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).
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What's your take on dopamine detox?
Everyone's got a story about how they read so much back in the 90's/00's. But they pick up a book now, and... it's just not entertaining. We all know we can dopamine detox and make reading enjoyable again, but the corollary is quitting the hyper-stimulating activities everyone does nowadays. No TikTok, no Twitter, no mindlessly playing games while listening to podcasts. You'll be (roughly) just as stimulated after detoxing, but you'll be disconnected from the root of modern culture. Your opinions on culture will be less accurate because you're simply out of touch, like boomers reading newspapers.
OTOH, dopamine detox has huge benefits. Your mind isn't constantly bombarded with stimulation, so you can perceive subtleties and "flavor" in art more, like when you remove sugar from coffee. You perceive the world in a slower, calmer, more rational, interconnected way. You're around people less, so when you meet people IRL you're much friendlier and happy to see them. There is probably some balance to the dopamine situation, but it's hard to spot, so we mostly stimulate ourselves as hard as possible from FOMO, scared of falling behind the world.
I suppose there are probably objective experiments that prove it, but I don’t know how true it really is that TikTok is hyperstimulus compared to books. Sure, sometimes I open a book and the words look like a blur and I don’t have the attention span to continue, but sometimes I scroll on these dopamine apps or play a video game and feel the same feeling, that I just don’t care to do it and everything’s boring.
I strongly suspect that while there’s a core of scientific truth, much of the whole theory surrounding dopamine up/downregulation is conjecture built around a kind of minimalist, de-stress, meditation-heavy wellness lifestyle that is largely a class signifier more than anything else.
It’s kind of like the moment in The Road where the kid who never grew up pre-apocalypse tries Coca Cola and it’s so good because he’s never had it before and is presumably used to much plainer and less flavorsome food/drink. We have this idea that if we live some ascetic lifestyle (forced or by choice) that even the ‘simplest’ pleasures - a good strawberry, a classic novel, an old black and white movie, a beautiful sunset - will be so much better because we’re not constantly experiencing pleasure.
I’m very skeptical that that is true. I think, instead, that some people are able to enjoy life more than others, and that this is likely largely biological/genetic.
I share this scepticism. I scroll tik-tok and YouTube shorts when I have literally nothing else to do. I'd rather read new posts on themotte, read a long form story that exceeds 1000 pages, listen to a multi hour podcast while playing a 100 hour save file on a video game, or watch a good movie.
I choose the long form stuff because I usually enjoy it more. I have a frustrating lack of short term things I enjoy. Lately I've just been playing sudoku to kill 5-10 minute waiting spots. But I find it very unsatisfying.
Yeah, I mean clearly the fact that we’re here reading 20,000 words a week of other people’s cultural commentary suggests wordswordswords can be as or more compelling than TikTok.
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