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Discourse on "checking out" keeps mentioning prolific welfare, porn, entertainment, and nutrition as both the catalysts and trajectories for someone "giving up." I won't argue statistics - video hosts and imageboards are chock-full of pornography for a reason, entertainment is cheap, and it's easier than ever to satisfy caloric needs - but I do want to share my own experience of gaming the limbic system.
For reasons approximate to those given by Shirayuki I've stopped pursuing women, career improvements, a house, and the Red Queen Race that is modern "fitness," yet some blend of pride, risk avoidance, and personal satisfaction prevents me from jumping fully into decay.
My issues with dating I won't go into, other than that I'm as aspie; these issues have been hashed out again and again here and elsewhere, and from what I've seen of recent dating discourse on The Motte I suspect the topic has overstayed its welcome. That right there eliminates a lot of motivation for time- and resource-intensive preening behavior, and made it easier to "give up" in a lot of other areas.
I get what satisfaction I can working a rural office job that puts me in a position to assist people without a heavy regulatory burden on my actions or mannerisms, whereas anecdotes from friends lead me to believe that working for any larger organization, be it public or private, would entail onerous oversight of my task prioritization and my allowed range of expression - I've heard more than one horror story of a nearby city's municipal office HR enabling the usual suspects to crybully their way to dominance. I could make more of a difference with a developed career, but why would I put myself through all of that? Besides, I stand out more in a small office, I feel more valuable even if being a cog in a larger, more developed machine might be a greater net gain for the world.
Due to the aforementioned marginal value of cash below a certain tremendous threshold, I'm more interested in acquiring something approximating that tremendous amount than I am wont to burn money for social plumage: what good is owning a home if it means being broke when disaster strikes, or stressing over the postgraduate education and career investment necessary to obtain both the savings and the home? So instead I rent from my parents at a monthly rate below that of regional apartments but sufficient to ensure I am a net positive for their finances, and dump the rest into savings and investments.
I think I'm being narcissistic on a couple levels here: obviously, I'm writing this to justify myself: "sure, I'm a loser, but at least I'm not a gooner NEET! I make (token efforts to make) the world a better place!", but on a further level, it unnerves me to realize the prosocial impulses that prevent me from falling completely to parasitism and decay are nonetheless being gamed by myself to make myself feel good: I've learned that I gain satisfaction from helping people with their problems, and so I've positioned myself to solve lots of simple little problems despite my objective impact being minute. My drive for social acceptance can be somewhat satisfied by making myself useful in a small community with sufficiently low standards and human capital to make "successful" participation an easy bar to clear. However superficially prosocial my drives, I'm still just a machine fiddling with its own parameters.
And so it all spirals back to the problem of terminal values. I don't act because I have a purpose, I act as an animal with simple animal desires, molded by - well, currently I have some evolutionary just-so-stories popping into my head, but I won't pretend at knowledge by reciting them. Sure, my animal desires are wired so that I want to pursue "selfless" actions as well as "selfish" ones, but it's still a reward mechanism that I've gamed, and that exploitation makes it self-centered: "why bother" actually trying to improve the world, when I can game all my inputs to make it feel kind of like I'm improving the world? It isn't satisfying my need for a long-term purpose, when I'm alone at night or going on a long drive I'll ruminate on the fact that I'm sating myself on a hollow substitute, but for want of belief in said purpose I have no motivation left to pursue the full-bodied experience of "usefulness," or the will to sacrifice for a cause.
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