January 2017

However, the wish to find a global force that may help us overcome a galloping addictive desire bumps into an unexpected obstacle, a purely philosophic one. There can be no force like that at all. We live in a world where the life order is a patchwork. Indeed, the mass public no longer takes such things as life aims, a personal devotion mission as imperatives for themselves. It’s a rule, not an exception when a person can quit his or her job that brings no more moral or material satisfaction and almost never feel sorry about it. The clearest description of this spirit of the public life was given by postmodernism philosophy of the 60s.

Within the goal-setting conditions,  subjects adopted either distal goals defined in terms of weekly goal  limits or proximal goals specifying the goal limits for each of four time  periods during each day. Goal setting enhanced self-directed change as measured  by reductions in both eating behavior and weight. The higher the goal  attainments, the greater were the losses in weight. Proximal and distal goal  setting yielded comparable overall results because the majority of subjects  assigned remote goals altered this condition by adopting proximal goals to  augment control over their own behavior.

Let’s add more details to the reception example. Such things are not nosh-up events, first of all, but social events. There you can bypass a social lift and solve your business problems, find new partners. In other words, short-term rivaling aims (in our case satisfaction and trying all foods) can be replaced with another relation with a long-term part (for example, business interests or scientific career potentials) and a short-term one (the same appetite). In most cases, the long-term aim wins. Let’s add one more component to the same reception model. They serve wine and stronger liquors in such events.