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Not quite directly related, but I can say this is how I feel about with my workload these days.
I've been doing this long enough that most of the actual work I have to do is involved, requires concentration, and it can take like 10-15 minutes just to load up all the information and context I need to start to produce a work product. I've got enough experience that I handle any basic inquiries or tasks in like a minute or two, but I want to handle the work that I can really dig into.
Which requires uninterrupted thought. I can't delegate this work, by and large.
I can set aside time on my calendar to do these tasks, but if I 'only' block off 30 minutes, that's barely enough to make meaningful progress, since I get everything up and running and then I can only 'work' for like 15 minutes at at time.
I can block off more time but at that point I'm guaranteed to get interruptions before long and get pulled off task to something else while I'm "in the zone" which ruins the whole effect.
I could set aside time outside of work hours to do it, but by the time I'm home, this feels like such a massive intrusion I generally won't even try unless i have a real looming deadline.
Honestly, I'd really rather be practicing Spanish, or learning how to pilot airplanes, or pick up an instrument or two. But my mental work is most valuable (in terms of how much I get paid) doing this stuff.
Unless someone can gamify it to some extent, lay out an extremely clear path for progression, with periodic rewards and a well-defined end-goal, and some mechanism for accountability, then I'm just less likely to commit to it fully, since I'd have to use discipline to establish a habit and overcome the initial unpleasantness. But so many side activities seem pretty pointless to engage with if they aren't going to drastically increase your status or wealth, even if the skill itself is handy on its own terms.
In part, because everyone is ranked against everyone else, and you know full well you'll never enter the top 10% in most activities, let alone the top 1%, and being the best Xylophonist in your town is no longer sufficient to win social points.
Also the impulse to add professional/monetary incentives to everything mean that the second you stop heading upwards in the rankings it's kind of depressing.
I was a pretty good Rugby player growing up, got into the professional academy system and ultimately washed out at 20. I then stopped playing Rugby since just kinda hanging around being an amateur felt depressing as hell. This trend's happened a lot with the guys who went through the process, compared to previous generations where really the entire 'pinnacle' of the sport for the vast majority of people was just playing for the suburb's best team and a career would be ping-ponging between grades for 10-15 years until injury or life got in the way.
This kinda happened to me with running. I was a D1 track athlete, and after college, could never get back into recreational running at a hobby level. It never felt right not to be training for the highest level competition, and then just let enough time get away to have it be a depressing slide of peak potential
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Yes I will.
Top 10% is nothing though. Even top 1% is nothing.
Practically nothing I do recreationally will mean anything to anyone outside of my immediate family, regardless of how good I am.
Thinking that people would care if you were a bit better at some skill is autistic delusion. No-one gives a shit.
Yes, I'm making this precise point.
If becoming decent at a given skill set or activity won't win you many status points, what's the motivation to keep doing it aside from autistic fixation?
I disagreed with the percentiles and that global ranking mattered, not your reasoning for why to engage in activities. I didn't mean to say you are deluded, only that people reasoning about these things often are (like guys at the gym or whatever).
People didn't give a shit about hobbies before the internet either and can't tell a 90th percentile from a 99.9th percentile anyway.
I feel like optimization culture has pushed into hobbies, though. There's way more concern around 'performing' at even casual activities
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Nah, I agree with the others below: If you need to gamify something to enjoy it, then you don't actually enjoy it. It's like people who get gym memberships on January 2 with the goal of trying to lose that stubborn 20 pounds and finally "get into shape". But the goal is more important to them than the exercise, which they find sucks, and they have to force themself to get to the gym and quit by March. the fit people who go to the gym aren't there because they have exceptional self-discipline; they're there because they like going to the gym. It's not something they have to force themselves to do; it's something they look forward to doing. I'm an avid cyclist, and I regularly go on long rides on the weekend. But I'm not putting in 60 miles because I need to tick some box that says I have to do 60 miles today and maybe I get some kind of reward for doing it. I ride the 60 miles because that's the length that corresponds to the amount of time I want to spend riding. And if I get sick of it and turn back early I don't care, because I'm not trying to force myself to do anything, or unlocking any achievement.
I feel that this is a problem of box tickers and speed-runners in general, and especially in the outdoor scene. About a decade ago I was hiking on the Appalachian Trail in Massachusetts when I came across a through-hiker eating lunch at the saddle between two mountains. I told him I was surprised that he was so far north about a month before most hikers would get that far. He excitedly told me that there were people who had finished already. I continued up the mountain and was enjoying the panoramic view at the top when he passed me. He plowed forward without even looking at the scenery. What's the point of doing a hike like that if you aren't even going to stop at the summits? It was clear that he was eating at the saddle so he could carb load before the climb and make better time.
Years later I was hiking Mt. Harvard in Colorado when I came across a guy from Kansas City who was trying to hit all of the fourteeners in the state. We hiked together for a while until he decided that I wasn't moving fast enough for him, but he did talk about how his wife was very supportive of his mission. I never would consider a hobby something that required suport from my family unless it was some kind of obsession that kept me away, which it appeared to be for him. When we got to the top we ran across two guys who were hiking together. From the summit the trail continues across a ridge to another fourteener, Mt. Princeton. It was a clear, warm day, and while the trail looped back around to the trail we hike in on, it looked like a long, hot, sunburned, high-altitude slog. The guy from KC and one of the guys decided to do it, while me and the other guy hiked down to the parking lot together. The thing about it, though, was that the guy from KC was staying with a friend in Denver who was getting him into a show at Red Rocks. If he had hiked straight out to his car from Harvard it would have been about the average time you'd leave to get back to Denver and change before heading to the concert. The guy acted like he had to get back to the car by five if he wanted to make it and thought it was possible, but he was effectively skipping the show. And since there was no cell service there, he was leaving his friend high and dry. Skipping an activity to do something else is one thing, but the guy seemed so concerned about bagging an extra peak that he was willing to risk pissing of a friend who gave him free passes to a band he really liked.
Counterpoint: Actual games.
Perhaps what we are discussing is more "the feeling of progress." Newb gainz are fun. Novelty is fun. Plateaus are not.
Every once in a while, I stop lifting say squats for a while. When I start back up, it's fun to rapidly increase. Then I plateau. Rinse, wash, repeat. (This is fine because I'm focusing on running for the time being. Where ... I'm making progress.)
Having bucket lists for hikers/explorers is a fun way to force oneself outside of one's comfort zone. I like hiking. Having a goal makes it channeled towards something concrete.
There's more than one way to enjoy various hobbies, in other words. Camping can be luxurious or hardcore. Cheap or expensive. Hiking, running, lifting, shooting, offroading, drones, car stuff, music, etc. all have multiple levels one can find a sweet spot.
Also most people like some kind of diversity, so switching and taking breaks is pretty normal.
Sounds like a rational agent trying to maximize utility between two competing goals and willing to take risks.
I mean the gamification scheme works mostly by overstimulation of the part of your brain that gets a ping from being successful. You get a dopamine high from achievement which is how your brain evolved to get unpleasant or difficult tasks done. That doesn’t mean you enjoy the game or got anything valuable from it, it means that the game used sounds and visual displays to trigger the dopamine that comes from accomplishing a task, but in a much more stimulating way. I’d put it this way — if games didn’t have those gamification elements in them, would you still enjoy them? I used to like Skyrim and it was always somewhat a thrill when you saw a hidden door open or quest completed or level up messages appeared. But what if none of that happened? How much fun is it really to solve random puzzles without the reward attached? No loot, no completion, no NPCs blowing sunshine up your ass, just turn the statues around to solve the puzzle with nothing to reward you? Just thwack the bandits for no pats on the head, no loot, no hidden rooms to discover? Is that really fun. Or is the fun getting those little bits of dopamine from the feeling of having done those things?
Ok, but Skyrim is an immersive open-world game with a narrative and all that.
Most phone games are way worse on the metric of gamification! It's like slot machines--they just skip straight to the dopamine.
Plenty of people just play games like Skyrim or Red Dead or GTA as a way to pass the time, long after they've beaten them. I'd argue they'd be better off if they found it less relaxing.
A lot of shooters are just fun because it's fun to shoot endless hordes of zombies or whathaveyou.
Don't some people love to just play poker on Red Dead?
Personally, my perfectionism gets triggered a bit too much with a game like Fallout and so I can't even just enjoy it because I have to keep checking the damn guides to make sure I hit all the things. So I started Fallout 4, but barely did anything. (I really like Fallout New Vegas years ago.)
I barely even game anymore and haven't for the better part of a decade now. My dopamine circuits are apparently satisfied with arguing on the internet. (I can and do still read full books just fine though. Never understood that issue.)
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No! Do not get me started between the difference between compulsion and fun. If you can play a game and enjoy it without any meta progression or score at all, only then do you enjoy the game. All the rest is just artifice trying to hijack your addiction centers.
So you're a filthy casual?
One of those "mobile" "gamers"?
(I'm kidding. Once again, I think there's more than one model here, and "true" "enjoyment" is neither easily defined nor discerned.)
You know.... unironically yes, but only because I feel like the ground shifted from underneath my feet. I mean, minus the mobile gaming thing but let me explain.
I think nearly all gaming up until mobile gaming and esports would be considered casual to modern sensibilities. There were no global rankings for Quake, you might even play only the single player game and never venture online with QuakeWorld! You might only play custom maps for StarCraft or WarCraft III. Did StarCraft even have a global ranking system or did that not start until StarCraft II? Jagged Alliance IMHO is hardcore as fuck, but it's also largely a sandbox for fucking around and beating it at all represents a substantial achievement.
None of these games have the sort of cutthroat competition a global ranking system introduces, nor the sort of metagame progression or constant attaboys of unlockables, achievements or cosmetics that mediocre modern games might shower you with to try to keep you around. They aren't super sweaty, and you can probably see everything they have to offer in terms of novelty in about 10-20 hours.
And yet, the moment to moment gameplay of them is so fun, I return to them over and over and over again. I don't need a global ranking, achievements, or loot crates to make Quake 3 on a LAN just as fun as it ever was in 2000. Or playing through the StarCraft campaign again. Or firing up Jagged Alliance for the first time a few years ago. They were made fun for fun's sake. And that, unironically, seems to code as "casual" now.
The release of Halo Infinite made me realise I was old and out of touch
A halo game comes out, it's pretty good, some networking issues but as far as triple A shitshow releases go, it was pretty smooth. IT WAS ALSO FREE.
The entire Halo Reddit community was fucking losing their shit about the lack of cosmetics, challenges, and unlockables. They were barely discussing the game, the balance, the maps, the things that make the game fun.
No, they were just endlessly bitching about the lack of armor cosmetics. You can't even fucking see your armor when you're playing.
Fortnite broke the kids man, they've lost sight of what makes a game good
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I think gamification is the exactly opposite of what you need. I cycled through a bunch of frankly masturbatory hobbies before I settled on woodworking. I tried to learn guitar, I tried mountain biking, I did martial arts for a long time, I've tried to make video games off and on for my entire adult life, did a smattering of electronics repair. All of them, to various degrees, felt like pissing in the ocean. I think I enjoyed the martial arts and mountain biking the most, but at a certain point going through the motions felt pointless. Especially with martial arts, once I no longer had anything to prove to myself that I could do it, I just wasn't feeling it anymore. I sunk costed through many more years of just showing up, but my drive to put in the extra work evaporated. A lot of what compelled me to put time into hobbies I really wasn't getting anything out of was the addictiveness of the gamification in the learning method.
But woodworking, at least for now, is fantastic. I make beautiful things that go into my home that are exactly what I want, and I don't care one teeny tiny bit how they stack up to what anyone else has done. It's not gamified, it's not competitive, but it's marginally creative and meets specific needs. Plus it's nice having hardwood furniture in my house instead of flat packed sawdust and glue. Mastering a smattering of baking recipes has been similar. I wanted great scones, I didn't like any of the bakeries around me, I figured out a recipe that produces the scones I want and now my family gets to enjoy them.
Human motivation is funny, and in several ways, I suspect gamification has spoiled our brains to expect more rewards for fake task than they deserve. I've found making real things you actually want and need has been a great detox, and doesn't necessarily carry with it the sort of "I'm too tapped out from work to do this" vibe that other more masturbatory and pointless hobbies might. But that might just be me.
As an avid mountain biker, I'm curious as to what you think was gamified about the whole experience. Most people who get into the sport start riding relatively easy trails and progress to harder ones as they get better, but the whole concept of difficulty is vague and not necessarily related to how fun a trail is to ride. What most people don't do is start off by taking lessons and sticking with it to "unlock" various achievements by passing certain thresholds. Easy trails can still be a blast for experienced riders, and a beginner can always walk anything he's uncomfortable with (most difficult trails are only truly difficult for relatively brief stretches). Most people, though, will be good enough in a year that they'll be able to ride whatever they want to, within reason, and the only thing that differentiates riders is speed, which isn't important if you aren't racing and which no one cares about on casual rides. Skills improvement usually just means getting faster by being able to navigate tricky sections better, like having the technique to navigate tight turns without slowing down too much or being able to find lines in rock gardens. The end result of developing these skills is that you end up finding certain kinds of trails more enjoyable, but it's a completely personal gain.
Have you heard of the types of fun? If not, See: https://essentialwilderness.com/type-1-2-and-3-fun/
As a descriptive generalization, all complex activities are composed of all three types of fun. The exact ratio of each type of fun changes activity by activity and person by person. Typically speaking, everyone wants to maximize type 1 fun and minimize type 3 fun. In the meantime, they will tolerate type 2 fun in proportion to they ability to delay gratification as an investment to produce more type 1 fun in the future.
Now, gamification, in this context, is best understood as a means to transmute type 3 fun into type 2 fun. The mechanism by which this happens is through providing consistent feedback and rewards so that the gamer later associated a particular misery with a positive outcome. In games, for example, killing the first 3 orcs in a questline might be type one fun, but killing the next 197 would be type 3 fun if it weren't for the xp and gold you get at the end. Similarly, in martial arts you might enjoy the first minute of getting punched in the stomach while being in horse stance, but you're not going to enjoy the next five unless you come to associate it with improving your capabilities and social status.
Gamification isn't always-- or even usually-- helpful. If an activity has a super high proportion of type 1 fun, you just do it to do it. And generally people don't have many issues doing activities they feel are predominantly type 2 fun, though they might have to get motivated first. I'll procrastinate doing my laundry, but I don't need to gamify it before I do it-- I know exactly how much I like clean clothes. Meanwhile, people should and do avoid activities that are mostly type 3 fun. I think I'd briefly enjoy falling out of a building, but I would definitely hate hitting the ground.
Where gamification helps most is at the margins, when an activity is favorably disposed toward types 1 and 2 intellectually, but at any given moment can feel emotionally tilted toward type 3. Think of this as the cold lake effect (you know you'll have fun if you just take the plunge, but you can't help but tiptoe in miserably). So if you're looking for it in mountan biking, don't expect to find it everywhere. As a hobby, mountain biking is probably dominated by the kind of people who find it type 1 fun. But if you find someone that's always a little reluctant to get on the trails. And seems mostly motivated by buying new gear, obsessively tracking their health statistics, and posting images of themselves completing on difficult trails... That's what gamification looks like for mountain biking.
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It might have been the friend I was doing it with, and how the trails were rated in our area. It was 15+ years ago, so I'll probably get all the details wrong. But there was some sort of rating system that didn't seem dissimilar from rock climbing ratings, and he was really into getting to the next difficulty, and mastering X, Y and Z skills necessary for doing so, and upgrading his bike with fancy brakes and tires and shocks. Where as I just had some dinky street/trail hybrid bike with none of those things and found myself completely incapable of keeping up. I just enjoyed doing the same trail or two when I could.
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Yea I agree with this sentiment. There are all these studies (mainly to do with reading) that gamification actually backfires. If you give a kid money or some other external reward for reading that actually is a pretty surefire way to avoid that kid developing a real love for reading. And so too with any other hobby you might be able to think of.
Really? Based on the recent ACX alpha school review, I was under the impression that cash for books does work.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-alpha-school
Which studies do you mean?
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I agree with this. I cycled through a lot until I found piano, and singing. I do them because they are beautiful and they open my heart. I don't even necessarily have to have energy or anything I just find myself gravitating towards piano more and more because I genuinely want it.
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Similar for me, but I swapped over to teaching it to others, which is quite rewarding on its own.
And you could always try some amateur fights if you want to challenge yourself (at the risk of injury).
3D printing is giving me a portion of this satisfaction of making something 'from scratch' and having a finished product at the end you can take pride in.
But so far that's mostly for trinkets and trivialities.
I dream of having a sizeable enclosed workspace on my property to tinker with cars and wood and produce fairly complex devices and objects. I am become Boomer, acquirer of hobbies.
I think my only point there is that you're going to encounter the gamified stimuli anyway (unless you are VERY actively avoiding it), and it thus behooves you to let the 'good' stuff grab your attention (and money) or else something wasteful and trivial might, instead.
For instance: I do have Duolingo on my phone and I consider it a better use of my time than, say, Candy Crush or the bazillion basebuilding game clones out there, so its like, I dunno, substituting nicotine gum for actual cigarettes. I rage every time my phone updates and it auto-installs a bunch of the little ADHD time-suck apps on there that I have to remove manually.
And I can also say that there is zero chance I'll ever get 'bored' or feel 'satiated' with having sex with women, but that has run into the endless frustration that is modern dating that I bemoan elsewhere. I'm tempted to start setting aside a 'prostitute budget' for myself if I go another year or two without getting into a relationship, but I damn well know what its like to be intimate with someone you truly know and care about, and cares about you in return, so I don't think I can be truly happy just paying for it.
All these basic activities turn out to be the most fulfilling on a primal level, whoda thunk? (lots of people, it turns out, the modern world just wants to keep you distracted with candy and trinkets).
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