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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   1987 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 28, 2023

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:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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).

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My office has this self-scan device in today and tomorrow, which checks your weight, BMI, blood pressure and heart rate. I did it and it told me I have perfect blood pressure, good heart rate, but very slightly high BMI (25.2). Slightly deflated, I went back to my desk. A little while later I felt the urge to defecate and went to the bathroom.

Out of curiosity, I took the test again, and found that my weight had fallen by 1kg, and my BMI is now in the healthy range.

siiip... life is good.

Diet update. I got to 71.4kg in 98 days, or 14 weeks. The average weight loss rate was 400g a week. Now I have a different problem: I should at least go back to eating at maintenance, but I have grown accustomed to the diet, and I am quite satiated when eating 1600-1700 calories per day. Since the amounts of protein and fat I eat are already sufficient, this means I need a way to eat 400 calories worth of relatively pure carbs. Should I start drinking soda and fruit juices? I guess I'll switch to sugary fruit preserves in my yoghurt first.

Should I start drinking soda and fruit juices?

probably not. those are not filling at all. how tall are you also, that matters too

180cm

Great work. Can you summarize what you've been eating, particularly anything that's been good for your satiety? I struggle with appetite, and while I've tried a GLP-1 agonist, I desisted: I felt like I wasn't seeing much loss and felt like my appetites were drifting back to what they were before I started. Given the horror stories I'd heard of people having insatiable hunger after ceasing a different GLP-1 agonist (semaglutide), I decided to quit while I was ahead.

  1. Note that I wasn't fat when I started dieting, I weighed 77kg, but wanted to lose some of the fat around the midsection. From what I've seen, people that are unambiguously obese have a harder time curbing their appetites, especially if they like drinking.

  2. I already didn't drink alcohol, soda or juices or eat cookies or chocolate or use fatty sauces when I started dieting. I have been drinking protein shakes between meals and eating protein bars for dessert. I was lucky to find a brand that tasted great and gave me that "meal capstone" feeling.

  3. Counting calories is essential. After the first few weeks when you're still entering the data, it becomes a breeze and lets you plan your lunch and dinner to ensure that both sound appetizing.

  4. The biggest changes I did were fixing my shakes, my breakfast and my sides.

    • I stopped using so much milk in my protein shakes. Milk is surprisingly caloric. Or maybe not surprisingly, as mammalian babies subsist on milk alone.

    • my wife had been cooking me breakfasts that were fine nutritionally but were simply too large. By removing a single sandwich, I was able to scale them down to about 500 calories.

    • vegetable sides and salads are great. Lots of volume and quite satiating. Various forms of beans and cabbage make for great sides. I still ate curries with white rice on the side (there's no real difference between white and brown rice) but added more broccoli to the dish itself. Pasta carbonara, on the other hand, became a special occasion dish, as it's basically a plate of fat and carbs.

    • chicken breasts, seafood, lean fish and lean cuts of beef are A-tier meats, you can eat them with anything. Fatty fish, pork, chicken legs, steaks, pork and lamb are B-tier, you should check the recipe and the sides. Ham and salami are F-tier.

Even if your current protein intake is sufficient, there really isn't harm in getting more protein, and there could be a lot of benefit. So I would try to up protein rather than increase carbs.

If upping protein isn't an option because it's too satiating and you just can't get enough calories that way, then I would suggest increasing fat. It gets you more calories for your efforts, and it seems to be less harmful than carbs in general.

I am already at 2g/kg, there's no real point in eating even more protein.

Is there a point to eating more carbs?

Less intense protein farts?

What is the absolute cheapest way to acquire a decent house? Money is tight, but me and the girl are tired of living in an RV, and we're ready to upsize. Land isn't a concern because we have a family property, but it needs to last awhile and it needs to be larger than the 350 sq ft (!) we currently live in. I've been looking at the following options:

  • Construct an A-Frame house. These seem solid, but the cost is somewhat prohibitive, at somewhere around 25k with me performing a significant amount of the labor. Not a huge fan of the shape either, as it seems to be pretty bad conceptually in the cost-vs-space sense.

  • Do one of these sort of things: https://www.steelmasterusa.com/quonset-huts/. Cost seems comparable to the A-frame, but for more space and durability

  • Buy a used mobile home. They can be surprisingly cheap. As low as free, actually. They won't last more than probably a decade, but hey, that's a future problem. Size is disappointing, but not unbearable. I grew up in a mobile home after all.

Any other ideas? Any actual home construction seems to move it into the 200k range, which seems not worth it to me relative to the steel building setup, though I'm open to other opinions.

Any actual home construction seems to move it into the 200k range

Define "actual home". Home Depot and Menards offer several small and tiny* kits with sticker prices well under 200 k$.

*The official definition of "tiny house" is "400 ft^2 or smaller". In theory, four people can squeeze into a 600-ft^2 house without much trouble—say, 120 ft^2 for a living room, 80 ft^2 for a dining room, 100 ft^2 for each of two two-person bedrooms, 40 ft^2 for each of two bathrooms, and 120 ft^2 for a kitchen.

A-frames suck. You don't have to build three walls out of four, but the roof surface is huge, and it gets hot as balls there.

A mobile home should be fine. Is it possible to buy a used double-wide, or are they impossible to take apart?

Why not build a regular home instead of building an A-frame? Something small, like 8m by 6m (500 sq ft), should be pretty buildable alone, you just need some aid to raise the walls after building them and to construct the rafters. If you can afford prefab trusses, you can save yourself a lot of pain.

A frames were moderately popular where I grew up, but that was a state known for cool temperatures and lots of rain. So I would say the heat issue depends on the climate.

We talked to the person who placed our house, and apparently he sourced a double wide and single wide from two different locations, moved them, and re-assembled them into a triple wide, which is still inhabitable several decades later, and seems likely to remain so. He said it was fairly difficult to move, and also added a metal roof, which I think is expensive. It is more space than we need, and there are probably 600 sq ft we aren't really using.

Negatives: I don't know if it would work in a wet climate, since it does not have a foundation. It's difficult to sell, since most loan companies will not finance previously moved manufactured homes. Ours is financed, at a slightly higher rate, because the loan holder is a local nonprofit.

I grew up in a mobile home that my dad had expanded over the years into a house that was indistinguishable from a non-mobile home (to the untrained eye, anyway: I'm sure if you're a builder you could probably tell). Started with the mobile home, build extra rooms off the sides as he could afford the material. Eventually re-sided everything and put a new roof on top of the whole shebang. So you can potentially start with a mobile and build out from there.

Caveats: my dad had a good amount of professional construction experience, and the mobile home in question was on the older side, but was in it's original spot. From my understanding, moving a used mobile home to a new location can potentially cause a lot of structural issues.

Having a pretty rough week in terms of negative thoughts, emotions etc. Not really much to add, just gotta push through I guess.

My favorite thing to remember when things are atypically terrible: by definition, things are usually less terrible.

I mean, from my perspective things are just as terrible as always, I'm just doing a poor job controlling my reaction to it.

If you get a chance, you should watch something funny. Idk what you like but Still Game is on Netflix. Or Azumanga Daioh or something. A good laugh may set you in the right direction. Maybe a nice chocolate bar from the drugstore too. It won't solve your problems but at least you'll have had a chocolate bar.

This too shall pass. Eat healthy, hydrate, prioritize sleep, walk or exercise, meditate, etc. Treat yourself well. You'll get through it.

Sometimes you just need to recognize it's one of those days and move on tbqh

Well, having one of those days turns into weeks, into months. Moving on is easy, but problems have a way of catching up.

If weeks turn into months, you might want to seriously consider eliminating stressors. You can push through to some degree, but it will take its toll.

It's occurred to me (more than once over the past few months) that, ever since I've gotten a smartphone about 9 years ago, my smartphone has been more or less the last thing I look at before I go to sleep at night and the first thing I look at when I wake up in the morning. I use my phone as an alarm clock, so when I reach over in the morning to turn it off, the temptation to look at Instagram for a few minutes before getting out of bed is almost impossible to resist. I often wake up briefly during the night, and sometimes I even look at my phone during these brief intervals as well. I don't know precisely how exposing myself to Reddit and Instagram junk food during my hypnagogic and hypnopompic states has impacted upon my mental and physical health, but I'd hazard a guess that it hasn't been a postive impact.

I'm now making a concerted effort to break this habit and practise better sleep hygiene. I've bought an old-fashioned analogue alarm clock and put my phone on the far side of my bedroom so it's out of reach while I'm in bed (I still set an alarm on my phone to go off fifteen minutes after the alarm clock itself, as a failsafe in case I sleep through the alarm clock). Roughly 30 minutes before I go to bed, I make the conscious decision to place my phone in its designated spot on the far side of the bedroom, then read a book (an actual printed book, no eBooks or Kindles for me) for half an hour before falling asleep. I do not permit myself to look at my phone until after I've gotten out of bed, taken my retainer out of my mouth etc. To keep myself honest, I've created a spreadsheet* to track how well I'm adhering to my goal. Every day that I succeed in reading at least a few pages of a book before falling asleep, and/or not looking at my phone before getting out of bed, I mark a check against that day. The goal is to get to 21 consecutive days doing at least one (preferably both), after which I'm hoping they'll come as second nature.

*Which I access on my phone; yes, I appreciate the irony.

Great to hear! I've been doing something similar for about a year now and it helps quite a lot. You can definitely stick with it if you work on it.

A few other things that have helped me with phone addiction are putting it into grayscale, and just turning it off when I don't need it on for work. I try to have at least one chunk of 3 hours per week with my phone off. It may not seem like much, but especially if you set that time aside intentionally to really get into whatever you're doing, it feels great.

That's a great idea, I'm going to try to do that as well.

You can do it. In fact I did this for a long time, setting my phone up on the far end of my room, and it helped my sleep quality tons.

Now I realize I put my phone charger back by my bed recently. Foolish! I'm gonna go move it back right now.

I'm jealous of your progress. I would recommend to anyone looking to repair their sleep patterns to do what you've roughly done (I cheat and use a Kindle Paperwhite with no blue light). My only other recommendation is to cut down on caffeine intake. Exercise during the day (not too late or too strenuous) can also help regulate sleep.

I gave up caffeine for a month and slept like a baby.

I'm a hard-core caffeine addict. Headaches, irritability, general inability to focus without a cup of ambrosia of the gods (or "coffee" as some call it) in the morning. But I cut off around 11am or so. So I sleep well and don't generally feel tired, except for feeling tired due to exhausting sleep disrupting parenthood issues.

Were you an afternoon drinker? Or did cutting off morning coffee help resting?

Right? It's a big deal. The casualisation of caffeine is a very sneaky thing. It's a drug, harder than a lot of nootropics and it should be treated as such.

When I was in Germany briefly, drinking coffee shortly before bed seemed quite common, you’d be at a party or even a very small gathering and someone would routinely make a pot of filter coffee at midnight or 1am. It didn’t seem to impede sleep much, I found I could drink even a double espresso and fall asleep less than an hour later.

My mom falls asleep faster after having tea or coffee. It's rather funny.

I see life as a movie to be enjoyed. The ending is not determined but the experience is uplifting.

I wish I had an answer that easily assuages your existential angst, and it makes me all the more grateful that I find myself largely immune from it.

I've been inured to being a meat robot made of trillions of smaller robots for decades, and have found no loophole or reason to require the existence of something as stupidly incoherent as free will unless you have pathological axioms that require it's existence.

A concept I have found useful is the idea that even the most absurd or non-anthropophilic model of the world reduces to normality. Be it the Abrahamic god's Covenant or a phenomenon that boils down to the outcomes of quantum mechanics, a rainbow is beautiful to us all the same.

You can face reality:

What is true is already so.

Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.

Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away.

And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with.

Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived.

People can stand what is true,

for they are already enduring it.

—Eugene Gendlin

You've been withstanding the fact that you're in a deterministic universe that has no special carveout for humans as being above the laws of physics. It's not something you can't handle, and now remind yourself of that when it's come to your conscious attention.

(On a tangent, I consider myself especially lucky that I don't have the disease of a god-shaped hole in my psyche. It's akin to having your motivation in life being finding the very last digit of pi, the universe has no obligation to indulge your choice of goals, and it would be better to aim for one that's at least physically plausible.)

People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

I don't really buy this. For one, plenty of people aren't enduring it because they've already killed themselves. For another, 'truth' itself is a funny thing in that all maps are wrong, and a more accurate map may actually be a less-useful map. But even this pushes us to consider what 'usefulness' means as it seems to imply some kind of overriding telos, which is, as far as I've ever been able to tell, not a matter easily able to be decided conclusively.

In regard to OP, there's also a matter of intelligibility. Perhaps there is a frequency of sound, for example, which is unbearable to hear. Those exposed to it are in such torment that they almost always end their own lives sooner or later, even if perhaps after years or decades of resistance. Only, most people can't hear this frequency. Does it make sense to tell those who can hear it that everything is fine because others are enduring it? Is this an appropriate thing to tell such a person if one is, oneself, unable to hear it?

For one, plenty of people aren't enduring it because they've already killed themselves.

If OP was outright suicidal, then I'd be recommending a doctor. Existential crises, while painful, are usually not lethal.

For another, 'truth' itself is a funny thing in that all maps are wrong, and a more accurate map may actually be a less-useful map.

I'm not sure what you seek to point out with this. Sure, map ain't the territory, and the dozen or so corollaries that follow.

In this case, without getting into the metaphysics of it all, I think my map is both true enough and also more useful than what OP originally had.

Utility and use are both in the eye of the beholder, but in this case, I want OP to escape the angst he suffers from, and I personally find this useful.

OP's map, like many others, has a deeply subjectively meaningful equivalent of a dangling pointer to nowhere, and he's realized that fact. To the extent that he found any beauty or utility from the map he had, I ask him to look for it knowing that the map hasn't really changed, and he can rederive his sense of place without relying on a compass that never actually pointed anywhere.

Does it make sense to tell those who can hear it that everything is fine because others are enduring it? Is this an appropriate thing to tell such a person if one is, oneself, unable to hear it?

Just because I personally don't suffer from existential angst from the non-existence of a god or the fact that I am 100% derivable from the laws of physics (and ignorance about how qualia arises is a fact about me and all of human society rather than a feature of the territory), doesn't mean I'm immune from existential terror altogether.

I don't want to die. I don't want to be subsumed by a hostile superintelligence. I want the reassurance that my parents are invincible and not flawed human beings, and that my 94 year old grandpa makes it to the Heat Death of the universe.

I have largely made my peace with the above, but I certainly suffered in the process. I found the Litany of Gendlin to at least offer some small comfort.

It would be a genuine miracle if something as kludged together as a human being was perfectly aligned with the ground truth of the universe, yet some suffer more from this misalignment than others.

The following is mildly inflammatory for the religious, so the reader's discretion is advised:

On a tangent, if I was Czar of the World, I would do my absolute best to cure the need for religion that a large fraction of humanity suffers from. I'm unlikely to successfully get the American Psychiatric Association to label the religious as suffering from a pernicious form of delusional disorder (because I think anyone with sane priors would eventually see the overwhelming weight of evidence and desist, and it takes a prior of either 1 or very close to it to never update successfully). Doesn't mean I don't genuinely think that's the case. After all, in this more enlightened age, someone foaming at the mouth, speaking in tongues and claiming divine revelation is more likely to be treated for epilepsy than worshipped, and I am hopeful we find the misfiring neurons that produce more prosaic religiosity eventually.

Now, if the religious yet disillusioned were content with filling the hole with something physically realizable, I'd point at the AGI we might eventually create, even if I think worshipping it is both tawdry and unnecessary. Unfortunately, most of them probably don't think that counts.

Think of it as akin to as body dysphoria, but for reality itself. Your mind yearns for the soul, but it stubbornly refuses to actually exist, a condition far worse than mere phantom limb when we can graft on a prosthetic.

You either find a way to plug the hole, live with the pain, or die. I'm lucky that I lack this particular hole, and pity those who do. But if my advice helps them to live with the pain till we find a better solution, then I am nothing but grateful I could make a difference.

As a theistic person, your post reads to me thus:

I am asexual. I cannot comprehend how sexual people like the way they are and I regard it as a sickness rather than recognizing myself as the one who is sick. If I can, I will fix the flaw in human beings which causes them to desire romance with each other. That is disgusting and it is clear to me that so much unnecessary pain could simply be avoided. I know so much better.

What I'm saying here isn't an argument. It's an apology. Best wishes to you.

Being asexual is not a falsifiable epistemic position, it's a personality trait.

I see the analogy as being someone deeply in love, say a parasocial relationship that's utterly unrequited. They suffer immensely, yet can't shake off the shackles as much as they want to. This causes them to go to a public forum and ask for help in dispelling these thoughts and desires that are unachievable yet cause them a great deal of pain.

Of course, the situation is even worse, since the object of their affection is outright nonexistent.

In such a scenario, who wouldn't want to help them sever that love that achieves nothing but sorrow with nothing to show for it?

I do pity the religious, and particularly the people who are just sane enough to know that the desires they feel are likely unfounded, yet by some quirk of biology are fundamentally unable to get rid of the same even if they rationally can see otherwise.

Of course, I'm self aware enough to see that you likely pity me, and I appreciate that, because it's better to pity than to hate, and at least you're living up to your standards as a good Christian.

This type of thinking used to bother me, so I got really into Eastern thought and discussion of the self being false etc etc. Now I'm even more blackpilled if anything. I do go in cycles and sometimes it feels freeing to have looked into all this, but yeah there is not a great spiritual remedy for modern man out there as far as I can tell.

Everyone has to somehow find their own meaning and purpose in life, which is far easier said than done. Finding a spiritual community can help though, we're not designed to go it alone.

Might have been better off going West instead of East. Eastern religions seem to float people down the stream of this particular blackpill, while the various forms of Christianity attempt to row against that current. Say what you will about Christianity, but it is very insistent that the self is real, and that our choices matter immensely (Calvinism aside).

It seems like Eastern religions try to erase the self by proving through direct experience that the self doesn't exist.

Western religion tends to try and get you to focus on service, forgiveness, and erasing the self by serving God. Honestly, the Western take seems to work much better for me.

Lewis has a great passage on the Christian idea of "erasing the self by serving God" in Mere Christianity (bolded for emphasis, in sections that particularly speak to the OP):

To become new men means losing what we now call "ourselves." Out of ourselves, into Christ, we must go. His will is to become ours and we are to think His thoughts, to "have the mind of Christ" as the Bible says. And if Christ is one, and if He is thus to be "in" us all, shall we not be exactly the same? It certainly sounds like it; but in fact it is not so.

It is difficult here to get a good illustration; because, of course, no other two things are related to each other just as the Creator is related to one of His creatures. But I will try two very imperfect illustrations which may give a hint of the truth. Imagine a lot of people who have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe to them what light is like. You might tell them that if they come into the light that same light would fall on them all and they would all reflect it and thus become what we call visible.

Is it not quite possible that they would imagine that, since they were all receiving the same light, and all reacting to it in the same way (i.e., all reflecting it), they would all look alike? Whereas you and I know that the light will in fact bring out, or show up, how different they are...

...It is something like that with Christ and us. The more we get what we now call "ourselves" out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of "little Christs," all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented—as an author invents characters in a novel—all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to "be myself" without Him.

The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires. In fact what I so proudly call "Myself" becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call "My wishes" become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism or pumped into me by other men's thoughts or even suggested to me by devils.

Eggs and alcohol and a good night's sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideals, I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe: most of what I call "me" can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

At the beginning I said there were Personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else.

Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most "natural" men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.

But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away "blindly" so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all.

The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange?

The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom.

Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.

Wow, this is incredibly beautiful. Thank you for sharing. I'll have to read this book.

Young Italians don’t really seem very tradcath even if they’re conservative, even Meloni is an unmarried mother / lives in sin which seems wild for the leader of a hard-right party who calls herself a Catholic.

For start, is there any reason to expect that this study is much better than typical research? Has anyone at least replicated it?

Typical research is worthless.

At least you can be an outlier and do significantly worse than your predetermined attributes suggest. You can have much more control over that than doing better.

I think that is reason enough that not all is predetermined. I can just ruin it all with a DUI.

I don't think this is necessarily a solution to the OP's existentialism, because ultimately all you are is a complex system of cause and effect that interacts with a larger, more complex system of cause and effect to produce outcomes we call behaviour. Whatever you "choose" to do is as predetermined as everything else.

The only thing I can really say is "First time?"

Yes it doesnt.

But that also isnt OPs problem. That the universe is deterministic. Its that it unravelled into him getting dealt a shitty card. I dont see any billionaires crying about determinism.

What op needs is to just make things better, predetermined or not. No amount of philosophy will give him what he actually wants.

Was the artisanal limoncello good?

Is there a similar one online? What spirit did you use? I find when I make it with even the highest proof vodka I can find it doesn’t turn out close to the good stuff in Italy.

Commenting to find the limoncello recipe.

Thank you, that’s very kind.

Was the artisanal limoncello good?

Asking the important questions..

I will say there have been limoncellos in Sorrento and Capri that have significantly enhanced my will to live…

I have been feeling like this for around 2.5 years now. I read some of the work(s) of Nietzsche, Stirner and a book about evolution whose name I cannot remember to pass the time when I was working in an empty office during the lockdowns and came to largely the same conclusions that you have.

My cope is to commiserate with a like-minded online friend and cry laugh at the comically awful nature of existence.

I am just an automaton.

Yeah, you and everyone else bub.

It sounds like you suffer from low agency, meaning that you doubt that your actions meaningfully affect the world. To be honest, with your attitude, your actions probably don't.

I doubt you'll listen to this advice, but do two things immediately and you will feel better. Will it solve your existential angst? Of course not. But you will think about it less.

  1. Go outside and get a tan via exposure to sunlight. Lack of Vitamin D causes low energy, depression, and probably low testosterone as well. You sound like you have these issues.

  2. Start lifting weights or do body weight exercises such as pushups with the goal of increasing your muscle mass. This will also increase your energy, lower depression, and increase testosterone.

Can you do these 2 simple things? If so, congrats, you exercised agency. Now go conquer something harder. If not, who are you to be worrying about philosophy?

Yes. I'd add cutting down screen time and also mindfulness meditation.

What you want is a priest.

Is there any reason to not forgo video games completely? Are they in a category with gummy candy, smoking, and lottery tickets - no benefit of any kind beyond a dopamine release - or more like classic movies, dime novels, and social media - escapism with some degree of social and intellectual benefit?

I’ve enjoyed my two-week trial run of Lex Fridman’s maximally productive daily schedule but do find myself missing my offline career-based sports games. How sturdy is the argument that “not everything has to be productive”? Are books and television and film so far above video games in the usefulness ranking (after all, they can confer knowledge and social benefits, if not maximally condensed) that it’s a no-brainer to stop gaming completely? Or should sedentary leisure as a whole be relegated to “break in case of emergency” status, never part of a daily routine but “around” when more productive options are not available, or only to be used in the company of others?

I’ve wrestled with this for every day of these two weeks and still see benefits of escapism, while simultaneously seeing the futility of time spent achieving nothing in the real world - even if only for an hour or two.

EDIT: I coincidentally just discovered the "End Poem" of Minecraft; a poignant take on this discussion:

[teal] and the universe said I love you because you are love.

[green] And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.

[teal] You are the player.

[green] Wake up.

I’m pretty sure videos games are objectively inferior to their real life equivalences always. So, permitting you can do the real life alternative activity, you shouldn’t play video games. The competitive fun is best found in team sports. The adventure is best found in nature and one’s own life. The memories are best made with friends. The novelty is best spent on wisdom.

Productivity doesn’t factor into this at all. If your object of life is Superior Enjoyment, then it’s simply the case that real life offers superior enjoyment. Because when you’re done playing team sports, you have had fun plus some. You had a fun experience you don’t regret, and you’ve also had necessary socializing, sun light, nature exposure, and exercise. An hour spent on team sports is always going to be better than an hour (or even three hours) of gaming, in your unhealthy room, staring at pixels, not moving your body, alone, unchallenged, etc. The memorable adventures in reality are always better than in video games or books. The exploration of wisdom is always of greater benefit than anything in Oblivion.

Note that Abrahamic religions are against gambling and other vices, but don’t have a word to say on productivity. Christ doesn’t care whether you work hard at your job, and in one parable even seems to commend a man who wastes his boss’s money to make friends. The argument against video games is all about the fact that its enjoyments are base, lowering, and fleeting. They are inherently inferior than real life alternatives, and the base pleasure lowers your sum total enjoyment. In a year’s time you will be measuring your real experiences, not your dumb video game exp.

I’m pretty sure videos games are objectively inferior to their real life equivalences always.

Looks at my thousands of hours in Arma 3, Squad and other milsim games.

You sure about that? Because I think one of the overwhelming advantages of playing video games where people shoot each other is that nobody gets shot for real.

I'm sure actual trucking is less enjoyable than Eurotruck Sim, or farming than Farmdew Valley, not that you can get me to play either.

I'm skeptical that "it's simply the case that real life offers superior enjoyment", full stop. What real-life team sport offers the complexity, action and fast paced strategy of a RTS like Supreme Commander? What real-life pursuit offers a visually stunning, persistent imaginary world for thousands of players to live in and form communities like FFXIV? What real-life performance or play matches the worldbuilding and narrative depth of something like Disco Elysium?

For some people, sure. Winning that game of ultimate frisbee, climbing that mountain, seeing that play, might be more fulfilling than vidya. For others, I doubt it.

I’d argue that the human mind does not like “complexity, action and fast paced strategy”, instead it likes learning, risk-taking and figuring things out. Learning to play music is going to be more satisfying in the long run than a video game, because while you’re learning and figuring things out you’re also expressing the best emotions communicable (plus cognitive enhancement, plus a social dimension if you want). And if you want fast-paced action, there are sports for that, which again promote other benefits.

Similarly, we aren’t drawn to “immersive world building”, we are drawn to beauty, and I don’t think a lifetime of final fantasy could compete with an hour under a waterfall or in an Italian city. It lacks so much of the sensory. Walking in a pixelated world does not compare with walking through Reykjavik half-drunk with friends or family.

Now there’s also a second-order analysis. You should consider what the activities you do afford in the future by way of implicit practice. After a few months of final fantasy, you’re going to find it difficult to shlep to the bars to meet chicks and friends, or to decide to enroll in a course that requires boredom and travel. But after a few months of arduous but rewarding trekking in the wilderness, you’re going to find you have the energy to pursue all manners of outside enjoyment. If you can have fun while increasing your physical health and mind (and walking is excellent for the mind) this will pay off invisibly in the future.

Then there’s a third-order analysis: what memories will we remember? We remember the most sensory memories. In fact, we often forget the arduous parts of life and selectively remember the greatest parts (eg nostalgia). So if we want to collect enjoyable experiences, then we should be looking at collecting the most memorable and optimal experiences, which would involve sensory novelty and other people interspersed with long periods of waiting / wakeful rest to devote to memory. I actually wrote a post on here a bit ago about how the optimal life certainly consists of optimal memories; if all we wanted was pure pleasure then we would simply inject heroin and then die, because time/memory wouldn’t matter, but we don’t do this.

A fourth order analysis would be, like, what will produce less guilt? Society judges people by experiences and creations. You can play zero games and never have a wince of guilt, because society will likely not judge video games as a facet of a fulfilling life.

Leisure is important to life. Don't worry too much about all the blather from busybodies who say that every second of your life needs to be spent toward some productive aim. Sure that's a way to live, but far from the best way to live in my opinion.

I could drum up some sort of fancy quote for you, but it all comes down to what gives you meaning in life. If you have a deeply felt mission you burn to complete, which fulfills you, then sure dedicate yourself body mind and soul to that. Spend all of your waking hours bent towards making that goal a reality.

If not, don't work too hard. Working for the sake of being busy is a cancer on our society. Future generations will look back and curse us for our stupidity and senseless cruelty to one another.

Are they in a category with gummy candy, smoking, and lottery tickets

I'm inclined to say that games are more like movies and social media, but what I really want to object to is the idea that some candy, smoking, and gambling is to be frowned upon. Yes, moderation is required for the sake of health and wealth, but candy, smoking, and gambling are all quite enjoyable on their own merits and enjoying them in moderation has a salutary effect on my life. There is absolutely nothing I'm trying to accomplish in life that would be improved if I skipped the Mike and Ikes with a movie, cigar in the sun on the weekend, and annual bet on the Bills to win the Super Bowl.

Thinking about the grindset mentality of being "maximally productive", I mostly have a bit of contempt and pity for people suffering from the delusion that more time invested in their marketing career or middle management or writing code will somehow lead to a more fulfilling life. If someone eschews gaming because they want to invest that time in their family, more power to them, but if it's just to keep hustling, I have to ask what the actual goal is.

I don’t see why in the slightest that I should center my life on “productivity”. The greatest benefit of being someone in a rich Western country with an easy-ish email job is that one’s material needs are extremely easily met, meaning that there is no biological imperative (enough food, water, shelter, sex) to be especially productive.

I don’t think a life of pure leisure is necessarily satisfying, but so long as basic imperatives (pursuing a family, children, a job that pays enough to not worry all the time about providing for them) are met, I don’t see what the issue with games is. I have no aspirations of being a “10x person” or whatever the hustle culture term is. Those people will be forgotten almost as soon as I will.

While people with stable families and decent jobs are almost universally happier than NEETs, I see no evidence that hypercompetent life-optimizers are much happier than me. Lex Fridman himself does not seem like a hugely happy fellow relative to the average. Maybe he is.

“Achieving nothing in the real world” isn’t a grave point of pain for me, especially not if it’s only two hours. I’d caveat that I do think the pursuit of legacy through children is an important part of fulfilling our biological programming and most people’s psyche benefits from pursuing a family. But beyond that, and beyond the base needs, leisure is fun.

By the way, tons of rich people I know play the lottery or buy scratchers. I know I do, even though the (shockingly low) jackpot on my usual card of choice wouldn’t exactly ‘change my life’. I like the idea of imagining how I’d feel if I won, no differently to how I enjoy exercising my imagination while reading. And I love gummy candy, I enjoy the texture, the color, the taste, the sugar (obviously). In moderation I see no harm in it, although I make sure I avoid certain artificial food dye/colors.

Your argument for not doing these things seems flawed, or perhaps I just don’t understand it. From a “productivity maximizer” perspective they’re bad, but from a “candy maximizer” perspective consuming candy all day isn’t bad. From a “happiness maximizer” perspective, sedentary leisure in moderation might well have entirely decent utility.

I don’t see why in the slightest that I should center my life on “productivity”. The greatest benefit of being someone in a rich Western country with an easy-ish email job is that one’s material needs are extremely easily met,

Productivity construed in material terms is indeed shallow. I don't think the same is true for recognising that becoming a better person in a virtue ethics sense is going to take a lot of time that you really shouldn't be wasting.

Lex Fridman himself does not seem like a hugely happy fellow relative to the average. Maybe he is.

He's 39 and unmarried. Whatever he's succeeding at, I'll take my life over his.

I confess I find him extremely boring. He’s like the inverse Joe Rogan. Rogan is the star character on his show, his fans tune in for the guests to some extent, sure, but he’s the main character, his idiosyncrasies and mannerisms are amusing. I don’t personally listen to him, but I understand why people do. Fridman is an empty shell, he’d never have been made an interviewer by a TV network or radio station. I suppose because he’s such a nonentity, he’s able to draw quite a lot out of some of his guests.

Yeah, I tried Lex's podcast out because he has some great guests and he seems like a nice enough guy, but he really isn't a good interviewer. Rogan's ridiculousness and curiosity makes any episode with a half decent guest a pretty good background listen, but Lex pretty much needs to be carried by guests.

I'd put them in the same category as sex: not to the detriment of your health or other activities, not instead of self-fulfillment, ideally social and not masturbatory, etc.

I was going to push the artistic analogy but found the sexual one more compelling: artistic endeavors have too much of a positive connotation, gambling and smoking too much of a negative connotation, whereas sex straddles the boundary between puritanism and appropriate hedonism.

Video games can make you gasp and shake your head in wonder, can bring friends together to laugh and share, they can be a portal into a universe of creation, where the only limits are of the mind and the machine.

They can also be addictive and predatory, think of the people found dead at their computers, or with 6 figure debts from Candy Crush addictions. Is that any different than heroin or slot machines, or prostitution and camgirls?

My biggest issue with videogames is that they don't contribute to real world development. It's just dopamine. Dopamine in a way that doesn't (directly) destroy the body or mind, but can be engaged in for longer than sex.

After a while you need to avoid the dopamine trap and engage in things which give real meaning.

Does protected sex/whoring contribute to real world development? What about pickup artists who go to bars every night to try to find women? Does that provide real meaning?

What I'm trying to get at here is that real meaning is ill-defined and most philosophers do include some form of pleasure and hedonism as an intrinsic value.

The worst fallacy, however, would be to try to argue meaningless work is more virtuous or valuable than meaningless pleasure. To argue that a substitutable office drone that shuffles emails around and does his 40 hours a week somehow is doing something intrinsically important than someone who plays MMORPGs all day. You can assign more value/respect to either of these activities, but I don't see how it's intuitively or aesthetically obvious that either is fundamentally superior.

What I'm trying to get at here is that real meaning is ill-defined and most philosophers do include some form of pleasure and hedonism as an intrinsic value.

Your examples at least don't show that it's ill defined. I think most people would say those pursuits are meaningless or even harmful without hesitation.

Perhaps you can't objectively determine the meaningful ahead of time but it becomes quite clear when things are compared.

Yes, the concept of 'meaning' is nebulous. There is nothing wrong with gaming or whoring except when it gets in the way of bringing meaning. Meaning is a bit like pornography in the 'I know it when I see it' sense. You're also correct that work for work's sake is a false path.

They engage your mind, which is in the real world. Why this strong distinction between the virtual world and the 'real' world?

If your body and social skills atrophy while you are playing games it is an issue. If you are just gaming as a hobby with moderation, there is no problem.

I play a lot of video games. Its probably most of my free time. Though I try not to let video game time intrude into my time on other activities like family, social, work, and sleep. So it is actually my free time, and not an expanding black hole of time.

I can sort of claim that balance right now, but I haven't always been able to claim it. I'd say when video games start being more than the sum of my free time I have been uncomfortable with them as a negative presence in my life.

There is a privileging of the "real world" in your thinking and most people's thinking. But I think this privileging is incorrect, or at least badly applied. Much of the "real world" is actually just taking place in people's heads. Consider an election. Imagine you spend dozens of hours reading about the various candidates and researching political philosophy. You spend time discussing politics with people on the street. On election day you go and vote. The only thing you've really done "in the real world" is take a few trips outside, and make some motions on a piece of paper, everything else happened in your head and other people's heads.

For the people saying "the imaginary stuff in our head doesn't matter" my claim is that none of them ever actually go down the rabbit hole of all that implies. Most of what just about everyone does is just a thought inside their head and other people's heads.

And you can take that realization and be a nihilist and say nothing matters. Or you can go the opposite direction and say meaning is what we make of it. If your imagined participation in "politics" makes you happy, then do that. If your imagined participation in a video game world makes you happy, then do that.

Video games, if anything, are one of the more positive hobbies to engage in. Most of them are designed to leave you entertained and coming back for more (some are just designed to milk people of money that have gambling addictions). Other hobbies like engaging in politics, watching the news, or watching sports do not have any specific design for positive sum human enjoyment. They are much closer to zero sum games, where one person's happiness is offset by another person's disappointment.

Which type of games do you play?

Lately I've been playing starship troopers extermination.

My favorite games tend to be strategy and survival games. I really enjoy multiplayer PvE experiences.

Bro, I think your comment on here is what got me to buy that. Been having a blast with my friends. We should squad up, citizen.

I'm cjet799 on steam, or friend code 49603174

Most of what just about everyone does is just a thought inside their head and other people's heads.

But this phrase is not true of video games, specifically the thoughts in "other people's heads". Politics and sports and news are shared human experiences, and while many people have the shared experience of playing a game, they do not have the same experience of the game itself - that is the whole appeal of player-led video games. Even an unhealthy fixation on any of your three examples will still produce opinions and actions based on shared human experiences. They incentivize interaction with other human beings, whether positive (people who agree with you) or negative (people who can argue with you). Ultimately, the many adventures, lessons, trials, and triumphs of video games are solitary experiences curated for the player in a controlled environment in which even one's greatest accomplishments will always carry the tinge of having occurred on artificially fixed terms.

in which even one's greatest accomplishments will always carry the tinge of having occurred on artificially fixed terms.

I think this is a far more important point than that of 'shared experiences'. In one sense I would define 'being in contact with the world' as being exposed to the possibility of genuine novelty and discovery - a war game has a meta that teenagers can figure out - real war will regularly surprise even the best minds.

We do our best to pierce the real world and bring it into the realm of intelligibility. Learning what others have made intelligible before us is an important part of that, but you have to venture into the difficult and unintelligible to make real conquests.

The virtual world isn't necessarily distinct from the real world on this definition, and solitary pursuits can still produce genuine insight - but in a standard game as in a grammar textbook you're never going to learn more than the author has set out for you to learn.

I played a bunch of Diablo IV with my wife yesterday. This is a shared experience and not an uncommon one. Talking about what Aspects she should use to increase Twisting Blades damage doesn't strike me as all that different from discussing what our plans are for a given marathon training cycle.

I suppose that is an argument against single player games. But it also seems like an argument against reading fiction books, watching movies, and consuming stories in general. Are you suggesting people should give up all of those things as well?

Other hobbies like engaging in politics, watching the news, or watching sports do not have any specific design for positive sum human enjoyment. They are much closer to zero sum games, where one person's happiness is offset by another person's disappointment.

You're going to have to explain that one for the examples you provided.

I'll use an example: when Trump won in 2016, Trump supporters were happy. But Hillary supporters were very unhappy.

Other hobbies like engaging in politics, watching the news, or watching sports do not have any specific design for positive sum human enjoyment. They are much closer to zero sum games, where one person's happiness is offset by another person's disappointment.

This seems like a fairly pessimistic view on politics. Do you not think that political problems can be ameliorated? I'd say the difference between war and peace lies in that realm.

If there were a bunch of p-zombies that all the real humans could beat them that would help.

The problem of politics seems unavoidable. People want to have more resources than their rivals. Their rivals want the same in turn. The winning move for humanity is not to play zero sum games.

I think war is a negative sum competition. Politics is an improvement over that, but that doesn't make it good.

The problem of politics seems unavoidable. People want to have more resources than their rivals. Their rivals want the same in turn. The winning move for humanity is not to play zero sum games.

People want more resources than their rivals sure, rivalries can also be dissolved or transferred into healthier forms of competition.

Then it ceases to be politics, but there are always other things that remain political. Almost any group larger than 5 people has politics, and certainly every group larger than 50 people.

The division between "productive" and "unproductive" activities is a false dichotomy - or at least it should be:

Time and time again, when questioned or interviewed, one is asked about one’s hobbies. When the illustrated weeklies report on the life of one of those giants of the culture industry, they rarely forego the opportunity to report, with varying degrees of intimacy, on the hobbies of the person in question. I am shocked by the question when I come up against it. I have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic, who is incapable of doing anything with his time but applying himself industriously to the required task. But, as far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognised profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously. So much so, that I should be horrified by the very idea that they had anything to do with hobbies – preoccupations with which I had become mindlessly infatuated merely in order to kill the time – had I not become hardened by experience to such examples of this now widespread, barbarous mentality. Making music, listening to music, reading with all my attention, these activities are part and parcel of my life; to call them hobbies would make a mockery of them. On the other hand I have been fortunate enough that my job, the production of philosophical and sociological works and university teaching, cannot be defined in terms of that strict opposition to free time, which is demanded by the current razor-sharp division of the two.

TL;DR is that if you do give up video games it shouldn't be because they're not "productive".

I don't see the relation between your first assertion and the quoted text. The quotation is referring to activities which have demonstrable benefits, and the author takes issue not with the idea that they're forms of leisure, but that they're unproductive forms of leisure, which they assume "hobby" to insinuate. Video games are absolutely unproductive in any real-world sense; music and reading are real-world activities in the actual, non-simulated world. The question is whether activities in the simulated world have any worth in our real one.

Reading can most certainly be simulated: consider smut, or cheap fantasy and fiction.

Same goes for music, the distinction between popular and highbrow musical productions has nothing to do with productivity.

What about "games" that straddle the line between real-world activites and simulated ones? Poker, sports gambling? People make a living off such "games". And pushing that idea further, what about the gamification of financial markets? Is there any productive purpose to the microsecond race to the bottom with high-frequency trading?

Let's put it this way: you seem to already agree that listening to music is something that can be "taken seriously" (or at least, you didn't challenge that claim). If listening to music can be taken seriously, then why can't playing video games be taken seriously?

You seem to claim that video games are "simulated" and music is not. But I don't know what this means. You sitting in your room and listening to Beethoven's 5th on your laptop is surely no more or less simulated than you sitting in your room and playing Minecraft on your laptop. You could get together with other people and play music on real instruments. But you can also get a bunch of people in a room and play video games together. Again, neither activity seems more or less simulated than the other.

I'll start with the caveat that I know some very successful people (career, romantic, fitness etc) who are heavy gamers (and a caveat to that caveat that I know some very successful people with a cocaine habit) and the confession that I've found life just as difficult in the times I've chosen to abstain from gaming as the times I've gone overboard with it.

I hope it will be uncontroversial to say that the escapist and the addictive nature of gaming can seriously stifle the development of some people. A lot of people probably know someone like this, as for myself I've got friends approaching their 30s who have yet to form a romantic relationship or move out of their parents house and who aren't otherwise hampered by autism, ugliness, stupidity or anything else that would have made life hard regardless. They're intelligent and likeable enough that they could have already done a lot in life but gaming specifically seems to have been what stopped them. Like the dangers of a drug habit, this isn't a convincing argument as long as you conceive yourself as not being in that minority (hopefully it's a minority) who can't game with moderation.

The best argument I can think of for the moderates is in terms of opportunity cost, and this is one which has convinced me to make attempts to abstain in my personal life: "Tallying up the hours displayed on your (my) steam account what kind of person would you be if you had spent that on solving practical problems in your life or pursuing meaningful intellectual inquiries? Let's grant that it's implausible that you could have been doing something better for all of those hours since you only game when you're too tired for anything but escapism, what portion of those hours could have been put to real use? Are you being honest with yourself if you say that each of those 50 hours playthroughs were time that would have been wasted anyway? Are there not other forms of escapism that could satisfy your desire which don't have a tendency to eat into your productive hours and might have even brought some incidental benefits?"

This is an argument that convinced me. I doubt I'm half as productive as most of the people here so I'm not claiming a position of authority on how to live life well, though like my successful friends who drink too much or indulge in cocaine I do wonder how much more of an impressive person you could be if you chose something else.

How sturdy is the argument that “not everything has to be productive”?

'Not everything has to be productive' can be an argument against video games also. Instead of letting yourself be bored for a while you're choosing to simulate productivity in the times you're too lacking in motivation for real productivity. Boredom might be a negative stimulus that prompts motivation for more substantial actions which you're choosing to block out with something that makes you contented with your present state.

'Not everything has to be productive' can be an argument against video games also. Instead of letting yourself be bored for a while you're choosing to simulate productivity in the times you're too lacking in motivation for real productivity. Boredom might be a negative stimulus that prompts motivation for more substantial actions which you're choosing to block out with something that makes you contented with your present state.

I actually agree that the theoretical value of boredom is the primary argument against the massive availability of sedentary leisure activities. Still, I’m unsure of how much boredom drives motivation. Prisoners are (they often report) extremely bored, and yet they only rarely decide to be highly productive (although some do). They’re a heavily selected population, but I’m still skeptical. I think back to the endless boredoms of my childhood, my brother occupying our shared Game Boy Advance, my books finished, nothing on TV, sitting in a hotel room on vacation bored out of my mind. What did I do? Fucking nothing lmao.

I absolutely hate being bored (could anyone tell that I have ADHD?) and there's no way in hell I'd take a time machine back more than 10 years in the past.

I like having a phone, as a kid I killed boredom by exhausting every library I could, watching TV or playing games.

My phone makes both dead tree books and the TV obsolete, and I actually have a good pc I paid for myself instead of the old junker I had in the past.

Call me a big fan of modernity, but boredom just tells me that I'm burning the limited negentropy of the universe and not even having fun in the process.

I don't know what options prisoners have but it seems what they have in common with kids is a genuine lack of options and both may lack enough of an introduction to books to make them seem interesting (which I see wasn't true in your case). As an adult I can't really count all the other things I could be doing with my time, exploring the woods nearby will take a bit of effort but will probably be something I look back on as more rewarding than the same time spent gaming.

I think back to the endless boredoms of my childhood, my brother occupying our shared Game Boy Advance, my books finished, nothing on TV, sitting in a hotel room on vacation bored out of my mind. What did I do? Fucking nothing lmao

Hotels can be very boring places for kids to be fair, you're pretty dependent on your parents' schedule to leave and do something.

I had similar experiences arguing with my brother about who got to play the Xbox this time. Even having a strong stimulus like a Game Boy nearby can be disruptive as instead of finding something new to do you can just wait or argue for your turn, your sibling isn't going to put his mind to the same problem because he's occupied. Things were much more relaxed when we visited my grandparents' house and there was genuinely nothing to do but go out in the garden and look at bugs.

What a brilliant response. Your takedowns of the common "cop-outs" are of such an undeniable verity that, I think, you sufficiently lance any notion of video games as worthy of inclusion at all in a life not be wasted. Even cocaine seems to confer greater benefits - real productivity in the real world - albeit with much greater costs. Your hours-spent thesis is a fatal blow to simulated productivity, as even one minute of real productivity in those 50 hours is infinitely greater than the faux-accomplishments of a simulated world. Your last paragraph is a very clever retort to a common excuse that I'd neither heard nor considered before.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. If so I'll have to be more careful not to sound sanctimonious (a hard thing when expressing strong opinions on how one should live), if not then thanks for the praise.

Even cocaine seems to confer greater benefits - real productivity in the real world - albeit with much greater costs.

Hah well I wasn't thinking about replacing gaming with cocaine when I wondered about better forms of escapism. I know a few friends who have wasted years gaming and a few friends of friends who have died from the other thing.

It's not just you. That felt a bit too glowing.

Not sarcasm; I really do think your response was fantastic. I tend to overenthusiastically react to good points that I hadn't considered before.

That thought was not to say that cocaine is a viable, more productive alternative to gaming, but simply that, if even one of the most dangerously addictive substances on Earth has the potential to leave more of a positive impact on the progress of one's work, that's a pretty good indicator of where video games should sit on the hierarchy.

Oh then thanks for the praise.

I still want to stress that cocaine is lower on the heirachy of the best uses of one's time and my argument would risk falling into absurdity if I said otherwise. The similarities I wanted to highlight were just that people can be very successful despite their vices and that the excuses made for something obviously bad can be seen regarding the thing I wanted to argue was bad.

I struggle with social anxiety, especially in among strangers and in large groups. I believe that I am on the autism spectrum and I do things like avoid eye contact and I almost always have neutral body language when sober. When sober I try to avoid social interactions if they aren’t required. I spend most of my time alone doing solitary activities like bicycling, using a computer, or reading. I’m content with my life, but at the same time I feel like I should get better at social interactions to improve my quality of life.

I’m in my mid-30’s and when I was younger I tried many of the standard recommendations for improving social skills such as: going to meetups, trying new hobbies, and making extra effort to be agreeable/nice. I failed at making any new close friends and I just grew more frustrated at socializing. I figured socializing is just something I’ll never be good at.

I did figure out one way to make myself better at socializing (and to enjoy it), but unfortunately it is somewhat dangerous, involves being intoxicated, and can only be done one day a week. If I take Phenibut (anti-anxiety drug, GABA-B receptor agonist) in the morning and then drink to around .05-.08 BAC at night I get in a mood where I just want to go out and socialize. I become extremely confident and my body language is improved. I also feel like I can sense people’s vibes and read social cues much better (like this person is really enjoying my company, or this person is annoyed because they are too sober). If any social interaction goes poorly (which happens <10% of the time) it doesn’t bother me at all – there are plenty of other people to talk to anyway. If someone doesn’t like me I just find it funny or externalize the reason (such as they are just jealous that I’m in such a euphoric mood). Intoxicated me is all about spreading good vibes and I often do ‘clownish’ things to get a laugh that I’d be way to embarrassed to do sober.

I’ve been trying to use the intoxicated state as ‘exposure therapy’ to eliminate social anxiety permanently from my sober state. The theory is that if I show my brain that socializing is fun and rewarding while intoxicated then my brain will update in that direction and socializing will be more fun and less frustrating when sober.

The problem I’m running into is that I think I’ve internalized the wrong lessons from ‘exposure therapy’:

  • I care way less about what other people think of me. If a social interaction doesn’t go well I learned I can just avoid it and interact with other people. I feel way less pressure to conform to allistic norms.

  • Instead of trying to socialize sober I can just wait until Saturday to do fun intoxicated socializing.

What I was trying to do was:

  • Increase confidence in social situations

  • Have my sober state internalize that sober socializing is fun and rewarding

  • Internalize that the sober state needed to change body language and communication technique to be more fun/open.

The sober state has proof that ‘clownish’/fun behavior gets good reactions, but I still can’t bring myself to be less serious when sober. My sober state objection is now, “if that is the behavior people enjoy there is no point trying to connect with them because I’m a serious person who doesn’t resort to ‘clownish’ behavior to get attention”.

To use an analogy: I don’t like watching sports. I could memorize the popular discussion points about a sport to get people to like me. But then I’d just be spending my time doing things I don’t like (watching sports) so that that people like me.

The sober state still gets overwhelmed in many social situations because I think too much about things like:

  • I’m not good at body language and I can’t think fast enough to get it right

  • Is there some social cue that I missed

  • Is there some hidden social signaling component in this conversation

  • How do I make sure that what I’m saying won’t be taken in the wrong way

  • Making sure not to repeat a mistake I made in a previous social interaction

How do I get my sober state to internalize the desired lessons (relax/have fun, people like you when you’re not so serious, be more open with body language) from the intoxicated state?

I,too, am often serious, and for whatever reason appear to have a permanent scowl across my eyebrows where I apparently look angry all the time. This is not me being selfconscious; i've literally been told this more than once by people as varied as literal strangers all the way to my wife, recently, after more than a decade of marriage. And like you, I benefit from a buzz. I lighten up. I am probably more fun to be around, at least until I'm not.

But I am not always serious. I have moods where I am relaxed, and without any booze. Are you of one consistent mood all the time without your concoction?

Regarding your metaphor, I once knew a guy who forced himself to become literate in SEC football just to be able to converse casually with other males--it's almost like a secret handshake among men in certain areas of the South. And he did this with some success, to the point that eventually he married a woman who was an extreme football fan, and when my friend died his after-funeral wake was festooned with the colors and logos of the local college team. Be careful what tools you use to become social, I guess. Or maybe there's no lesson there. I myself never learned to bullshit about football, but I admittedly escaped 10,000 miles to another country.

Are you of one consistent mood all the time without your concoction?

Yes, I'd describe it as a stoic mood. If it is nice outside I'll think the weather is pleasant, but it doesn't cause me to smile. I don't get mad at people when they do dumb things, I just think that it is interesting or useful information about the world.

Even when I'm in social situations I usually just think about how I can quickly and politely end the conversation so I can go do something else. If I were to be in a social situation with a large group that I couldn't leave then my mood would be much more anxious. That is one of the only times my mood changes much when sober.

Back in my teenage years I did use alcohol as a crutch for social skills and it worked pretty well. Of course you don't learn as much as you would if you just did the difficult thing and interacted with lots and lots of people while sober and in that sense you can become dependent on it.

I'd say if your goal is to relax and have fun you need to be around friends who know you well and accept your quirks (even if they might criticise them in good faith). There have been periods of my life where I abstained from alcohol for a few months and still went to bars with friends and it was still very fun despite me not being drunk.

In my experience you don’t. There’s a reason people enjoy being drunk and that is because it does the exact things you are describing. But once you remove the chemical from the brain, there’s no way to replicate that experience.

I’ve learned to sort of accept my stiffness and work on being ok with that. It’s not ideal, but using substances to try and create real relationships does not work.

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