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Comment by axiosgunnar | Hacker News Reader

Note that you could probably „weaponize“ this addictive personality to achieve what normal people cannot (eg dedicate an extreme amount of time to a difficult task and achieve it)

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I'm not who you're responding to, but I very much identify with what they wrote. I once accidentally trained for a marathon.

Weaponizing this is unhealthy. It doesn't end well. The reason normal people can't do X and an addict can is because an addict is making egregious trade-offs.

"I know I'm going to mess up my shoulder for the rest of my life, but I'm going to bench heavy anyway"

"I know I haven't seen my kids in a month, but I'm going to shut myself away and work on my side business anyway"

It's collapsing your entire life into a single, simplistic max/min function. It's a quick path to misery.

I'm reminded of a quote from J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan: "You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it." I once thought it was, and have often seen it used as, an inspirational quote until I later read another opinion that it was a warning of the dangers of being too single focused.

I simply take it as a description of reality. As a child, you are nothing yet, but you have the potential to become almost anything. As you get older, you trade in that potential for something specific. It's up to you to choose. You can trade all your potential for one thing only or you can divide it up to become multiple things. The right balance is debatable. The real danger lies in taking it to the limit. If you try to become everything, you divide your potential up into infinitesimal pieces and end up remaining nothing at all, a child.

In any case, there is some real wisdom in Peter Pan, but it was completely lost on me as a child.

I don't claim to be well-read on the topic, but this reminds me of Kierkegaard's infinite and finite.

"A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis."

Note that dedicating an extreme amount of time to a task can be unhealthy in it's own right, if it's to the detriment of other aspects of life. Depending on exactly what you're picturing, it may also be worth noting that hyper-fixation can lead to working past the point of productivity (sometime you just need to sleep on it, take a walk, etc.). It's not a clear-cut advantage.

That's not where health is though...

Health is balance.

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