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’ve always seen the “I used to be a reader” thing as largely LARP. People want to seem like they’re better than they are so they claim that they “used to read so much,” when I can remember from my (pre-iPhone) days in high school, and people were not sitting around the hallways reading books and magazines and so on. They were socializing, talking about the opposite sex cuties, talking about sports and fashion. At home, I mean sure I occasionally read a book, but I think I and most of my peers were watching TV, playing sports or making art or something else. Books haven’t been a mainstay of leisure activities since the advent of television.
I think there might well be benefits to disconnecting from the hyper online culture we’ve created. And to me the main benefit is in hearing your own inner voice telling you what you’re actually like, the kinds of things you actually want to do, the things you really believe in and think about the world. The problem for me isn’t that “I suddenly can’t read a book”, it’s that the firehouse of information and entertainment that we are pushed to keep track of all the time tends to crowd out the individual you actually are.
I don’t think people are suddenly aware of more subtle nuances of art either. The difference is in the fact that you aren’t viewing it with thoughts about how other people react and without the pressure of trying to fit in with whatever tribe you’re a part of.
I wasn't doing that stuff. I was reading.
Today, I'm probably 99th percentile well-read but I rarely read new books. I can't decide if this is good or bad. I somewhat agree with Hanania's take that books suck:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-case-against-most-books
I don't know. For me, reading a bunch of books to get from 99 to 99.9 percentile might not make sense. But if you haven't read seminal works of literature then it probably makes sense to read some more instead of getting more hot takes off the internet.
I'm in a similar position to you, but I still read a few books a year. I was a voracious reader until I was about 16, reading multiple fiction books a week. I'd go to a library, check out 10 books from the kid's section, read about five, and return the others(sometimes weeks late, to my parents' chagrin).
Sometimes I still devour books in a similar manner, where I'll read hundreds of pages in a week. But that's a rare occurrence. I think that's mainly because it's difficult to find books I enjoy. The majority of books I start simply don't engage me, and I can often force my way through, but I'll probably just be reading a couple chapters a week when I have absolutely nothing better to do with my time. But when I find a book I really like, I make time for it. When I was a child, I had much lower standards and there were a lot of engrossing books.
Also, I don't think there's ever been a "classic" that I've really enjoyed. The closest would probably be Animal Farm, Dune, and Lord of the Rings, but those were still books I forced myself through. The books I burn through are the modern page turners, stuff like Cradle or Dungeon Crawler Carl that are really popular on Reddit and have tons of action and tension. Sometimes non-fiction too, I like Frans de Waal's pop sci on animal intelligence a lot.
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