We take a lot of simple pleasures in our lives for granted. The feeling of stretching, scratching an itch, relaxing our muscles, sleep, the taste of food, the smells around us, feeling warmth or cold on our skin, etc.
I've wondered a lot about what a life would be like without these things - even if you were otherwise completely healthy.
It can be a strange experience, to try and describe to people, something missing from your shared vocabulary.
I had a number of rounds of an IV drug treatment 4 or 5 years ago, and on one and only one of them, shortly after being treated, I found myself feeling a strange sensation, one that I couldn't place, but that I definitely remembered having experienced before.
After 5 minutes or so of wondering and racking my brain, I placed it.
It was hunger.
At some point in my early teenage years, that particular piece of wiring stopped working, and I didn't really pay much attention at the time, so I can't place precisely when, but I had no severe injuries or medical maladies crop up. The two likely causes of that are apparently a brain tumor or hormone problems, but my bloodwork and brain scans turned up nothing exciting then or since, so ...who knows. (I did, many years after this started, start drinking caffeine sometimes, but it doesn't stop happening if I stop drinking caffeine for months, so I don't think it's related. I'm not on anything stimulant-like or adjacent either.)
But it's a difficult thing to explain, the absence of that - and the knock-on effects, the absence of motivation to avoid it that results, the absence of satisfaction from eating causing it to vanish.
How you can sincerely ask "why am I having a pounding headache - oh I forgot to eat for 2 days", and not have had any sign unless you set deliberate calendar events and phone alarms to serve as a reminder that this basic feedback system is broken. (I usually don't need them, these days, because habit is a powerful thing, but I keep them around so that I don't become sufficiently sick or taxed by life that something breaks down and I forget...again.)
I can't exactly offer an A-B comparison of the difference, my memories of my childhood are not clear enough for that at this point, but while I will be sad if I end up not eating something especially tasty or unusual, there's not a visceral absence of satiation in it, it's an intellectual lament.
When I've tried, occasionally, a lot of weed, in edible or otherwise, it just makes me nauseous, then fall asleep. So not the same experience here, unfortunately.
We take a lot of simple pleasures in our lives for granted. The feeling of stretching, scratching an itch, relaxing our muscles, sleep, the taste of food, the smells around us, feeling warmth or cold on our skin, etc.
I've wondered a lot about what a life would be like without these things - even if you were otherwise completely healthy.