Not old enough to buy a drink \u2013 that would be illegal \u2013 so the first drinks are always gifts of some sort. The gift of beer creates a bond, a feeling of connection, or community, between the young people. Since teenagers usually have little or no money, they share.<\/p>\n
Indeed, what bonds them is hardly the exchange of a beer, but a qualiadelic experience. Even though these experiences may eventually lead to perdition, the memory of them is often among the fondest qualia that remains held in the mind right down to the deathbed.<\/p>\n
This is how profound a qualiadelic economy can be.<\/p>\n
The drinking of young people is filled with giving. When reciprocity is betrayed within the larger context \u2013 not in the cost of beers but in the accounts of friendship and romance.<\/p>\n
Once our gift-giving relationships get reframed as transactional our material economy takes over. Over time, addiction (drugs, goods,thrills, even romance) commodify relationships. This devalues the qualia inside us, and we return to our bad habits to escape the pain and disappointment.<\/p>\n
The community of drinkers is no longer a community at all. The price of each beer is reckoned. A beer bought for the man in the next stool at the dive is a token of gratitude in return for a joke or a story which has momentarily distracted us from our trauma – for it is trauma. Addiction leaves trauma in its wake, and over generations, well you know, it’s all of us.<\/p>\n
We know the exact cost of our trauma, for we lost the communities that raised us, and with which we once built our lives \u2013 our friends and our families.<\/p>\n
This is what we can learn from addiction. For, when the need to escape from the trauma of an addictive economy we use up the trees, the salmon, the minerals in the earth, all the things on this planet which have formed themselves around qualia.<\/p>\n
And we find ourselves reckoning all alone. The entire human race is alone, nicheless in ecosystems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Not old enough to buy a drink \u2013 that would be illegal \u2013 so the first drinks are always gifts of some sort. The gift of beer creates a bond, a feeling of connection, or community, between the young people. Since teenagers usually have little or no money, they share.Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-tony-brussat","post-342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-nerve-pollution"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9QShd-5w","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetqualia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetqualia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetqualia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetqualia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetqualia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/planetqualia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5297,"href":"https:\/\/planetqualia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342\/revisions\/5297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetqualia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetqualia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetqualia.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}