Comment by jstarfish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jstarfish | Hacker News Reader

Was really hoping there would be more substance to this. It's about as helpful as the solution to depression being "just stop feeling sorry for yourself!" Little better than the Protest Song-- "the world's going to shit, everything is awful, but all you have to do to fix it is...<mumble mumble mumble>."

That said, it's not wrong, just seriously low-effort and underwhelming. The same advice applies to healthy living-- ideally you want to reduce "cheap" dopamine hits (sugars, fats, etc.) and replace them with the rush you'd get from exercise. Some (can't speak for all) rehab clinics put patients to work doing menial physical labor (gardening, etc.) around the grounds for this purpose-- the intent is to replace their synthetic drug-based dopamine cravings with a self-generated and sustainable alternative. If nothing else it gives you something to do for a few weeks to get your mind off of the malaise that comes with withdrawal.

In the end, if you're feeling lazy and bored, no amount of advice from underqualified and overprivileged yahoos on the internet is going to get you off your ass enough to do something about it. There's a reason people end up in these ruts to begin with.

> In the end, if you're feeling lazy and bored, no amount of advice from underqualified and overprivileged yahoos on the internet is going to get you off your ass enough to do something about it.

I disagree that the content is worthless just because it doesn't have a lot of depth. Everyone knows that sugar is bad for you, but the idea that short-term dopamine - even when the activity doesn't have other obviously-negative side-effects - can be actively harmful to your mental health is a very counterintuitive one that I'd never thought about before, but which makes a lot of sense once presented.

> Everyone knows that sugar is bad for you

I'm sure they do, but that's the logic that has led to all manner of ill-advised diets. Too much sugar, especially refined sugar, is bad for you. You need sugar in your diet for quick-burning energy. Avoiding all sugar and only eating proteins is going to leave you lethargic and unmotivated as shit because protein requires more calories than carbs to break down. You may as well be trying to digest a brick. There's a reason every American Thanksgiving ends with a bunch of tired guests.

Hamburgers come with buns. Steak is often served with potatoes. Chicken is often served with rice. Burritos are wrapped in tortillas. The latter in all cases is a serving of carbohydrates...glorified sugar in all cases, and necessary to keep you awake and moving so you can break down all that protein.

> but the idea that short-term dopamine - even when the activity doesn't have other obviously-negative side effects - can be actively harmful to your mental health is a very unintuitive one

Why is this unintuitive? Lazy people seek the most-immediate form of gratification available; that's literally the definition of laziness. Doing this repeatedly erodes your neural pathways to the point where your routes to dopamine rewards are artificially limited because longer (and more sustainable) paths simply cease to exist.

The real trick to beating it? Constant mental stimulation through establishment of new neural pathways. Exercise helps. Amphetamines do too (but will permanently ruin your ability to self-correct-- consider it nothing more than a clinically-administrated addiction). Travel. Learn a new language. Learn a new skill. Interest level does not matter; if it's something different than what you're used to and you can derive even the slightest amusement from it, you're creating new routes--even partial ones--to those sweet chemical rewards.

Scheduled/structured activities are greatly underrated-- being dragged into new activities and situations forces you out of your narrowly-defined set of paths and creates new ones that yield new rewards (and anecdotally, I suspect this pattern of constantly-seeking new stimuli may go a long way toward staving off degenerative brain disorders).

But the article doesn't even try to address any of this. It's literally a bunch of fluff culminating in "hey incels, just stop beating off." Yes, sound advice, but for the intended audience advice alone doesn't cut it, otherwise obese people enduring years of shame and torment would be sufficiently motivated to get off the couch. Once you've lost it, the problem is with finding the motivation to even get off the couch in the first place; it's even more hopeless for those who let this get to the point of clinical depression (and who now have two problems). At some level you end up with such impossibly-diminished returns that it takes external intervention to be able to even think about acting on pithy advice-- either antidepressants, gastic bypass, whatever.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by "amphetamines permanently ruin your ability to self correct"? In what way?

The anti-drug propaganda you were taught in grade-school was at least somewhat true.

Basically after prolonged stimulant [ab]use, your brain stops "caring" about natural rewards because they're so insubstantial in comparison to synthetic ones. Like a captive-bred animal, your brain no longer appreciates its own procurement of rewards because it has been trained to be hand-fed cocaine-battered filet mignon.

I'm not a psychiatrist or neuroscientist so my understanding is limited and based on anecdote and experience, but I've never met a career meth-or-coke-abuser who found happiness in anything once they went sober. The cravings never go away; they literally need the drugs just to feel anything more than melancholy and they are always irritable and underwhelmed without them.

There is some argument over whether dopamine receptors repair themselves; I don't know if this is true, but if not that then there is something else permanently lost to amphetamine usage.

>There's a reason people end up in these ruts to begin with.

Perhaps there is the lack of self-awareness that dopamine comes into play. This is where the (effective) simplicity of this article comes into the picture.

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