I'm on Lemmy so no. /s
this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025
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I don't get it.
Lonely internet nerds.
Awe, they are full of love.
Fuck you.
/s
Personally, I think Heinlein said it best: "Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own."
Love is also a choice that you need to make every day.
Next week my wife and I will be celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary. I love her more now than I did back then.
What is love? Baby don't hurt me, dont hurt me, no more...
(Would you please clarify the question as the song plays?)
Baby don't hurt me
Do you know what love is? A chemical. Electrons in your brain sending signals. Are you familiar with Ophiocordyceps unilateralis? It's a fungus that infects ants. It's amazing, really. The spores take over their central nervous systems and force them to climb to a high point, and then the fungus begins to grow up, bursting from the tops of their heads like a branch. And it kills them, of course. All so it can spray new spores over the jungle, infecting more ants. When people say love, that's what I think of.
Good thing cordyceps can't survive in humans due to our higher body temperature.
Yet.
And if that happens?
Seems like "the last of us" goes from fiction to reality...
Or it would be treated by a antifungal.
Hard to tell with things like this whether you get eldritch horror or a trip to the pharmacist.
We lose.
Love is a parasite. I knew it!
So, manipulative, infectious, subjugative, and fatal?
Love is not just one thing on its own.
Tru
Being in love makes you an expert on love the same way getting run over by a car makes you a mechanic.
Tru
No.
Philosophical answer: That shit is crazy, but we need it. We'll never understand it.
Science answer: Evolution and brain chemicals.
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
-- ee cummings
Nope. Tho that might be years of others conditioning me to believe I was unlovable, then social doings became harder cause I was done with school
Found one.
There are plenty of people who felt the same way you do but it doesnt have to be a macro thing. Am I lovable? What a crazy thing to say. Have I been loved? I love you. I dont love anything specific about you, obviously, but when I look out into the world I want you to be safe, and cared for, and healthy. Thats love.
Thats macro. Micro comes from within. Its wired into your body, generally speaking.
There are different forms of love. We've known this for millennia. There are also different kinds of understanding.
It might be hard to express in words those feelings that otherwise come naturally, and conversely, it might be easy for a person to provide an excellent description of a certain form of love but be completely unable to feel or express it when a suitable situation arises.
The most common one of these, I think, is those people who struggle to see certain others (variable as per preference) as anything other than potential sexual (or romantic) partners, despite likely being able to understand the dictionary definition of Platonic love.
For my understanding of it, in the dictionary sense, at least, see above. For the other sense, I definitely understand some of them. Others I'm not sure.
Enough to get by, but not completely. Like most things.
Love is the recognition that, on a profound level, the other is part of myself, and I part of the other.
Only if you love yourself
What is it if you don't love yourself?
Megalomania
Maybe the way I would say it is 'extending compassion to the other as if it were yourself.' Its like a rewriting of the golden rule.
I do get what youre saying too.
The topic probably does not go unexplored. Ill do some research.
Ah, you're referring to the tendency of certain narcissistic people to treat others as an extension of themselves. That's certainly not what I mean.
The golden rule works for the most part, but it also needs to create the Other to work. What I'm thinking about is closer to the philosophy of Ubuntu, sometimes stated as "I am because we are".
Seems to me that someone who hates themselves is living with a tremendous shadow that completely cuts them off from unconditional love. Thus one lives in a constant state of war against themselves. I always enjoyed this clip of Alan Watts reading Carl Jung's thoughts on the subject.
Do I?
I like Zizeks idea of love being a violent event. Check the yt video by Julian de madeiros which should explain the idea.
You could also read/ listen to zizek talk about it
Honestly I have my suspicions I don't quite right; maybe it's something biological, or maybe it's my childhood. But, I try to be a good person anyway, and help people who have or would help me. They seem impressed, even when I admit this.
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