Vladisvok Destino's thoughts: Equilibrium

Don't know if any of you would have ever watched this movie, didn't do particuarly well and never got brilliant reviews from critics. To steal a quick quote from IMDB "In a Fascist future where all forms of feeling are illegal, a man in charge of enforcing the law rises to overthrow the system.", if you are interested in finding out more about the movie you can see the whole article here, but it's not overly important for the point of my ramblings today.

Now the point here is that in this movie the way feelings were controlled was that everyone took a drug called "Prozium" that stopped you being able to feel any emotions at all, you wouldn't be happy, sad, angry, depressed, anything. This got me thinking, in todays world we already have certain drugs/treatments that are designed to help control/block certain emotions, we just don't look at it that way. Anti-depressants, Lithium, Calming medications, etc are all designed in such a way as to control/inhibit certain emotional responses, either in general or in response to specific stimulus.

Now again there are a reasonable number (I won't say most as I'm not sure of exact figures) that would probably feel the "Prozium" approach is overkill, that people need to be able to feel emotions to make life worthwhile (which seems to be the direction the movie heads in) but what about certain emotions that people would generally accept as negative? What if you could focus on specific emotions, or even specific occasions of emotion and control those?

Really hate your boss / some co-worker / maybe an important customer? Can't get over that partner who broke your heart when they left? Got a crush on someone you really wish you hadn't? What if there was a way to make it all go away, a little pill/injection/something that would make it all go away.

This is something I've thought about in various forms over the years and the more I think about it the more I think there would be a market for such a line of products, I just really don't have the time/resources/money available to me to make this project a reality. While the basic technology is out there (as I said there are already some treatments available that have this sort of effect) there's a lot of research needed to finetune the system to what I want to use it for, dosages, chemicals, time taken for effect, sideffects, etc, etc.

I suppose the question in terms of marketing the idea to people is, how many people would actually be willing to use it? The same people who would object to the total emotional wipeout might also take issue with the control of specific emotions/instances of emotions.



The other problem with marketing of course is how would you make it available to people? I imagine there wouldn't be too many hospitals/family doctors/similar that would be happy to prescribe it to people, same for pharmacies/drug stores being willing to sell it over the counter to people. So I guess that leaves health food shops / alternative medicine outlets / similar places.

So, lets do a little market research here, to the people reading this (both my regulars and anyone who may stumble across this) what do you think of the idea? Can you think of circumstances where you would want to use such a range of products? Can you think of people you know that would want to use them? If anyone with the money/resources to actually make this a reality happens to read, let me know how it goes because I really would be interested to know lol.

IRC Quote of the day

Announcing todays bronze trophy.....Desertfox/Cora/rodrod for 'shocking revelations' - Desertfox first entry into our QoTD
Announcing todays silver trophy.....Chinchilla330/Cora/Vlad for 'swimming'
todays gold trophy goes to.....Vesta/Vladisvok for 'Rules of Work'

Congratulations to todays winners, the updated score table can be found in the downloads section.

Quote of the day
Todays QoTD brought to you by Evanescence:
“So many fears were swimming around and around in my mind, Who would have dreamed the secrets we would find”

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