, blindness, heart disease, etc.  Yet people ignore the warnings.  I suspect the reason for this is denial and delusion.  Denial goes so far as to shift the risks towards the reward of ignorance: borrowed time.  That ignorance is a willful delusion because thanks to borrowed time, risks don’t apply.  Until they do.  The greatest motivation to change occurs when it’s too late; like those who refuse to admit they’re in denial.  Denial moderates the tug of war between awareness and delusion.  It accomplishes this through denial's resilience to linger.  The effects of cigarettes are irreversible.  The warning label makes that clear, so why be tempted?
 
Borrowed time, bets against your health to deliver pleasure.  Denial is the subliminal foundation of pleasure, because it rewards the act of willful ignorance.  That ignorance sustains itself within delusion briefly.  One’s lack of will (to sustain ignorance) is the borrowed time that bets against your health.  When that will is gone, it’s time to deliver the subliminal foundation of pleasure.  When Justin Trudeau said the F-word in the house of commons recently, liberals were quick to praise his behaviour.  One person on Twitter said, “I like him more now.”  Can you see the parallel I’m highlighting here?  The leader of your party conducts himself poorly, and yet the response from his voters are positive.  Changing one’s mind is irreversible when the risks don’t apply to those who refuse to admit they’re in denial. 
 
Denial is only accountable when it’s respected by your self-awareness.  Awareness has its own faults, but delusion backtracks from denial through the pleasure of cowardice.  It’s tough to quit a poor idea when your delusion convinces you that risks don’t apply to the pursuit of poor choices.  When pleasure fades, so too does your willful ignorance to the consequences you ignored (i.e. warning label).  It’s a cycle of addiction (in both drugs and politics) that decides not just your fate, but others as well.  Explain to me how addiction solves our problems?  Last I checked that’s impossible.  There’s an imbalance in the mind that siphons the resolve of its neighbouring functions to make ends meet (briefly).  Yes, people excel through addiction but it’s only on borrowed time.  Your borrowed time, and other people’s borrowed time.  The pleasure of cowardice finds a home in numbers.  As a group, pleasure celebrates one’s capacity to ignore the consequences with camaraderie.
 
Pack mentality overcomes the group’s individual consequences.  It’s a hypocritical choice because their choices affect not just themselves.  My body my choice, or rather my mind my choice.  This stubbornness is rooted in denial, and that denial votes for policy.  How can a position in health choices or politics be justified when their consequences suffer and kill beyond their control.  My mind, your choice.  Is really the crux of this matter.  If you suffer from denial, you can’t make good choices for yourself or others.  You outsource your choices to an authority (i.e. drugs and politicians) that accepts your blame (with pride).  You enable each other to reoffend (like an olympic game of leapfrog).  The pleasure of cowardice enables the cycle of poor choices to occur when risks don’t apply.  There’s no warning label in politics, only the denial that votes in policy where an authority accepts your blame with pride, not regret.  Temptation pleasures us with borrowed time.