# I am smarter than my hunger,

- Link: https://www.andreidraganescu.info/2016/04/06/i-am-smarter-than-my-hunger/
- Published: 2016-04-06T14:11:15+03:00
- Author: Andrei Draganescu

![](https://draganescu.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/634d2-10ghizmzi0lfiphyfbeeadq.
jpeg)

#### **therefore I am human**

It is late at night and I am planning my trip to bed for about thirty minutes, when
suddenly I stumble upon a talk show, which obviously sounded interesting enough 
to crap on my “go to bed early” plan. As I sat sunk in the couch admitting my defeat
to the shiny grin of the TV, my ears picked up the discussion. The show was a lifetime
achievement celebration for a teacher of agricultural sciences. This 80 year old
man sounded so crisp and eloquent as he talked about his love for corn and linen,
when the blast of something like this sentence got my attention:

> I don’t think there is anything more beautiful than a field of blooming linen

What? WTF! Blooming .. linen? I thought: this must be an interesting person if he
got to appreciate linen for its … flowers! And I was right, because for one hour
and a half of remembering his life, lauding ex students who achieved amazing feats
in agriculture, discussing the philosophy of teaching, commenting on the communist
backlash he experienced and so on, I watched mesmerized the stories of a cool old
man. But the real treat came towards the end. Here is how I remember it:

> What is your opinion on GMO plants?

> I believe GMO plants are the normal next step in agriculture and we are fools 
> for forbidding GMO agriculture in the EU. We have selectively influenced plants
> genetically for thousands of years but the natural possibilities of increasing
> productivity in agriculture through selective pressure have reached a dead end.
> As long as we cannot find human resources to handle the work required for increasing
> productivity, food production required to feed humans has hit a wall that GMO 
> plants solve brilliantly.

> Hunger has been man’s enemy ever since the dawn of mankind, always constantly 
> waiting to strike and us always evading it, and we should be constantly aware 
> of that.

Who am I?

I am a person. I am a programmer. I am a writer. I am a husband. I am a lover. I
am curly haired. I am getting fat at an alarming rate. But, really, _what _am I?

I am an electric equilibrium that is maintained for a while inside an organic tissue
made of neurons. I am all in my head. The rest is life support.

Considering this, just about any creature with a brain has this split. Their perception
of their selves on one side and their whole selves on the other side. The whole 
self includes the life support.

The whole self is hungry, and it is hungry at all times. We are hungry indeed. We
are hungry for food and the nutrients in it, but we are hungry for love too. We 
are hungry for life itself, we are hungry for glitter, water, pleasure, bliss, validation,
and the useless calories in double peanut butter chocolate ice cream. The hunger
for success, for the sand on sandy beaches and the height of waves to surf, for 
the leather on that yacht’s couch and the salt in our lover’s hair, put there by
the warm breeze, which we’re also hungry for.

But we trick our hunger. We prey on chocolate, when we crave closure. We chew on
regret, to soothe our gluttony of life. Our tongues caress teardrops, when we’re
starving for forgiveness. Nails can be bitten, when hunger for another existence
makes its sickening rumble in our tummies. The fleshy taste of our lips give us 
dinner haze, when we’re hungry for each other.

Yes, we trick our hunger.

Because we’re smarter than our hunger. The electrochemical state my brain holds,
the chatter between dendrites and axons, can trick the life support. My eyes can
see what they don’t see, and my hunger can be eased by what I don’t eat. We are 
smarter than our hunger, and that makes us eat the world itself.

Yes, hunger is our enemy. Hunger for validation. Hunger for lust. Hunger for the
present moment. We feed on Tinder, on Facebook, on Twitter. Hunger for food. We 
feed it, even when we fed it thirty minutes ago, just like babies suck on the milk
in the second bottle. But we’re not babies.

We are humans. Civilization, society, hope, exploration, family, philosophy, games,
religion, all made so that we can trick our hunger. We are prepared. Among all things
that demote us from humans, war is first place. War is when hunger gets the best
of us. War is when our hunger is for the other’s life.

I am eating these words as I write them, because I am hungry for your inside ears
to listen to my thoughts. I am all in my head and desperately knock my skull from
inside out. My life support is so hungry. I just want to tell someone what’s like
inside these mushy layers enveloped in dura mater. But you all know, don’t you? 
What news of that land so familiar could I bring? Hunger is our enemy and, yes, 
sometimes outsmarting it is straight out boring. God forbid we ever deem it useless.
But sometimes, some people do and dendrites and axons stop talking to each other.
Fist the who am I will vanish, and very soon after the what am I starts to dissipate.

Sometimes I feel sorry for life support and just eat when I am hungry. Whatever 
eating means at that very moment. Do you?