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Comment by CompelTechnic | Hacker News Reader

The way I usually formulate these lines of thought is as follows:

I have the desire to play video games (a waste of time), but I wish that I did not have this desire. I want it, but I do not want to want it.

If we do not have strong enough character to regulate our short term desires, our long term goals suffer. This tradeoff is implicit in how we spend every second of our day. Ultimately, actions reveal preferences.

If your long-term goals are unclear, or if your working conditions/ social circle are not congruent to your long-term goals, you will remain anxious over failing to progress towards these goals.

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Apparently this phenomenon predates video games:

"For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" (Paul of Tarsus, circa 57 a.d.)

"if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me"

That's one way of looking at it. Another is that there's more than one "you", or at least more than one part of you. A part that wants one thing, and a part that wants another. Sometimes the one part gets the upper hand, sometimes another. The part that gets the upper hand might even be fully unconscious, so as far as you're aware you fully want only one thing, yet do something completely different that an unconscious part of you wants (or that you want without being aware of it).

Apparently this phenomenon predates video games...

I think Ovid would agree:

Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor.

Reads like a prologue to the new offering in town around then (Jesus Christ)

It's an Epilogue. Paul of Tarsus is St Paul the author of many letters in the New Testament of the Bible. The text is from Romans 7:15-24. Verse 25 says "Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Thank you for finishing the quote. It's arguably the most important verse as it offers the solution.

It asserts a solution.

It's not so much a function of character as a function of habit. Change your habit triggers to change your behavior.

I'm currently going cold turkey on certain social media (Facebook, Twitter). It's hard, because they're so compulsive - designed to be compulsive (I call my phone my "digital crack pipe"). So I'm addressing my habits.

When I come home from work in the evening, I have a habit of going to the kitchen, grabbing a junk food snack, plopping down in my favorite chair, and opening my computer. It's destructive to my eating habits, my productivity, and encourages that nasty social media junkie thing. Even if I'm not on Facebook, I'll be checking Google News, weather, ANYTHING to get my fingers on the keyboard and mouse.

So the habit to change? Sitting in my favorite chair when I get home. If I don't sit down in that spot, I don't have a place to eat junk food. I don't have a computer at hand. I have to go do something else.

> If I don't sit down in that spot, I don't have a place to eat junk food.

Making that change still sounds like a function of character to me.

It's a different thing... it's a change of habit.

When I sit in that spot, I tend to get a snack for it. It doesn't matter whether I'm hungry or not... it's just a thing I do. Eating less snacks is a desirable goal. Eliminating a trigger that causes me to eat snacks is a change of habit.

Now, you might say "I want to eat fewer snacks" is a function of character. But without a mechanism, it's about as relevant as "I want a million dollars", or "I want world peace", and only slightly more realistic.

So I examine circumstances in which I eat unnecessary snacks, and try to change those circumstances. That's a process. That's a change of habit. And it's much more likely to be effective than anything about "character". This is not an act of willpower.

I think this is called conditioned place preference. You've associated dopamine hits (junk food, social media, etc.) with the chair. You've also probably conditioned yourself to timing (after work) -- do you go this routine at other times? Say, on the weekend?

Yeah. Similar routine in the morning, or on the weekend. Sitting there means goofing off, eating junk food and surfing the web. Which is bad when it also gets used for doing actual work on the computer, like coding. So there are conflicting signals.

I'm thinking a lot about triggers as a way to change habits right now.

Some functions of character are easier to perform when we change the environment to encourage them -- that's the parent's the whole point.

It's not like suddenly he would give a magic trick that involves no function of character at all.

Not to derail your point, but I do hate when people compare spending time on websites to crack. Its just so far from one another and belittles those who do have a serious drug problem.

> I'm currently going cold turkey on certain social media...

Don't you consider HN to be social media?

It is, but that's why I said "certain social media". Not trying to do it all. If HN started substituting for Facebook, I'd be worried, but that doesn't seem to be happening.

For me the bare-minimum of required functionality for SM is friending and JWZ's Law, so no.

I think of it more in terms of deliberately addictive behavior. HN is fun, but it doesn't have basic functions like infinite scrolling. The closest it has to addictive social media behavior is the upvote/downvote buttons. (See Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism for discussion about that problem.)

>JWZ's Law

Could you expand the acronym? I've never seen it and search results aren't helpful.

jwz is Jamie Zawinski[1] of Netscape fame. The law states:

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski

Whoops, yeah, I should have used the standard "Zawinsky's Law."

"A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills." - Arthur Schopenhauer

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qM7ydBXaCxPisAsaY/will-as-th...

Ali: A man can do whatever he wants, you said.

Lawrence: He can, but he can't want what he wants. (Pinching his chest) This is the stuff that decides what he wants.

-- Lawrence of Arabia (film)

[EDIT]

How strange to see / That I don't wanna be the person that I want to be

-- Amanda Palmer, "In My Mind"

This rings true for me, and is how I quit cold turkey and never looked back.

You need to realize that you want or need is not wrong - embrace it. Embrace it and realize there is something you want more; a larger need that subsumes the lesser habit.

No one hates eating cookies and watching tv all day, but there are conflicting desires that lead you to change your behavior - sense of accomplishment, physical health, making money to live, etc.

I love video games, but hate working out.

I brought balance to my life by purchasing an exercise bike and putting it in front of my Xbox.

Now I can play through the entire new Red Dead Redemption game without guilt - 40+ hours over the course of a month or two, as long as I keep the peddles moving while I do it.

Through this pairing I curbed my addiction to video games, and also lost about 10 pounds in the last 3 months. Not only does it cap my session time to about an hour maximum, there are days when I'm just too tired from work to play video games. So I end up going to bed earlier and taking a lot better care of myself than I was previously.

Do you not enjoy playing video games? What would you do instead and why? Is there an amount of acceptable time that you are exceeding?

What are your long term goals that suffer from you playing games?

I really enjoy coding. I have a practically infinite list of software projects that I could be working on at any given moment. But, I spend 8 hours a day working as a software engineer. I wish that when I got home each day I could just switch over to working on personal projects. Instead, I find that I'm almost always too mentally tired, so I play video games or browse the most mindless parts of reddit instead.

So for me at least, I play video games and accept that it's an important part of keeping myself healthy and not burning out at work, but I also wish I didn't' need to do it. It's sort of like sleep. I make sure I get at least 8 hours of sleep every night, but only because I need sleep to be healthy. If I could somehow replace sleep with more work (paid or on personal projects) without any adverse effects, I would do it, but of course that's impossible too.

>Ultimately, actions reveal preferences.

Actions only reveal which preferences prevails. We could still be totally conflicted internally, and wish we did otherwise.

It's not mere theater. Some even go to suicide because of the anxiety of such conflicts between what they wish to be doing and what their pleasure impulses get them to do.

Is it logical that your long term goal of "getting something productive done" is really more important than your short term goal of "having fun with video games now"?

Who knows if you run into a car accident 2 hours later and die? In that case it would've been better to play video games, right? Or maybe it would have been better to call your mom instead and tell her you didn't mean what you said last Thanks Giving?

The thing about life is: It has no meaning besides the meaning you assign to it. It might be okay to prioritize short term goals. It might be okay to suffer for long term goals. It might be more important even to do something completely different. Nobody can tell you.

Therefore I would argue that instead of evaluating things on artificial scales, to simply be aware of the trade-offs, make choices according to the circumstances you encounter and the stuff that you can know (e.g. you can't know if you die in 2 hours in most cases), and be confident due to your awareness that you made the best possible choice for yourself and you might be able to learn something to make an even better choice next time.

I.e. start making sounds by clapping with just one hand.

"If we do not have strong enough character to regulate our short term desires, our long term goals suffer"

Very well said. I have been dealing with procrastination issue and this line has hit me hard.

I once heard an interview to some gamedevs. They were asked

- Your Steam stats show that people have spent <an inordinate amount of hours> playing your game. Doesn't it bother you that they could have employed all that time doing something more useful?

Their answer:

- Well, you know, maybe they were all Hitler. We might be saving the world by destroying their productivity.

It cracked me up and made me buy their game.

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