I think these games are great at teaching people about concurrent programming, race conditions and locking though.
I run out of the one required for nasty bug finding, very soon, but when that one is gone (and after a short break to clear the mind) I can go on creating new code/architecture for hours.
Going back to the parent comment, one remarkable effect of this is that I rarely desire to play video games like I used to. It seemed like I always had enough juice for video games but rarely for other life obligations, but with the rainbow juice I am just as motivated to do all that other stuff as I am to play video games.
I do struggle a lot at times with focus, but I rather try to balance it with good and healthy livestyle. Lots of sleep. Exercise, meditation ..
But I have a toddler boy, who can mess with sleep and rhythm a lot, so having the possibility of a "rainbow juice" is definitely tempting.
Have you noticed bad side effects? Do you allways take ritalin(?) for work? Or just on special occacions?
Common side effects of ADHD drugs are loss of appetite, difficulty sleeping, and increased heart rate. It basically puts you into fight or flight mode for 6 hours a day. More blood to your brain + muscles, less to everything else (digestion, immune system for example).
One weird thing about it is the first few times you take it you’ll get a feeling of euphoria, like you’re on cocaine. This is _not_ the way the drug is supposed to feel, it goes away if you stick with the same dose for a while. Some people keep going up because they think the euphoria is part of it, and that’s really dangerous.
It really does work incredibly well for me. Especially for programming, where you’re most productive when you’re not pulled out of a flow state. I went from a B average to straight A’s when I started taking it in college. It made it so easy to oranize my schedule, I just worked/studied from 8-6 every day. No late nights, no procrastination.
Personally, I have no feeling of withdrawal when I go off of it for weeks at a time. Though I have developed a bit of a psychological dependency around work, where I kind of tell myself I won’t work well without it, which becomes self-fulfilling.
It’s not all good, not all bad. Hopefully this helps!
Basically, it enforced my point of view to only try it out, if I really think it is neccecary.
I never done cocaine, but weed.
With the right time and settings it can help me get into a flow lasting for 10+ hours. But weed really does not help mid or long term, my productivity goes into steady decline after couple of days.
And coffeine I never liked, so I prefer the natural rhythm, with varying success.
Stimulants (Vyvanse in my case) are blunt instruments; they alleviate the specific behavioral problems that plague those of us with ADHD but also enhance performance in general. The biggest danger that I see in my own behavior is the tendency to forget about all the self-management practices I learned before my diagnosis. With stimulants, you can do irresponsible things like stay up late for no good reason, get four hours of sleep, and still be fairly productive once the medication kicks in. I have to be really honest with myself on a daily basis about whether I'm using it to overcome a deficit caused by ADHD, or a deficit caused by bad behavior.
The second biggest danger is developing unrealistic expectations about what I am capable of accomplishing. For example, I am currently pursuing a PhD in computer science, and the decision to do so was made by the medicated version of myself. I don't regret the decision one iota, and it's a goal I've had for many years, but I already had a long list of projects and goals when I signed up for this and I definitely deluded myself about just how many of those other commitments I'd have to set aside for a while (or forever) in order to get a PhD.
That is my problem right now, too. I am just scared, that medication really does not help me long term, for all the reasons you mentioned.
Thank you, for sharing.
If only my insurance covered mental health...
Look into Ego Depletion. There's academic disagreement over just how "consumable" willpower is. My assessment of SOTA is:
- ego/willpower is finite/depletable
- Most people have more or less the same amount of it as the average. People with "more willpower" typically are more efficient with it
- non-neurotypicals and those that "don't fit in society" (ADHD, ASD, bipolar, trans, nonbinary, anxiety, OCD) often spend much willpower on "passing"
- it's linked to everything from blood sugar levels, insulin levels, brain blood flow, dopamine levels, D1/D2 activation ratios, and probably gut microbiome
But, yeah, with "TIS-1000" it was just programming, and sort of unnecessarily (and unpleasantly) difficult programming at that.
In my day job at the time the game came out I was doing node.js microservices. So it was refreshing to work at the bit level again.
I could sit here and get virtual levels and virtual money... or go raise my actual human fitness level, or go work on my actual business for actual money.
Games are an easy win to feed you nuggets of feeling like you did stuff, but a poor substitute for real life.
If you want to be a workaholic and spend your free time working, go right ahead.
But you will end up like my father, mid 70s with no real relationships with your family, obsessed with "completing your legacy" and a general inability to enjoy anything that isn't "work".
If that sound like fun to you, go right ahead.
Me, I'll continue to work at work and spend my free time on relaxation.
You only get one life, spending it chasing dollars and dimes is a poor life plan
A mechanic can enjoy working on his own project car in the off time.
Both of these things are productive in a way that playing games isn't, but they're still recreational. It's not spending your life chasing dimes. It's looking at the different recreational things you could be doing, and choosing the ones that also intersect with being productive and have a side-effect of helping you professionally.
Productive is all relative anyway. Children learning by playing is productive, the productive part is the learning that is a byproduct. Working on a project car is fun in itself. It doesn't become less fun if the person doing it is a professional mechanic. Would you tell a person who plays games professionally in an e-sports league that they must do something else for fun?
I think it is a sign of good life when you find a way to get paid for doing what you enjoy. And if you enjoy it, then it is still fun when you do it outside of work. The productive benefits of it do not make it less fun.
I disagree. I have fond memories of discussing Zelda on the playground as a kid. Similarly, online communities are formed around basically every notable single player game. It's still a shared experience, even if it's not shared at the same moment.
Maybe there's something to be said for opting to lead a more creative rather than consumptive lifestyle. Ultimately though, something only matters if you think it does. My work is largely bullshit, and I can't think of a business I'd want to get into that also wouldn't feel like bullshit. I think the value I'd extract would precisely be in the connections made and the problem-solving itself. How important is another piece of enterprise software to extract money from people that no one thought they wanted until it exists?
I'm eyeing off a few avenues, I wouldn't mind not writing software for money anymore but it would also be cool to use my hard earned experience to my advantage. One avenue I thought of was music composition, because there are ways to automate some of it with code that I could use to provide some extra value, but it's also enough of a leap from my current career that it would be a wildly new endeavor.
I do have personal projects, one to do good, others out of curiosity. Mostly out of an urgency to be creative. I don't think this carries more meaning than pure leisure.
Real life is fun too. But games are part of life.
I understand that there's satisfaction in it. That satisfaction can be hard to get at work sometimes. At work, you can be asked to work on things you don't like, that sometimes feel even more pointless than a game.
Part of the reason why I have programming side-projects at home is because they're an outlet to get the satisfaction of building software the way I want to.