The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
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There is no greater motivator than spite.
Some arsehole charted out a running route which spells out a political slogan, ran that route, then posted a screenshot of his Strava run on Instagram. A Facebook page I follow shared it, soying out over how "based" and "redpilled" he is. I pointed out that this is stupid performative virtue-signalling nonsense. Various people replied to me saying that I'm just envious that I'm not as good a runner as he is. I pointed out that I've completed three marathons with a PR of just under four hours, and also that this guy's stated pace (10km in 53:20) is not even particularly fast, and significantly slower than my PR for that distance. These people were incredulous. I was planning to go to the gym this afternoon anyway, so I dutifully hopped on the treadmill and ran 10k in 48 minutes exactly.
Mogged.
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For the sake of this inquiry, I shall utilize a throwaway account to retain my anonymity as I will be getting on the vulnerable side in this post. I'm looking for an off-ramp.
I struggle with a high libido, and it often manifests itself in fantasies related to a kink I have rather than generic thoughts about copulation, and I don't know how to channel it healthily. I find it at odds with the lifestyle I want to live and the person that I desire to be. I wish I could elude this, but I find myself entertaining those thoughts and entering compulsive cycles when it all culminates and I succumb to my curiosity, before I go cold-turkey for months on end without returning to them. At some points when I see myself having more success talking to women, it enters a remission, but when I find myself in a place of stress and loneliness, it begins to flare up and when I'm no longer convinced that the opportunity cost of it isn't justified. It's certainly nothing illegal, and common as far as kinks go, but I do worry that it will, even subliminally, affect the way I view women.
I'm fortunate enough to have avoided pornography, at least in its conventional form, my entire life because I didn't see the appeal in it at the time most of my peers got introduced to it, but I will look at content that maintains the minimal plausible deniability of what can be considered not pornographic for me to be temporarily satiated. Completely trying to set those thoughts aside is only futile and will exacerbate the compulsion. Some may say that engaging in something productive such as lifting may help, though I already work out 3 times per week, these fantasies will manifest themselves late in the evening at a time when I am not doing anything. I've been advised to redirect my thoughts to something else whenever the fantasies appear, but again, at that very moment I act impulsively and do not see an off-ramp where I can tell myself the opportunity cost isn't justified.
For context, the kink in question is:I am turned on by watching women sitting on the toilet, be it in movie scenes, stock photos, etc. Not because of the bodily functions themselves, but rather the posture. The knees bent, the pants hugging their legs, their shiny legs and thighs fully exposed, the psychological element of vulnerability and intimacy, knowing that women are human beings that are not without their flaws, and knowing that it’s a taboo to indulge in such content.
The first step is to acknowledge that this content is pornographic for you. For the purposes of combating porn/masturbation addictions, you need to define "pornographic content" as anything that arouses you. You can call it softcore porn if you need to. It's still porn and crosses a red line, so don't give yourself any additional slack for it. Someone posts thirst trap content in a discord channel? It's softcore porn. Dismiss the content with contempt (do not look at it) and close the channel, and don't come back until the content has scrolled far away or leave if it's a repeat occurrence. Instagram is a source of constant temptations? Delete the app. Tell your friends you're taking a "mental health break."
As for combating a specific compulsion, ceasing looking at actual images online will do a lot to stop feeding the compulsion with fresh images and a sense that it's something real and attainable. But if you continue masturbating to the thought of the previous images, it will still reinforce the compulsion. So you need to stop or heavily reduce masturbation in addition to pornography. It's going to be easier to stop masturbating entirely at least for a little while than to stop masturbating to particular thoughts. I have seen recommendations for a "reset" lasting a month or two.
It sounds like you have some shame about it but are still mostly thinking in the framework of only trying to stop because it may have negative effects on you. You can certainly get some of the way there in this framework using the above approaches, but you'll never fully get out of it because it is simply too easy to rationalize and make excuses when you feel tempted since the framework is entirely about self-benefit, as you indicate with the idea of an "opportunity cost" (i.e., it's extremely easy to rationalize that the pleasure is worth more than the long term effects, or to convince yourself in the moment that the long term effects aren't real, or that the hardship of stopping is on net worse, etc.). The long term effects are certainly true, but if you start to think of the behavior as intrinsically wrong and shameful, you will have far more success stopping it completely. And there's a very good case for believing this or at least betting on it being true: There are multiple plausible analyses for why masturbation is not virtuous behavior, is objectively disordered, and degrades the honor/respect of the person engaging in it. There are also plausible analyses for why it is neutral (neither virtuous or vicious). But there is no plausible analysis by which masturbation is virtuous behavior and that it's wrong to not engage in it. Thus, you're best off just not doing it. I assumed here you do not have a religious framework but if you do, this all becomes much easier.
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I take compounded semaglutide for weight loss and, anecdotally, it really does seem reduce cravings in general. (Which I was specifically hoping for when I got on them since I also struggle with being too horny.) In particular, I've noticed that while I still get horny, it's actually possible to distract myself and remain distracted, without the horny thoughts recurring later with even more power. I won't say the drug is 100% or even 40% effective, but I do feel like my ability to respectfully interact with attractive women has meaningfully improved.
I do have to bring up an interesting side effect though: as my libido has become more controllable it feels like I've become a lot pickier about how I evaluate women's faces. It used to feel like virtually every woman with a body I liked also had a face I liked, but now I notice facial asymmetries and defects in composition even on short girls with good hip/bust to waist ratios.
(Possible confounder: me just getting naturally less horny as I delve into the latter half of my twenties )
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All I can say is that I understand the appeal. I don't find it sexually arousing, but it's cute. Like bare feet or puffy groggy makeup-less morning face, or the smell of fresh feminine sweat.
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Learning to sharpen a knife on a sharpening stone sounds much more difficult than it actually is, and totally worth doing. I touch mine up all the time and it does make cooking more joyful.
I'd say check out some youtube videos, and you probably should, but in my experience they all make it seem much more stressful and involved than it is when you're actually doing it.
Don't overthink it, I'd say. Get a whetstone, wet it, scrape knife over it in a common-sense way and angle, repeat for the other side, then go back and do a few more strokes on each side. I like to use the printer-paper cut test to verify that it's acceptably sharp, but mostly don't really bother any more.
Rinse and dry the knife before applying to food.
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The knives are 80% geometry. I have reground my knives to the smallest angle I could set on my sharpener and now they stay acceptably sharp longer.
While my wife and kid are away, I've also been cooking dinner for the whole week. The latest batch was turkey breast in a vaguely Georgian stew: carrots and green beans with sour plum sauce and walnuts. I probably should've used turkey thighs, but they were out of them, and ground walnuts provide enough richness anyway. I would use less carrots and more beans next time, though.
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Fucking hell, it's clearly over for men in medicine. Somewhere in the ballpark of 80-90% of my new juniors and peers are women. I've observed the same thing in specialties that aren't psych, which was even, before becoming one of the first to end up lopsided.
And keep in mind this is a lagging marker. If I see someone who isn't a blonde girl as a med student, I need to rub my eyes. This is, to the best of my knowledge, true everywhere, and I lived through the immediate aftermath of the flip while a med student in India, a lifetime ago. Fewer blondes, of course.
I'm not complaining too hard, it suits me, to a degree. I get along with them, I'm half woman on my mother's side. And I'm sure @faceh and @Sloot will nod approvingly of what being a slightly older and reasonably successful man entails in that environment. I just happen to like women more than they do, probably, while having my fair share of criticism. It helps that I see most of them as responsible professionals, and they are as informed as can be desired about what their profession implies for their fertility goals. It's such a shame that British medical training seems tailor-made by Satan to ensure we can't reproduce.
I offered to show anyone new the secrets of our staff kitchen - telling them that drinking more than my fair share of cheap NHS instant coffee and semi-skimmed milk was just about the one perk of the job. I thought it would be just the odd person or two interested. Lo and behold, I had a train of six women behind me, in single file, heading down the ward. It felt as ridiculous as it looked, but at least they can fill whatever has replaced Stanley cups in peace.
I love women. Definitely in the abstract, and plenty of individual ones as well.
My boss is a woman, the majority of the attorneys and staff in the firm are women.
My best paralegal is a dude, it does so happen.
But I'm just too tuned in as to the sort of trends you're observing and what they mean to feel completely comfortable about where this is going.
Similar with law school.
And there's been an absolute rash of female judges behaving quite badly and unbefitting of their role in the Judicial system. Its annoyingly hard to try and maintain faith in said system in light of this. Justices Barrett and Kagan testifying in congress that they feel unsafe due to the heat brought towards them and their families for doing their job doesn't help.
Oh, and I am currently running a case where my client is a neurotic woman, the opposing party is a neurotic woman, who was previously represented by a neurotic woman, and is currently represented by a neurotic woman who has a neurotic woman legal assistant. I am dragging this case forward by my fingernails and billing appropriately, but its absolutely ridiculous that this whole thing could have been resolve six months ago if the people involved were willing to sit in a room together and hash it out. But that appears to be a literal impossibility due to the personalities involved.
I keep myself sane by working on my classic muscle car and driving it on the weekends to restore my testosterone reserves.
Organisational culture across all Western institutions is changing to be more feminized and I think you can see its effects if you look for it. More consensus 'popular' decision making. More misdirected empathy. More neuroticism. Less appetite for risk.
What's worse is the deliberate unstated discrimination against boys and men in meeting their psychological needs in education (think of who teaches our boys and how), and also in employment opportunities. I think future generations will look back on the blatant sexism with disgust.
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My sibling was fairly neurotic and I believe it’s one of the major reasons we never got along, so I know the feeling; and they inherited that from our mother. When they would go on one of their insane and anger filled tirades or crazes, the only way to get ahold of the situation was to absolutely scream at them because they would endlessly beat a dead horse, kick you while you were down and constantly rag on your ass. I always had a much more stoic and martial attitude that I inherited from my father, which naturally made our personalities almost completely incompatible with each other. The most extreme arguments we ever had always reminded me of this scene in Rush Hour; which is exactly what I wanted from them. Stand still, quit moving, sit down and shut the fuck up, or I will twist the knife as hard as I can until I make you stop it. They had no capability to control and moderate themselves and just Did. Not. Know. When. To. Stop.
In your case though, I’d imagine this is somewhat more common. Aren’t most of the people that need legal assistance precisely those kinds of people that possess problems with others and the law?
I'm fairly neurotic at a baseline. I've spent the better part of the last 5 years progressively addressing both the symptoms and the root causes. I also inherited it from my mother. My dad is stoic in the extreme. I'm currently playing a mix of hawaiian slack-key guitar music, some classic exotica, and Spanish New Age Flamenco music (Govi is AWESOME) because its soothing without making me sleepy.
I sympathize with the neurotics, but if they're not at least trying to be better and curb their worst tendencies... I want them far away from me. This includes some of my family members.
YES.
And more to the point, those are the cases that by definition tend to drag the longest. So they're the 'stickiest' clients. Which means even if it starts out where only 10% of my caseload is those types, eventually, if I don't filter, those cases become 50% or more simply because they fill all my time and crowd out new clients and I slowly close out matters for the more reasonable clients.
I've adjusted my intake process to account for this and I quote a significantly higher retainer if I suspect you'll be that type of client.
Have you watched any of YouTube's police bodycam channels? I find it amazing how people will needlessly escalate mild situations with police and ruin their lives in the process. Absolute madness some of things that they do.
That said, I also watch civil libertartion lawyer channels which show (
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Damn. Are you sure we aren’t related and have the same parents? Whatever I have I above the neck I definitely inherited from my father, but even so, nowhere near the frequency he had it; as I couldn’t keep up with him. He had them in the extreme, extreme. My more natural joyful aloofness and temperament I took more from my mother, but I did have very hard boundaries in certain places that I took from my father.
I’m also above average in neuroticism but I never had it to any crippling degree. It’s not a ‘bad’ thing intrinsically like people think, and it also poses problems that are known in the scholarly literature of the five factor model; namely that all the negative emotions load together on a single factor. I tend to remember negative experiences more strongly than positive ones, but it leads to being introspective and provokes one to learn from their encounters. Letting those emotions consume you is always a bad thing, but if I think of neuroticism I think again of a Nietzschean aphorism:
“One needs a little chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.”
My mother and father were very different people with very different backgrounds. My sibling and I naturally followed their steps in being equally dissimilar, though the associated dysfunction between us was still strongly sibling in nature, despite its intensity. Not in a rivalry sense; we just objectively did not like each other. We always got along more the less we had to interact and the greater the distance was between us. They also had problems throughout though. They were very bullying (and I mean that in the direct and literal sense) and a pathological liar among other issues they dealt with. Perhaps it’s a good sign that I don’t get along with people like that. I don’t usually talk about my sibling out of respect for them. If I draw from my own experiences I don’t have a lot of positive things to say. Better to preserve their memory by not speaking on it.
Is the economics of your job more volume based or particularly case based depending on if you land some big fish/problematic client? I can’t imagine getting paid is all that fun either, if these clients are so erratically beset with issues; I’m sure it can be like pulling teeth, because they never want to pay you your fee or can’t get it together. Makes me have more sympathy and pity for public defenders. Lol.
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I work in a very different field but consistently find that those of my clients which are least profitable are also by far the most troublesome.
Tax accountant here. Also true in this industry. The ones that are least likely to be able to pay our fee are also the ones that are least likely to be able to pay for a proper bookkeeper to get their accounts in order, and also can't pay their tax debts. Their information all comes in late because they're disorganised and time-poor and they tend to have far less leeway with the tax office to ask for an extension. You end up spending a significant amount of time fixing their errors, and negotiating with the tax office on their behalf trying to make sure that they don't bring the Legal Hammer down.
Working with these clients is like fighting a losing battle. Soul-destroying experience, business failure just compounds and compounds and compounds to the point that keeping anything afloat becomes a herculean task.
Its always a bit funny when I have a consult with a client with a lot of unsecured debt, and they've been dodging collections for years, and I advise them they can either figure out a way to pay the debt (maybe get the amount owed reduced), wait decades for it to become noncollectable, or declare bankruptcy. There are minor asset protection strategies but the debt will not just disappear if you hide your property.
Then they want me to take on a case for them and be like "can I pay you later? Maybe on installments?"
Oh honey. You just spent a half hour explaining to me that you can't be trusted with credit.
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Yes, although in my particular specialty, getting paid is usually not that big a problem.
There's definitely a mismatch between how their their demands are and how easy they are to work with. For me, the big concern is that they're slightly more likely to file a professional complaint than average.
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I don't think you're being unreasonable. I just think I still like women more. Both in theory and practice. Case in point, I wouldn't particularly feel inclined to write on gender-war adjacent topics, even if I appreciate the ones you do put out.
They tend to be softer, kinder, and more empathetic than the average man. Less likely to be an emotional brick than us, but not me I suppose. It makes me a good psychiatrist, even if I'm perfectly masculine in other respects. They are both more interested in, and better at, the emotional and daily logistics. I play to my strengths, and they cover my weaknesses, and I appreciate that greatly.
Somebody has to, and no-one else will.
Well, more specifically, few people will do one focused directly on the facts and not solely to grift on gender wars discourse.
Its not something I enjoy, but I get a very deranged sense of gratification when people challenge me on it and then completely fail to bolster their arguments.
Ultimately it's not the healthiest outlet, so I try to actively spend time around the women I enjoy the company of to counterbalance it.
Agreed! Nothing drops my blood pressure like being around a smiling, pleasant woman. Even irrespective of the desire for kids and the financial benefits, having a reliable companion to come home to who makes your day instantly brighter is a benefit I would pay thousands of dollars a year for.
Its a strong barbell distribution. Tons of women whose mere presence will spike your cortisol, and many who will instantly relieve even the worst stress, and not too many any between.
I do that, and I used to engage in this kind of wrongthinking way more in a very rigorous source-driven manner, but I've been saying the same things so many times and pointing to the same ever-growing corpus of information (that everyone conveniently ignores) so much that I ended up feeling like writing on gender wars discourse was a waste of my time and an act of egregious self-mutilation worse than actual self-harm. Sense of gratification completely went to shit after the 6th straight year of doing it.
Keep fighting the good fight though, indeed somebody has to do it.
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I moved into a new house. The previous owner left me a Memphis wood fired grill on a very tricked out outdoor kitchen. It's ridiculous.
What should I grill?
I'm thinking I need to host a steak and eggs brunch for my run club. And maybe do something with brisket or ribs on an evening.
Is this just how the median affluent Texan lives? Have I been a fool for thinking we blue state coastal elites knew how to live?
A good grilled sausage in a roll with all the fixings is hard to beat
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Reminds me that I got myself a proper t-bone steak recently. I've always meant to try one since I watched Tom and Jerry as a kid, though I must admit Swiss cheese is on the mid side. It was suitably delicious, though I didn't consume it in the recommended spiral pattern.
Make yourself some big fat medium rare steaks. You've got me craving one. Or I've got myself craving one. Same difference.
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Fish. What's the American equivalent of the gilt-head bream or the European seabass? Ocean-going fish, just big enough for one or two people, no fiddly Y-bones, mild and flaky flesh.
I would say the cultural equivalent is probably snapper. But I’m no angler, and I suspect there is considerable regional variation across the different waters of the Americas.
For reasons that are not at all clear to me, Chilean sea bass somehow occupies a premium segment if you mean American in the Pan-American sense.
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I recommend barbecued tri tip.
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I pulled something in my ass. A couple of weeks ago I was unhappy with the activation levels of my glutes when doing deadlifts and learned a few warmup exercises to improve mind-glute connection. They worked so well that I flew through my set, but the next morning I felt a painful sensation in my buttock next to the coccyx. It's been a couple of weeks, and every time I thought I was fine, any kinds of hip hinges would bring it back.
On a more positive note, I'm getting close to benching my own weight again. And not because I'm losing weight.
I, too, recently realized that my glutes were being under-utilized. For a long time I have been trying to correct a case of anterior pelvic tilt. Deadlifting has helped somewhat, but a minor pelvic tilt (and its associated posture issues) still persists. I have been doing weighed lunges and am starting to learn how to do hip thrusters. Hopefully no ass pain on the horizon. I made a comment many months ago on another wellness Wednesday thread that the secret to staying fit is not f*cking yourself up with an injury while exercising.
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If you're on the internet this often, you should know you're supposed to pull things out of your ass.
Sigh. It's amazing what insane stress levels can do to you. I've had this feeling that there's something wrong with a calf, in the sense that it feels off, and I worry it'll cramp badly or give out. It's been on and off for weeks, and it hasn't caused me any actual problems. A back injury, a probably-not-a-fracture in my thumb from a wild night out, a bad sprain? All reminders that the human organism can break under sustained load. Or that I should exercise more.
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So you’re saying you are butt hurt? Joke aside, I pulled an ass muscle once in Junior High School and it was the worst because it was extremely sore and painful for me to sit, and especially lay down on. I don’t sleep much, but every second felt so incredibly painful; I was constantly twisting and turning.
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I hate seeing iPad kids in public, and think giving a minor a smartphone is only marginally better than buying them a box of fags. I saw a note on Substack the other day that pointed out that lots of parents (or prospective parents) are concerned about their children becoming addicted to their phones, but this is blatantly hypocritical when the parents themselves are addicted to their phones. Children are imitative: if they see their parents staring at their phones all day, they're going to want to do the same.
I take this seriously, and it's indisputable that my fiancée and I spend far too much time looking at our phones. Rather than trying to address it after having children, we want to get ahead of the problem. To that end, I ordered this phone lock box from Amazon, which arrived yesterday. You simply pop your phone inside and set a timer, at the end of which it will open. We have pre-committed to not looking at screens of any kind for at least one hour (preferably more) every evening: no phones, no laptops, no TV. (Obviously our laptops don't fit inside the lock box, but for that we have each other to keep ourselves honest.)
The box arrived yesterday evening, and as soon as I returned from the gym I put both our phones inside and set the timer for an hour. It also occurred to me that I could leave our phones inside overnight, so that our phones wouldn't be the first thing we see when we wake up in the morning. This turned out to be a fortuitous decision, as last night I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep, but had no choice but to read my book for an hour rather than looking at my phone. It's only been one day, but so far I think this was a wise purchase.
I recently got a device called a Brick which allows you to block a list of apps and websites (of your choice) on your phone and you must physically swipe your phone in front of the Brick (NFC) to "un-brick" it. I have mine on my fridge which is very near the door to my garage so I can free up my phone to be limitless as I leave the house if I want.
I'm also using an app called StayFree to completely block all shorts, TikToks, Reels etc across all of my devices. It hurts a little but it has very quickly (in the span of a few weeks) reset my habits to where I spend much less time on any kind of scrolling feed website even when they are unlocked.
The phone lock box idea sounds interesting to get some time periods of fully disengaging. I can set up a mode for the Brick to block everything but the literal phone function but I dislike the feeling of picking up my phone only to remember that the dopamine things aren't in there at the moment so having it physically quarantined sounds kind of appealing for occasional use.
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I still consider people obsessed about minimizing their screen time to have a minor to major skill issue.
A computer, especially a handheld one, is a convenient portal to the sum of human knowledge. Some of my friends live in there. Like, do something useful with it.
I have had days of 12-14 hour screen-on times, and I managed 8 hours 45 minutes today, as of the time of writing before bed. That represents a less than maximally busy day at work followed by a lazy evening. Apparently I used my phone while walking for 1 hour and 44 minutes.
I do not consider this wasted time. Were there things I could have done instead that could, theoretically, have benefited me more? Yes. But I wasn't going to do them just because I didn't have a phone. You try preparing case based discussions and reading NICE guidelines all day. I wrote important emails, used AI to make my life easier, used AI to make other people's lives harder, entertained myself, and got things done, in general.
Nobody in 1995 would have looked at a person spending two hours reading, an hour writing letters, an hour listening to music, an hour navigating around town, an hour talking to friends and three hours using a computer and concluded: nine hours of device time, catastrophic. The figure sounds alarming only because we've collapsed a dozen activities into one dogshit metric based on the substrate they happen on. By the same logic you could work yourself into a panic about somebody's "paper time".
I also have strong doubts about the nominal harmfulness of "screen time" for children. I spent my childhood reading like my life depended on it, because I was bored to fuck. I spend my adulthood reading because I'm often bored to fuck too, except it's on my phone. I also write essays on the bus and in the loo, put on tunes, do useful work, and maintain social relationships with it. The only reason your kids won't end up doing the same is because we might end up with something better.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0506-1
My recommendation:
Don't optimise children's screen minutes. Optimise what they're doing, what they're not doing because of it, and whether they can disengage from it.
I'd say that phones have made my life considerably better. Getting absolutely bored in the year of someone's lord 2026 is the biggest skill issue there is. And God knows I do a lot more IRL than I often used to. They're not mutually exclusive.
Well, yes, I'm not terribly concerned about my hypothetical future child staring at his laptop for hours because he's hard at work studying for his Leaving Cert.
I am concerned about him spending so much of his formative years consuming short-form brainrot and meaningless slop that his literacy, ability to socialise with his peers, executive function etc. are permanently compromised.
The purpose of the lock box is to prevent my fiancée and I doing things which look more like the latter than the former, so we can set a good example for our hypothetical future children. Endless scrolling on Instagram is an example of the latter. Neither of us claim that it's an edifying way to spend our time. It doesn't even make us feel happier in the short-term (never mind in the long-term), which is almost the textbook definition of an addiction.
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"Here's the weights. Do something useful! Better yourself! Why are you complaining that they're right next to this table full of drugs, porn and video games? Just git gud and ignore the temptation, scrub."
Willpower likely follows a similar distribution to IQ (albeit, much more trainable). Most people here are also high willpower people, who don't grok that there's a difference. Personally, I plan around my probably-sub-par-for-the-motte Will stat by paying for an app that lockdowns, limits and blocks my biggest time wasters on my phone.
I am perfectly aware of the difference, courtesy of ADHD and varying degrees of depression.
I'd say my willpower is as spiky as a porcupine. Herculean levels when it comes to work and professional advancement, if you know what I've had to suffer through, you'd get it. Ridiculously low in other places. I have that iron in me, I've survived things that would make many people quit or die. It just happens to be pig-iron.
The majority of people here would do better than me in the domains where I confess weakness, and those domains are the ones relevant here.
If you have a stash of superstimuli you can't resist staring you in the face, close your eyes, or get them out of the way. Installing an app that specifically gates the usage of the other apps of concern. Block websites. Locking your phone away is like locking yourself in the shitter so you don't go for the fridge.
More importantly, people consistently mythologize what they'd do without the all consuming specter of "phones." Yeah, I'm sure you're going to learn Latin, take up gardening and run that half marathon. Or call their mom, oh wait, no phone. Grand projects of self-improvement aside, even the marginal effect is likely minimal. I'd say it's both easier and less ridiculous to simply figure out better ways to spend the time on the phone doing better things on the phone.
I'm not sure why you're being so obtuse about this point. The phone is specifically designed to make it very difficult for you to avoid hyper stimuli. Yes you can change the settings to turn off notifications, make the phone greyscale, restriction app usage, etc. When I have done those things they make me use my phone less, because, perhaps unsurprisingly, it's much more pleasant to read on a physical book or e-reader than on your phone, it's much more pleasant to write essays on a laptop or physical notebook, and its much more pleasant to talk to people in real life (or call them without the screen on). When you remove the super stimuli, the phone is not that useful, so I don't see a very big difference between what you recommend and locking it up.
Not obtuse, just unconvinced. I'll try to be clearer about my stance:
I concede the design point entirely. The devices are adversarial. There's a building full of people in Menlo Park whose comp package depends on my thumb continuing to move, and I don't flatter myself that I'm immune. It is just, in my experience, a milder disease than most people think. A lot of innate dysfunction is blamed on the phones. That's why my recommendation was blockers rather than raw willpower. I'm not telling anyone to git gud in the face of a slot machine. I just wish to point out that it's not just a slot machine. It's like avoiding a city just because it has a few casinos in it.
Where I get off the bus is here:
My phone with Instagram, Twitter and Reddit stripped out is still:
I haven't used my laptop in six months, which is a shame, because I paid like £1200 for it. I only game on my PC because... the reasons are obvious.
It's the only way I speak to my parents from several thousand kilometres away. Calling that "not that useful" is a claim about your usage patterns being generalised into a claim about the hardware. Yours might genuinely be a Meta machine with a phone app bolted on, in which case locking it in a box costs you nothing and I withdraw my objection in your particular case. Mine isn't. And it is clear to me that's true for most people reading this.
I do almost all my reading on my phone. I genuinely can't remember the last time I bought a dead tree book. I acknowledge this puts me in a minority.
But the armchair with book in hand isn't what the phone is competing with. It's competing with eleven minutes in a queue at Tesco, a bus ride, the dead twenty minutes between clinics, and 3am when I'm awake on a night shift. I do not carry a Penguin Classic into the toilet. The realistic counterfactual for most of my reading time is not a better reading experience, it's worse, or none.
Which brings me to the actual disagreement, which is about the counterfactual rather than about superstimuli. Your model says the phone is a plug in the drain and pulling it lets the good stuff flow back. That is a well established vibe consensus but the evidence for that is thinner than people assume.
When English schools banned phones for the school day, the students didn't use their phones less overall or score better on wellbeing, sleep or attainment; they just shifted the usage till they got outside.
(That makes the whole "phones in school are bad for you" rather moot)
Meanwhile an RCT explicitly designed to teach goal-directed use rather than reduction performed about as well as a standard digital detox condition on problematic use). That is what I'm advocating.
Removing access and improving allocation seem to land in roughly the same place, which is what you'd expect if the binding constraint is what the person wants to do with their attention rather than where their attention is physically able to go.
A blocker is a scalpel: I lose the slop and keep the library. I don't need this, but I could do it.
A lock box is a tourniquet: it works, at the cost of the limb.
My on-call registrar cannot ring a box. I appreciate that FtttG's box has a timer and that this is a solved problem for most evenings, and honestly if it's working for him he should keep doing it. I am just concerned about he hasn't tried something... less extra.
My gripe is with the version of this that treats total removal as the obviously superior intervention because the intermediate one requires trusting yourself a bit.
And I stand by the mythologising point. The man who locks his phone away for an hour and reads a novel is real and I salute him, he must be, we've got plenty of people on the planet. He is also, in my experience, wildly outnumbered by the man who locks his phone away and then watches telly, or reorganises a drawer, or lies on the sofa contemplating the middle distance in a way he will later describe to himself as restorative. If it turns out that what you actually wanted was a book, you could also have just opened the book.
Replying because you're missing the obvious truth that different strategies work for different people and you do not always know why, especially by reading an internet post. First Toil then the Grave's plan may work for him splendidly, and not because he has some defect of character.
I concede all the usefulness of smartphones (I am typing this by the way on a computer). I still balk at your seemingly inalterable attachment to them. The other day on a walk I witnessed nearly every third person driving by looking at his or her phone. Who knows why. A map, a menu, an emergency text from a pregnant wife, a thesis on Heidegger. Or maybe just some dumbass inflammatory reel or so-called influencer. I do know that were Japanese suburban traffic only slightly faster on average that there would be a lot more swerving and crashing than there is now. And this with a current law enacting large fines and potential voiding of licenses for driving while staring at a phone.
People lose situational awareness when gazing at phones. They forget where they are, they forget what used to be basic manners. And this is in Japan where actually speaking on a phone in an enclosed space (such as a bus or train) is still tantamount to open-mouthed sneezing in an elevator. I still see it, and not always from foreigners. I had a girlfriend in grad school who used to read fucking books while driving until she was warned repeatedly that this was a reckless, selfish thing to do. This of course does not mean that reading books is innately harmful. Nobody is saying books are the devil. Still, reading has never been the best way to learn. As for phones, we've all seen the pithy quote.
You suggest @FtttG has claimed:
And maybe that was his intention (I did not get that.) And I understand perhaps yours is just an instinctive desire to defend technology or modernism or whatever.
But phones are not always, or even most of the time, such a wonderful thing, despite what is perhaps their potential to be such. Any more than many things that should be good, that are good in theory, that seem foolproof in their benefit to humanity, end up fucking people up. But then you know all this and you know some version of all the stories I might tell to make this point. I predict that you will remain intransigent. I would consider this a blind spot of yours, a shortcoming worth reflecting on. You will not agree. Call me Kreskin. You do you, as they say.
I'm not stupid. I couldn't miss that if I tried.
I have said, rather clearly:
Really? Are we going to psychoanalyzing arguments here? I can't stop you, even if that is an incorrect assessment. I've read the relevant literature, and shared it. It's not a content-free claim.
It would be trivial for me to turn this around and say that to you, and many others raising objections, phones are a mythical boogeyman holding them back from self-actualization. As I pointed out to @Iconochasm, their utility is ridiculously high even with the dopamine-pumps removed. Did I want to say this? Not really. I wouldn't, if you hadn't. I think it's true anyway.
I don't disagree, but I do think it's worth acknowledging that the thing people are worried about is the 24/7 access to high grade dopamine pumps.
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I did say perhaps. I qualified throughout. Admittedly I haven't read all your replies to everyone, only the one(s) I was answering.
I personally don't have issues overusing my phone by my own standards of that term. I do have teenage sons who would benefit from giving the damn things a rest, as I repeatedly suggest to them. Parenthood informs my views to some degree, as does the fact that I lived well into adulthood before smartphones existed, so I remember a different world.
Sure phones "utility is ridiculously high" yes, I believe I granted you all of that. I think you might be slightly on defense though of course I'm not the shrink. I'll leave it.
Edit: I'm not leaving it because I am smugly convinced of my rightness, or your wrongness. But I think we're talking past each other to a degree and I'm not interested in taking part in a pile-on.
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Well, about that.
But hey, if programmers can't figure out the benefits of async/await communication patterns, and they're supposed to be smart, what hope does anyone else have? (Technically books and TV are like that too, they're just one-way.)
Yes, but if you're not smarter than the tool (which tends to be co-morbid with not being smarter than your kid) you won't be able to think like that, and many people are not smarter than their tools. The simplest way to do that- the one any idiot can understand- is to flatly reject those tools and to urge others (perhaps at gunpoint) to do the same. You can even claim you're helping keep the underclass from vice when you do it (re: test scores and child molesters), which is the standard prohibitionist playbook, and as such opposing these things will require an approach focused on human dignity.
I can't cure stupidity, susceptibility to hyper-stimuli, and the CEO of someone's executive function jumping out a window. Those are the most innate of skill issues.
But I do not think @FtttG is dumb. I don't think he has executive dysfunction to that degree either, and if I have ADHD and manage professionally and personally, so can he. I dare say that his current approach is proof of high neuroticism and conscientiousness, but a failure of framing/perspective. Particularly in light of objective evidence accrued in a systematic manner.
This applies to most people on this forum, to varying degrees. I'm not going to tell my typical patient to spend more time on their phone, and I won't tell the average teenager to put in a few more hours of TikTok. I do expect the population here to be selected for the ability to read things at length, which correlates with intelligence. There are exceptions. We won't be naming them.
Something I've genuinely believed for a long time: half the fucking point of being intelligent is getting to do things that would wreck someone dumber than you. And if you're intelligent enough, you become acutely aware of how far that extends, which is why I advise everyone, myself very much included, against being too smart for their own good. Is this elitist? Possibly. It's also true, and I've made my peace with the combination.
So the advice is aimed squarely at the people who'd benefit from it, and it amounts to this: stop generating angst over a benign practice, and if you can't manage that, at least decouple the dozen different activities that have been reduced into one number on a settings screen.
There are of course people here genuinely wasting their time on their phones, or using them in ways they'd regret on any sober reflection. That fraction is much smaller than the fraction who believe it of themselves. The gap between those two numbers is doing more damage than the phones are.
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If you can control your home wifi from your phone, then you can turn off the WiFi (in some cases on a per device basis) and then lock the phone in the box. Two birds with one stone.
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Are you British?
Irish. Why do you ask?
“Fag” is a common slur for a homosexual in the US. Zero people that I know will think you are talking about smoking anymore. I thought you were talking about a gay orgy for a moment.
American here amd I understood immediately.
Yeah, the context of "a box" made it reasonably clear. Probably did raise a few eyebrows though. Like if an Anglo were to read an American account of keeping their CCW in their fanny pack.
Maybe speaks to my suspected autism more than anything. I’m American and can’t understand half the Americans I speak to. Sometimes I come across as awkward in my responses to people because they enunciate a word a certain way, or are too fluid in conversation, or they connect words the “wrong way” to me (i.e. “you’re not supposed to say it like that”); but I just nod along like I understand; mostly because it’s rude if you say “What?,” 17 times consecutively because they make no sense to you. When he said “box” and “fag” in the same sentence my brain just went “????” “Must be a slang term for an orgy of homo’s…” Same reaction I have to a lot of people who don’t understand how I think.
I have seen this called "problems with auditory processing". One scholarly article says (with literally two dozen citations omitted):
Do you have this problem? It has been alleged by @self_made_human that you are practically retarded. Fluid conversations I can more or less perform very well at. Much better than I could as a kid, but people can sometimes tell there’s something… off, about me. 95% of the time I look completely normal like everyone else, but for me “normal” is often a matter of successful imitation. It doesn’t come naturally to me.
But I also sometimes experience the same issue reading. I think it was a Facebook post I came across once that I started laughing at because someone posted a question asking if “Anyone has ever put fruit in a smoker before?,” and what the results were. The immediate answer someone gave was the exact one that occurred to me before I realized what the questioner was asking. They posted a Wikipedia link to the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany.
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I am familiar with that meaning, but "pack of cigarettes" is too laborious.
Makes sense. They usually just say “cigs,” here.
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I've had one of these for about 5 years now. They are amazing. Don't always use it (because my discipline is weak) but it makes it much easier to resist temptation because you only have to make one decision (rather than many). Cold Turkey for laptops helps a lot (you can make it so your computer auto-shuts off after a certain time).
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New Year's resolution check-in:
How goes it @self_made_human, @thejdizzler, @birb_cromble, @ThomasdelVasto and @falling-star?
Spending is $3,091.99 less than the same day last year.
The contractor finally started the work this week, so I expect that buffer to crater in the next week or two.
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Did push-ups. And I've confirmed that my back pain is usually psychosomatic because I can feel them quite literally tensing up at the prospect of going to work. Oh well, this is a career where you're unlikely to come out entirely unscathed.
My last batch of juniors finally rotated out. I used the opportunity to treat them to chocolates, and prior to that, get them to fill out feedback forms. I scrupulously made them do the latter before the former, because life has made me neurotic, and I'd rather not give anyone the impression I bought my reports with M&S chocolate. I knew they liked me, but I was very pleased to see that the feedback was unanimously excellent. I needed that, after a shit day, and with my grandpa in the ICU with my heart at his bedside.
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Last weekend was a bank holiday in Ireland, and I overindulged in both food and drink. Weight is up by 1kg from this day last week. We must redouble our efforts!
I feel like consuming double the usual amount of food and alcoholic beverage isn't going to help. Idk, I'm not a doctor.
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