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After some very long bouts of self reflection, I've found that I have 4 primary emotional needs: social connection, satisfaction derived from accomplishment, breadth of information to learn, and excitation (something that gets my heard pumping and the adrenaline flowing).

Most things in my life that I occupy my free time with can meet those needs, art and music fill the first three, programming meets the middle two, but only gaming fills the 'excited' factor. I have yet to find any other activity that isn't dangerous which gives me the same rush as winning a game of dota2 or overwatch (or what have you). What's more, games not only fulfill my need for excitement, they also fulfill -all- of the aforementioned needs to a decent degree. Sure, I won't feel as accomplished finishing a setup in factorio as I would finishing a piece of music, but the difference really isn't all that great. And for breadth of knowledge? Games are designed to be grok-able, whereas many more existential domains are full of hard or nuanced problems. Lastly, (multiplayer) games are just as social as my other life pursuits if not more so.

Guess what I'm saying is that I've had trouble finding a suitable replacement for games, they really can serve as an omni-activity. Despite all that, they still give me a fair portion of guilt when I devote time to them. I can only assume that is my parents' sensibilities which have been ingrained into my conscience. As a result I've quit them multiple times, and the jury's still out as to whether I personally view them as a vice that needs to be severely moderated, but what keeps me coming back is that need for a rush. Nothing else gives it to me in such a balance of low risk / high reward.

Philip K Dick already did it in 1977 with A Scanner Darkly.

Gave up: - alcohol - marijuana - ecstacy - coke - amphetamines - cigarettes and vaping - all animal products (meat, leather, etc) - gluten - videogames - porn - social media except reddit/hn - working

Started: - lifting weights (sent on for two years before stopping due to covid gym closures) - running - reading recreationally (discovered I really enjoy sci fi), prior to that only read learning material like textbooks and documentation.

The list goes on. I am in a constant state of reinvention. Deep down I am also miserable and always have been, hence the self medication, the constant quitting, and being in a seemingly permanent exploratory phase. I'm in my 30's and thought things would have made more sense by now. I can only superficially relate to others, even conversations with my 'best friends' are basically just small talk. I thought I was depressed but despite repeated visits to mental health professionals, none have been able to help: sessions amount to them just nodding and go 'wow... Well guess we'll see how you feel next visit' untiI I eventually stop going.

Sorry if my post seems negative, the previous paragraph just sort of... emerged as I was reflecting on the things I've quit over the last few years.

How odd. I spent my childhood inna constant state of hayfever. A major revelation for me was going off to university, where I was no longer around the household dogs, and my allergies all but disapated.

In my experience, without use of g! DDG isn't serviceable.

> Doing coding for a living strips away a lot of the joy out of it

As someone with a lot of interests, I have found this to be true for every one of them. Seems like monetizing yourself is always soul sucking to some degree.

This is still news to me, the 10% rule is presented as 10% of posts... posting 9 other things to post 1 of my OCs seemed overly excessive.

Now I might actually start posting some things...

I've been doing 'days off' off coffee amd I'm inclined to sleep waaaay more. Like from 8 hours to 14. It can be a massive trade off in productivity. I have to set aside light workloads for those days.

Pure white noise doesn't quite work for me because my hearing will try to make sense of it anyway. It's akin to looking at tv static and seeing images fuzz & flicker in and out of the signal noise. Interestingly enough, this observation got me into making noise music for awhile, it started with just some noise oscillators running through filters with lfo's on them. Then add in some noise osc's with amplitude envelopes and you can create rhythmic elements, but I digress.

Like you suggest, ambient noise (I'm fond of GNOME's pomodoro bird sounds :)) can help. However I've found that earplugs work even better. I had some nice ones because I attend a lot of shows/dance concerts and want to protect my hearing. Started using them in class during tests and found it to be really effective. Generally useful for every situation I needed to 'turn the volume down' on life.

I'm the same way. My partner is able to do all her homework while listening to music or playing a show in the background. I was somewhat envious, until I looked at some studies that suggest while it's possible, it's not ideal, and can reduce information retention.

As to why some people have an easier time doing it than others, no clue. I have a background in music so I suspect that plays some role. I need absolute silence in order to concentrate.

It was the habits of my overweight parents, and thier overweight parents before them.

The habits of thin people are not about when they eat, but what and how much they eat.

I'm of the notion that there is no better weight loss method than counting calories, that all other methods are either deleterious or gimmicks which merely shroud eating less calories. The problem is that people want an easy (and fast) way of losing weight. well, counting calories is easy, but it's not fast. I believe (although I have nothing nothing but personal anecdotes and reasoning to back this up) that it's more sustainable too. I believe it's more sustainable because you're building a habit of eating healthier foods. It encourages you to eat more filling, nutrient dense foods and opens your eyes to foods that aren't. Whereas with IF 'eat whatever you want is such and such window' doesn't teach you what foods to eat, it doesn't show you what you're putting into your body, and it definitely doesn't teach you portion control. And as another commenter pointed out, it risks putting your body's metabolism into shock because you are literally starving yourself. Of course you will lose weight when you starve yourself! But you can't starve yourself forever, and once you stop, the weight will most likely come back.

Calorie counting on the other hand, is a knob to turn, it's a parameter that you can adjust. The more data you track, the better. You can weigh exactly what you want to, you just need to be persistent. View it like washing your hands after using the restroom: log every thing you eat, right after you eat it. The rest will follow.

Agreed. tried replicating this with org mode, which required an extensive learning curve to meet the needs akin to what you listed. Although at some level it did the job, I could imagine a tool that does it better.

Does it really make the web faster for mobile? I've had the exact opposite experience with it. It's made sites run much slower, broken things like dark themes, and make advertisements more intrusive. For example, I used to think the game guide/news site polygon was a horrible slow mess until I learned about amp, I was accessing it via google search, and once I excised the amp portion of the url the site became snappy and usable. The same exact thing happened to me two nights ago with SoundOnSound as well.

Seriously. I'd sell my soul to the devil to make stuff like that. Wish my brain was big enough!!

For what it's worth, my circumstances agree with you. I've become much less stressed out on the day to day by ungluing my eyes from newsmedia.

But then you're ordering from walmart...? A company decidedly worse than amazon by nearly every metric.

I still rue the day I uninstalled that game.

Agreed. As someone who has lived in CA all thier life, I'm afraid of leaving, because of lack of opportunity elsewhere, but the cost of living here is absurd. My rent constitutes 75%(!!) of my monthly expenses.

This is something I came to slowly realize in the search for repairing my attention/depression issues. So far I've been getting good results. It started with giving up amphetamines (adderall, vyvanse), when that didn't do the trick, I removed alcohol and caffiene from my diet. The benefits I experienced led to stop smoking marijuana as well. That one was the toughest to give up, the anhedonia was torturous. It was like my brain forgot how to make dopamine. I couldn't enjoy any activity.

It's been 38 days since I stopped smoking, and it seems that things are starting to improve. I'm able to work on my creative endeavors again in multiple short bursts. I've also massively cut down on porn consumption (from daily to biweekly on average, but trying to get rid of it all). As well as halved my newsmedia consumption (an avg of 10 hours a week down to 5, another thing I want to get close to zero).

I've been reading a lot more, mostly philosophy (stoicism, daoism), but also worked through some other self help books as well as some science fiction. Still playing lots of games but, Im using it as my support system for the time being. Eventually I want to get even games down to just a very select few titles.

It's am ongoing process, tempting to want to rid myself of everything but that would be setting myself up for failure, too overwhelming. Must ease into things. the benefits have been manifold, discipline, concentration, memory, emotional control have all improved, which cascade into fitness, eating better, getting work done, less procrastination, and my favorite: more time. Bill Burr said "a year sober is the longest year of your life" and it's true, the clock passes so much slower, which is great, life is starting to feel plentiful again.

Anyway, I digress. But what I did notice is that is all comes back to dopamine. Some activities seem to give it more sustainably, others supernormally. And by limiting supernormal stimuli, we should expect to see positive effects.

Not sure if you're being tongue in cheek, but Gates basically ripped off Xerox.

I've worked through a couple of these lists and a few of the projects. My take on them is that many of the tutorials are not vetted for quality or even completeness. I have several projects where the author of the guide essentially 'gives up' 60-80% of the way through, usually in the most difficult stage of the process, in what can be described as a 'rest of the fkn owl' result.

Also as someone who easily succumbs to analysis paralysis, this has made it quite difficult to motivate myself to start another one.

In my experience, Entheogens and money have a reluctant relationship. A 'psychedlic healing' business immediately sounds concerning to me. I can't find any convincing credentials beyond the author taking these substances at some point in her life. The author lambasts MBAs yet admits they themselves are a marketer. Not to mention, 'psychedelic industry' just sounds wrong.

What's the difference between psychedelics and anti depressants? Psychedelics have a religious component-- no, not the dogmatic, institutionalized sort you find in the likes of the roman catholic church; rather, the kind of spiritual experiences that help you come to terms with your existence, and your demise. More akin to a shaman than a pope.

While I think the world could use 'psychedelic churches' in a manner of speaking, I struggle to reconcile that with anything possesing a profit motive. lofty ideals alone will not lead to enlightenment.

If all you listen to is the radio, sure. However in the broader sense of music being created, this is patently false. There are more genres and subgenres of music than ever before, experimentation and synthesis techniques weaving together ever more intricate and sophisticated timbres.

Movies are a better example of a medium getting bland, but there is a material reason for that; production costs vs return on investment leading to less riskier films being made.

Music doesn't suffer from that same problem, in fact 'good' music can be made for nothing except the composer's time.

Additionally those time estimates aren't always accurate. I used to do deliveries all over my county using gmaps, and it was usually 5 minutes off, even as much as 10 minutes off for some of the further destinations.

At this point I just assume anywhere else in the world have better pubtrans than anywhere in the western US.

It's late and I just realized MediCal is medicaid, not medicare. These program names are so confusing. Going to let out a large sigh and get some sleep.

I'm on MediCal, California's version of Medicare. Just want to say thanks for mentioning that. I had never heard of it before. I'm a young person who is also unemployed, and an orphan. Medi-Cal has been kafka-esque in how terrible it is. I relate it to therapists and doctors at the quality of school counselors and nurses, it's third rate care and it's practically made me lose all hope in getting treatment for chronic abdominal pain I've had for over a year and a half. I've been churning through doctors because they are so unprofessional to be flat out useless. One doctor straight up told me "so what do you want me to do about it?", And that's only one incident among many of the bad experiences I've had with it.

So to add on to what you've said, yes medicare is nightmarish. Hopefully this offers me a new chance to live a life.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Albert Camus