Hacker News Reader

> You spend time on reddit because you want to. It seems unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.

This seems like a mischaracterization of how addiction works.

Replace "reddit" with "heroine" and not much changes, except to the same effect.

I like to think of it as "I can't stop scrolling Reddit despite knowing I'm not enjoying Reddit". I deleted the Reddit app, and blocked reddit.com (which I found myself using next) to 0 minutes on Digital Well-being (on stock Android).

Addiction is just a pattern, a framework of looking at reality. You could say you are suffering addiction withdrawal when you are away from somebody or some place you love.

Addiction framework and associated solutions seem to be pretty effective for things like stopping heroin usage.

Quite likely it can work for reddit too, but I'm guessing PC already tried it.

I'm just offering a different framework and way of looking at things, which works great for me - or to be even more precise, removes some suffering. One may just decide she wants to spend a lot of time on reddit, but being honest with oneself and trying not to hold logically contradicting things in one's head seems like a good thing.

Addiction isn't "just a pattern". Stop treating people like logic-driven robots.

Its just your association with the term pattern. Or maybe mine. To me, love, death and myself are just some patterns too.

I mean just something that we name. If we look at a tree and I say its crown forms a nice sphere, I'm not treating trees like geometric objects and I can still appreciate its beauty and marvel.

Observing the same reality you can see it through different frameworks consisting of different patterns. The same tree can be seen as color palette for a designer, bunch of areas with different living conditions for microbiologist, shapes for painter, material for woodworker etc.

Once you divide reality to some patterns in a certain way (what I call a framework) when somebody suggests different division we usually don't throw away existing one, so we subdivide our patterns based on what's somebody is saying instead of looking at a whole thing and then the other framework usually seems like a detail, not important, worse, less useful.

Being able to abandon your preferred framework for a moment allows too see the same things differently.

E.g. I can have a long conversation with somebody who deeply believes in God, (we skip the church bit for a moment) and if I substitute just a name of the pattern, if I do s/God/Universe, it turns out our worldview is virtually identical despite me being an atheist.

I think there's some value in most of what you're saying. Your overall proposal, etc etc.

But when you say "You could say you are suffering addiction withdrawal when you are away from somebody or some place you love", you demonstrate that you have no idea what addiction is. No idea.

With respect, I strongly advise you to not say things like that. It's super wrong (which is okay but sub-optimal), you look dumb (which is bad for you), and it's hurtful to other people (which is bad for other people).

I hope you can continue to be naive about addiction for your entire life.

I have seen some forms of addiction up close, but I think the term is more general and we shouldnt taboo every with which some people have extremely bad emotional association with.

IMO I should be able to say I was forced to do some work even if I wasnt in a concentration camp myslef. Or that it bugs me that something is messy even if I dont have extreme OCD.

Internet addiction is a normalized term and I think withdrawal fron losing somebody you love or even a place can be more accute.

Also I'm sorry about whatever you had to experience related to addiction.

It sounds like you're mixing up the casual, colloquial use of addiction ("I'm addicted to key lime pie") with the medical term ("i suffer from addiction"). The latter is not just a failure of willpower and is qualitatively different from the former.

You can use either, but if people think you mean the latter and you start arguing points that only apply to the former, expect pushback.

> You spend time on reddit because you want to. It seems unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.

"Just stop being depressed" - Psychiatrists hate that one trick.

That's not what I'm saying. If you want depression analogy it would be more like

"You are suffering most of the time. It seems unproductive to tell yourself that you aren't"

You spend time on doing heroin because you want to. It seems unproductive to tell yourself that you don't.

Yes.

We are always doing what we want to.

Perhaps I should have added "given restrictions of reality"? I mean you can have diarrhea and be currently shitting your pants. And you may not want to do that. Seems like a stronger argument than equaling heroin to reddit. But in both cases your options are limited. From those, you choose what you want. And you are then doing what you want to do (with or without telling yourself that you don't really want to do that - whether that's shooting heroin, going to rehab or changing your pants). If your argument is that what you want was not available as an option, then your problem is wishful thinking. Reality is what it is. You are here now.

As far as I understand it, a heroin addict, at times when he's not craving and has some choice, has a choice to continue doing it or to go through hell and then some. I doubt there is much cognitive dissonance before dosing. But I just don't know this context enough (except for the fact that random dude view's on life are very unlikely to help).

But in general yes, if you murder people you can apply this thinking too. You will either decide that's not what you want or have less cognitive dissonance while doing it. Happily slashing without thinking that you don't really want to do that.

I'm not selling any cure, just suggesting that there seem to be no need to ever think "I don't want to do this" and then do it. And I mean it. From cleaning up shit from the floor, through putting your dog down to going to a funeral.

It seems that you may be unfamiliar with the concept of compulsion. All you've done is water down the word "want" to meaninglessness and uselessness. It distinguishes nothing in your theory.

> As far as I understand it, a heroin addict, at times when he's not craving and has some choice, has a choice to continue doing it or to go through hell and then some.

No, not at all. I think your understanding depends strongly on your ignorance on that subject.