Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
If a kind fairy made you absolute ruler of your country, what batshit crazy out of left field ideas would you implement? We’re assuming that you can’t be overthrown or stymied by the deep state, but have only the normal powers of the government and other actors for your country’s coordination problems don’t necessarily listen to you.
As for me, a few ideas-
declare that police racism is caused by angry confederate ghosts and that by appeasing them we can prevent police racism. To this end have sweet tea, Marlboros, fried chicken, etc left on confederate graves and monuments and put all of Dukes of Hazard in the library of congress. Trumpet anything and everything that could be considered improvement in race relations as a victory of this policy. This is because ‘hey, police shootings are actually nothing to worry about’ is simply not a narrative that will catch on, but an outlet of superstition can make intractable problems seem acceptable.
Ban federal funds from supporting university education for anyone without an associates degree from a community college first, including by guaranteeing debt- most people who obtain student debt without a degree drop out in the first two years, so forcing people who would otherwise borrow to complete community college will minimize the amount of new pointless student debt.
Pay already-canceled celebrities to go on racist rants using foreign racial slurs like ‘preto’ and ‘kafir’ so the n-word will lose its racial connotation as it morphs into a general very harsh swearword(which it kind of already is) similar to the c-word. This way future controversies caused by this use can avoid harming race relations.
Require any school getting federal funding to give equal time to any gender, sex Ed, or civil rights lessons to curricula designed by popular boomercon figures like Mike Rowe and Dave Ramsey. Either the schools teach things the kids could stand hearing, or they stop teaching stupidity like what actually gets pushed in the former category. Win-win.
Repeal Marbury v Madison to take the federal government out of hot button issues(which, let’s be real, are very rarely passed by congress).
Give doctors the right to point firearms at their patient and tell them to take their fucking meds on the pain of death.
It's a good day at work, can you tell?
I think there's something deeply important about this issue which we haven't figured out yet.
I want to be productive. My dream is to be extremely productive. Maybe I'm lying to myself a little bit, but as far as I can tell, if I could press a button and make myself productivity-monster, a man who enjoys working and spends only perhaps an hour a day doing anything unproductive, I would. I'd like to switch all my current hobbies to more productive ones (swap reading for creative writing, for example) and spend my days accomplishing things.
That button exists, it's Adderall, and when I take it I temporarily do become very productive, and enjoy being productive. It's a great state of mind, quite pleasant to experience, and increases my overall wellbeing a lot. Emotionally I do better (because I get work done and am less stressed about it), and of course the work getting done is a big deal as well.
Before I take the pill, though, I have an aversion to taking it equal to my aversion to actually doing the work. My values are the same, I think--I want to get the work done--but on a base level it seems that my desire to do anything else is deeper than simple ADHD and has to do with base hedonism, or time preference, or something. In other words, I had thought that ADHD just means "you have a harder time focusing and getting work done", but it seems to be deeper than that. Despite deeply wanting to get work done, another part of me actively hates the idea of working in its own right. Even though I know that work under Adderall will be very enjoyable, it's still something I don't want to do. This can't be explained by simple hedonism or time preference; if it were just a case of wanting the happy chemicals, I'd be an Adderall abuser by now.
There's a phenomenon I'm sure you know more about than I do where some mental illnesses seem to involve wanting to be mentally ill on a level. Depressed people want to stay inside in the dark and avoid doing things which would snap them out of it. Some people of all types don't take their meds, even if they're capable of it, know the meds will work, and don't have any conscious reason not to take them.
I've heard bipolar people such as Freddie DeBoer describe the experience of taking meds as making them "not feel like themselves". Maybe this is true--he's certainly pretty bright, and seems to believe it--but connecting it with my own experience taking Adderall, I wonder if part of what they are going through has less to do with some vague feeling of "offness", disassociation, or feeling like their personality is being changed, and more to do with their actual subconscious values encouraging them to remain mentally ill.
It makes me wonder how much of mental illness is, at least in part, due to basic values and personality rather than anything actually wrong with the brain on a chemical or physical level. I would never have expected to develop an aversion to Adderall--it seems to solve basically all my problems--but to some small extent that has happened. My only explanation for why is that, unbeknownst to me, on some level I really did enjoy and value my hundreds of hours of playing videogames and stressing about the work I wasn't doing.
Anyways, sorry for the spew of words, it's a thought I haven't had time to explore in too much depth, but I think there's something to it.
Also, man, I always wondered how you put out so much content, but it's so easy on stimulants.
If downers like alcohol bring out the "real you", then uppers like adderall and coke bring out the "fake you". The real you genuinely just wants to laze around and play games, so even if it hurts being a depressive P.o.S., there's always catharsis in the fact you're doing what your brain wants you to do. And if you drank some booze instead of popping an adderall, you'd go, "Work? Who gives a fuck about work! I'm just gonna drink myself into a coma and die in a couple years" etc. Even if it's wrong, that is how you actually feel about things, and adderall doesn't solve that so much as cover it up.
Can you pop adderall every day to stay productive? Sure. Build a career from that if you want. But the underlying problem remains. Stop taking adderall and all the problems come back. So will you take it every day until you retire...? This drug which stifles your creativity, which makes things feel somehow phony?
When we feel extremely sad or whatever, there's a massive wave of catharsis which makes us feel oddly satisfied and complete. And every time a depressed person boots up League of Legends at 2 AM and sips another cup of coffee, there's a mini wave of catharsis. It's his version of what happy people get when they do happy people crap like take a stroll through nature. You take that away from him, and he doesn't really have anything.
If.
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