great being

IKEASIS The desire in daily life and consumer life to cling to “generically” designed objects. This need for clear, unconfusing forms is a means of simplifying life amid an onslaught of information.

INSTANT REINCARNATION The fact that most adults, no matter how great their life is, wish for radical change in their life. The urge to reincarnate while still alive is near universal.

HUMANALIA Things made by humans that exist only on earth and nowhere else in the universe. Examples include Teflon, NutraSweet, Paxil and meaningfully sized chunks of element No. 43, technetium.

INTERNAL VOICE BLINDNESS The near universal inability of people to articulate the tone and personality of the voice that forms their interior monologue.

INTERRUPTION-DRIVEN MEMORY We remember only red traffic lights, never the green ones. The green ones keep us in the flow, the red ones interrupt and annoy us.

ME GOGGLES The inability to accurately perceive oneself as others do.

OMNISCIENCE FATIGUE The burnout that comes with being able to know the answer to almost anything online.

POST-HUMAN Whatever it is that we become next.

PROCELERATION The acceleration of acceleration.

from A Dictionary of the Near Future

The act of restricting food and the constant hunger “made food the most important thing in one’s life,” said one of the participants. “Food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life. And life is pretty dull if that’s the only thing. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.”

These experiences are familiar to those who’ve spent their lives dieting. In fact, many of the symptoms once thought to be primary features of anorexia nervosa are actually normal biological responses of undernutrition and restrictive eating….

It was actually Dr. Keys’ research that first evidenced the role of dieting in increasing risks for eating disorders. The extreme physical and mental effects Dr. Keys observed led to his famous quote: “Starved people cannot be taught democracy. To talk about the will of the people when you aren’t feeding them is perfect hogwash.”

This was also what led early feminist activists to see dieting and weight concerns as a way to keep women preoccupied with food, filled with guilt and self-hatred, more easily influenced by others, and too mentally and physically exhausted to succeed professionally and politically

some interesting ideas about our obsession with diet drawn from the Minnesota Starvation Experiment