Many of you are familiar with Huxley’s “Brave New World” book. In it, Almost all of humanity regularly takes a drug called Soma which produces feelings of euphoric happiness without any side effect.
I postulate that, within a few decades, medicine may progress enough to enable the creation of something similar to Soma. An ultimate antidepressant with no side effects. In other words, a pill that makes you happy, no matter what your situation and with no side effects. (Well, maybe dependance). Let’s call it the Happy Pill.
How do you think such an event would be bad or good? How do you think it would affect people in their daily lives? How would it modify our customs, our laws, our society, humanity as a whole, How different would a child be if he grew up in a Happy Pill world?
Some SF authors like Larry Niven and Spider Robinson have written about a variation of this idea - an easily used device for delivering direct stimulation to the pleasure center of the brain. The genral consensus is it would create a self-destructive addiction with people being too happy to bother doing things like work or eat or move.
I think there would probably be a lot of resistance to such a drug being produced in the first place. There are a lot of folks out there who feel that anything done for purely pleasure’s sake is morally wrong.
Here’s the deal. You go to a doctor who asks how things are going. Being a typical stressed-out 21st-century person you (hypothetically) say, “Oh, fine, except that I just don’t have enough energy to keep up.” The doc asks you to elaborate. “Well, I just can’t get everything done…the house, the kids, the spouse. I’m not really happy with anything. My house is a mess, I don’t have enough time to spend with my kids, and I’m distracted at work. It’s depressing.”
The doc says, “Well, now, we better treat that depression” (ignoring that the actual problem is something else–lack of energy, not knowing how to prioritize, disorganization) and gives you, let’s say, Lexapro.
So a few weeks later how are things going? Wonderful! Your house is still a mess, your children are still deprived, and you’re still just skating by at work–in other words, you still don’t have energy/organizational skills–but you are now not depressed about it.
(On the other hand we as a society have been damned diligent about suppressing any kind of drug that merely promises euphoria.)
So how is this not a happy pill?
And if that one doesn’t work, there’s Wellbutron or Prozac or Paxil. Keep at it, they’ll find something that suits you.
Pretty much described my ex-wife to a T. When the woman who is now my wife showed up, she was on Paxil. Had been for years.
My ex decided she needed some pills to. She got Paxil. They helped mellow her out a bit, but that was about all. She stopped taking them when I left, and hasn’t looked back.
My new wife, now on different meds, actually needs them to get through life. But I love her.
I think the effects would be rather similar to the effects of existing recreational drugs; chiefly - if it costs and people want it but can’t afford it, some of them will break the law to fund the purchase. If it’s a high demand item, governments are going to want to tax it heavily (or possibly just ban it).
Just as an aside, that’s not the way anti-depression meds work. If you don’t really have the chemical imbalance that these meds addresss, they won’t have a mood-elevating effect. And if you do have that imbalance, they may help you to have the initiative to do something about your life.
For the thousandth time, anti-depressants are NOT “happy pills”, dammit. I make jokingly refer to mine as that, but in truth, it’s more of a “here’s a pill that will bring allow you to function as you NORMALLY SHOULD.”
I worked very hard on myself to get to the (mostly) state of contentment I now have. A pill
of this sort would just treat the symptoms and not the deeper psychological issues that I’ve
managed to beat. IOW it’s MY battle and not a battle of chemicals and I wouldn’t want anyone
taking that away from me. As Kirk said in STV:
“Damn it, Bones, you’re a doctor. You know that pain and guilt can’t be taken away
with a wave of a magic wand. They’re the things we carry with us, the things that
make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don’t want my pain taken
away! I need my pain!”
I think Huxley was largely dead-on in Brave New World, so I would say that the results of this pill would be more or less what he writes about in the book.
I’m not sure if a drug or device that directly stimulates the “pleasure centers” of the brain (a.k.a. the nucleus accumbens) could be anything but addictive, so the “without side-effects” requirement appears to be ruled out, unless you don’t treat addiction as a side-effect. There have been all kinds of neuro studies done where electrodes are used to trigger this region about as directly as is physically possible, and the animals, if given an option, will trigger the stimulation ceaselessly, to the point that they eschew all other activity, like feeding, grooming, even sleep, and eventually die of deprivation and/or exhaustion. I think Huxley had very interesting ideas, but the neuroscience seems to be telling us that soma is pure fiction. The closest thing to soma we’ve got are the recreational drugs we’re already familiar with.
This has little to do with the OP, but I’ve worked in pharmacies and there actually is a drug called Soma. It’s a muscle relaxant, not an antidepressant, but it still creeps me out a bit whenever I see it.
I get sick of that, too! Antidepressants do NOT give you a “high” or make you happy, still less euphoric. They allow you to have normal ups and downs, not just be stuck in the “down” position. Also, guys, you have to take them for weeks before you see any benefit at all.
These pharmaceuticals have quite literally saved my life . Please don’t trivialize them. :mad:
We are going to achieve massive human life extension and the eradification of all known diseases within the next 30 years, and probably far less, if we don’t destroy ourselves beforehand.
We will be living for thousands of years, and the playing field of a human lifespan will have changed unalterably.
This is what we have to look forward to. Personally, I’m looking forward to it.
