Fan fact: your body can learn for things it knows it can't sense, and that's a really good argument for why Cypher, the "I know the steak isn't real" guy from the Matrix who betrays his friends, kinda had a point.
A thread.

As you know by now, I'm a COVID zombie and this have no smell or taste at the moment.
This is really freaking my body out, more than I expected it would. I generally struggle with minimal appetite/motivation to eat and the COVID stuff only makes that worse.

However, I've noticed lately that, starved of familiar sensory inputs, my stomach has been craving *very specific* foods, with which I am intimately familiar, which I can taste just by thinking of them.
UDF cookie dough ice cream, which I like. Burger King Whopper, which I don't.

I used to eat Burger King all the time in my teens and early 20s but the quality went down (or my palette raised its standards, or both) and now I don't eat there anymore. But I am *craving* a Whopper atm despite the fact that I can't taste one and don't even like them anymore.

This yearning for the familiar despite oneself has always fascinated me. The human brain really struggles when it can't have what it's used to, even when what it's used to is bad.
Even when it knows what it's used to is bad.

For example, I've had a lot of friends who have been in bad relationships for way longer than they should be. I've done this myself. Often those people (including myself) come from families where the home life was difficult. Divorce, difficulties with parental attachment, etc.

It's so interesting that we find ourselves replaying familiar patterns we know aren't healthy. I'm not trying to get into "nature vs. nurture" territory here, but I find it so amazing how large a part the banalities of our backgrounds play in how we act as adults.

So I get Cypher to an extent. Sure he's a selfish prick and that's important to keep in mind, but I sympathize with him nonetheless. The sensory deprivation the people the heroes awaken out of the Matrix would be horrendous. Their minds would be screaming for what they had lost.

And that evening makes us crazy. It really, really does make you do stupid things. I'm, like, fighting to control my urge to go to BK, and I have COVID, and I don't even like BK!

Just imagine how those with deep, complex traumas struggle daily not to return to those cycles.

I've seen a lot of that in my life from family and friends. Drug abuse, bad relationships one after another, bad habits, etc. It's so easy to just be like "well just don't do that anymore" because, well, they know they what they should or shouldn't do.

Procrastinating on important things is a huge problem of mine. I tell myself "Just, like, do it" all the time and yet here I am, writing about it on Twitter because worthless intellectual naval gazing a lot more comfortable to me than calling my insurance company back.

It's so important to be empathetic to people who struggle with stupid shit. People do or don't do things because they're somehow wired to do or not do those things in ways that are way too complex for us to really understand or control.

Often people are trying really hard even when it doesn't look like it! With the world as fucked up as it is generally, even without a global pandemic, it's kind of a wonder anything good or productive gets done at all.
I guess this turned out kind of optimistic.

Go us. Appreciate that good things happen despite everything. We're all trying and I guess that's as much as we can rightfully demand without getting hypocritical.

Cypher is still a douche though.

I need to eat.

Fin.

haha I spent half an hour procrastinating on eating. take that body, you shit