I think that when you “poison” your brain with easy dopamine like candy, fastfood, alcohol, drugs, endless scrolling, etc you will shift the internal goalpost of when something feels good. Compared to these easy sources of “joy”, life just isn’t that interesting. The scale changes to the point that normal things cannot longer provide enough jou to be worth it.

Personally I’ve been trying to constrain myself a bit on these easy sources of “empty happiness”. Things that do give me joy without ruining my brain are, among others: running, music festivals, listening to nice music, looking back at something cool I made, making something cool, playing videogames, chilling with friends (though this usually involves alcohol). These things definitely don’t reliably provide joy, Most of the times they’re just “nice” but definitely not amazing. But every now and then I get hit with that dopamine rush and it’s all worth it.

Up until now it was my student time, though I think this depends on personal circumstances and is different for everyone. Childhood was nice, but obviously limited in terms of freedom. Teens where decent, but not 100% great. Student life was easily the best for me, I’d constantly meet like-minded people, there were so many cheap or free activities, and people constantly said shit like “you guys are our future” etc. I also loved having well defined work and goals, limited scope, and lots of depth and interesting challenges. Now that I’m working it’s usually very shallow work in terms of complexity, but with lots of communication and interdependencies. And it goes ever on because agile, no clear quartile or semester goals like university.

Now that I’m working I have the money, but I lost the easy access to like-minded people and fun activities. Organizing something with friends turned from “let’s grab a drink this afternoon” into “let’s align our agendas to find a free spot somewhere in 6 weeks”. And programming turned from “here’s a algorithm someone came up with that you can implement” to “the customer wants this button to do X, hi spend the next week implementing/testing/finding out its meant to work differently”.

I’m a bit biased though, because I’m currently burnt out. Work life was decent for a bit, it just temporarily got worse and kinda pushed me over the edge. If anyone has tips I’d love to hear them :3

Then at least it’s their own fault

Having a career. At home though, nothing :3

Okay but does that matter? I recently saw a video from Veratasium about teflon and there they mentioned that teflon is too large to be absorbed by the body, it just comes out on the other end. It’s the smaller compounds used for producing teflon that are poisoning our water, bodies, and everything else with PFAS. Companies just dumping this poison into our water supply. If this is false I’m open to learn ofc.

Wtf. How did they not at the very least build in a reasonable safe state whenever the thing gets disconnected. Something like “keep current position, disable heating” or return to flat position.

But the more pressing question is: why does a bed have an internet connection? Who does this help? And why does it NEED an internet connection? Surely a few Back-up buttons for when the service eventually goes down isn’t too much to ask? Who would buy such a thing?!

No definitely not. Like, it’s fine if you don’t care for some uncle who’s kind of a dick and who you see once a year. But if you care for no-one but yourself then something is out of the norm. Might not be something you can help, but it’s probably a good idea to run this by a professional.

Personally I’m kinda extreme in the opposite direction. I can feel intense empathy towards inanimate objects. I’ll feel sad for the slightly fucked apple at the supermarket because no-one will buy it. I struggle to watch movies with too emotional plots because I start to experience those emotions myself intensely.

Yeah that’s a bit much tbh. Personally I find the train to be way too loud usually. Other people talking, train noises, maybe a screaming baby or something. I’ll just listen to some music and stare out of the window (if it isn’t dark).

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Yeah I also tend to play against the bots. Me and my friends have hundreds of hours against the AI at this point. Nowadays we tend to play against the Hard Barbarian AI. We usually win, but the AI can be very variable and sometimes it just turns on and destroys us. If we manage to expand aggressively in the early game, manage to contest roughly half the map (or have a good choke point), we can survive the early onslaught and out-eco the AI in the late game. Which is the most fun way of winning imo. Chill behind defences and slowly get the upper hand until we waltz over the AI with experimental units. We did ban ourselves from “cheesy” tactics like nuking the AI, target bombing their economy, or aggressively targeting our long range artillery at their economy. The AI just doesn’t seem to sufficiently defend against these and it quickly ends the game in a lame way. Unless we’re losing hard, then everything is permitted.

Same. I don’t like playing RTS games the good way. I just like building a cozy little camp and defending it, slowly exploring the map and just building whatever units I feel like building. I enjoy games like Age of Empires and Beyond All Reason because the maps tend to be quite large and random. It usually takes a while before I get overwhelmed if I’m losing I those games, and if I’m winning I can spend a lot of time just messing around without the game being over.

Games like Starcraft or Warcraft seem to be built too much for quick games where you have to be constantly moving. Expansion locations are very determined and scarce and resources run out way too fast to just turtle in my little corner.

At the moment almost every weekend in person, though on average it’s more like every 2 weeks I think. It used to be way more but after finishing my study it became insanely hard to meet new people like myself. I also game with friends more than half of the days in the evenings tho, so that’s nice.

The main loss since finishing my study is the regularity and spontaneity of meeting with friends. It requires careful alignment of agenda’s and planning ahead for over a month to get something done. I hate planning, but the downside of making friends who are like me is that most of my friends also hate doing so. So sometimes I have to push a bit to get stuff planned. Previously we’d naturally run into eachother and just decide to grab a beer that evening or watch a movie or something.

I’d also live to make more queer friends where I’m at but every group seems to be for students or elderly or something.

I want to use it but I keep forgetting it exists. Something like this should just be accessible via button in the UI so no-one misses it

I recently got a photo printer and the experience is surprisingly similar

I have this with lots of other things currently. Whenever I cannot do one of my hobbies, I will fantasize about them and come up with all kinds of ideas of what to do, but when the time comes to do them I just cannot get going and sometimes even get stressed. My brain would rather just stare at YouTube videos all day. I believe it’s our dopamine systems being completely fried due to all the easily accessible instant gratification online.

I recently read a book again for the first time in years, Dune, and I was struggling so hard in the beginning. My brain just wanted to scroll. I enjoyed the book, but nevertheless my brain wanted instant gratification and I had to resist the urge to grab my phone while reading the book. Luckily this subsided after getting a bit further.

I don’t often have this for games yet luckily. I’m currently absorbed in Hades II and no amount of brain rot can get me out of it. But it’s one of the last sacred places, and even gaming sometimes suffers this fate. There are so many gun things to do that it’s just overwhelming, whenever you do something your brain always has something else it wants to do more. Not because it actually wants it, but just because it likes the idea of it. As a kid I didn’t have all this stuff, and didn’t experience all these things, so everything I did felt special.

Being able to go basically anywhere by bike, foot, or public transport. And just our bike infrastructure in general. I honestly don’t know how I could live in most other countries because it seems like basically everything happens by car or foot. Being able to bike anywhere is so much nicer and gives a lot of freedom from an early age.

Strangely we Dutch people also seem to be quite alone in our view that helmets on normal bikes are not really necessary. They make bikes more prevalent imo, because you don’t have to drag a helmet along everywhere. You just park you bike and the only thing you have with you because of it is a key, no special clothes, helmets, etc. I think that’s also possible because of our bicycle infrastructure and culture.

Kids learn to bike from a young age, in traffic. You see very young kids just cycle on their smol little bike with a parent on the outside sort of shielding them from traffic. Safely on bike roads, but also just on shared roads with cars. In general kids are quite free to just play outside. I live close to a school and I see plenty of kids all across the neighborhood, just playing without parental supervision. It’s what we did back in the day too, without mobile phones or anything. We’d usually be home on time for dinner or our parents would find us somewhere in the neighborhood and tell us it was time to get home.

Don’t disagree fully, but time/energy is definitely a factor in this. I’m really not going to care enough to make an educated vote in all the communities that I’m in, I have better things to do. And likewise for a lot of people probably. Having 3 people vote in a mod doesn’t exactly give confidence either, it makes it easy to game the system. For smaller communities it’s probably better to retain the “benevolent dictator” system and punish any unruly mods with abandoning their community for a new one.

Recently my parents showed me some stuff they saw on Facebook. It was all just AI slop, rage bait, advertisements. Seriously, there was barely anything useful on it. They were very avoidant of acknowledging it tho. “But there’s also fun stuff on it”. They were constantly wondering whether what they were reading was real, yet it did plant seeds in their brains. It’s even influencing their politics, I had to have a whole discussion with them (traditionally centre left voters) about how our left wing parties didn’t want to let an unstoppable horde of immigrants into our country. And why voting for a centre right guy because “he looks pretty competent” will also fuck with poor people and important topics like abortion.

Try being permanently exhausted. Ever since I had mono and COVID in 2020 I basically fall asleep the moment I touch my bed. But unfortunately I also need that nap almost every day.

Your view is totally fine, but I guess you’re not understanding why people do this. I’m a millennial, around 30. Personally I buy CDs, I buy vinyl, and I even have some stuff on tape. I’ve also recently picked up film photography and among my friends it’s common nowadays to bring some 2000-2010 digicams.

So why? flac is perfect, and streaming services stream whatever high-quality music you’d ever want to play. Film is expensive, and digicams are often way more shit than whatever a modern smartphone that’s already in your pocket can do.

Personally I’ve become bored by perfection, overwhelmed by choice, and frustrated with the lack of owning anything. When I play a physical album I sit down for it, I am focused on the music. I cannot easily choose the music, I’ll just have to accept the order of the album. There are way fewer choices to overwhelm me. Likewise, with film photography, it feels simpler in a way. You shoot a few images in a go, because film isn’t cheap, and you’ll only get to see them weeks later when the roll is developed. No pressure of the perfect shot, no insane resolution to show any imperfection. And mistakes just happen, because you cannot see what you’re doing, so you just have to accept them. Digitally you can just take 20 pictures and take the best one.

So back to music. Why would one prefer vinyl or tape over CD? As a life-long CD collector, I wondered the same thing a few years ago. But when artists that I enjoy started skipping CD releases in favor of vinyl I hopped in, invested in a shit vinyl player, and didn’t really get it. Sure it had a character, but it wasn’t great in any way. After some more research I found out that it was probably just the vinyl player (please don’t get some cheap shit for a 100 bucks with a red unbranded needle). I invested in an Audiotechnica LP70XBT, and oh boy did stuff improve. I finally get it. The sound is gorgeous, though not necessarily better or worse than CD imo. It’s a bit warmer, with detailed bass but less clinical high end. And I love the whole tactile experience of it. Older vinyl definitely sounds worse than modern CD quality though.

I think it’s the whole experience that people enjoy. Putting the vinyl or cassette in the player, having something move and, as if it were magic, suddenly there’s music. With a slightly different character that differentiates it from the clean and clinical sound of high quality digital audio. Modern digital audio is great and definitely has its place, but at times it can feel sterile, too perfect. The crackles and warmth of vinyl, the grain and slightly off colours of photographic film, they feel like they have more personality. They stem from a time where the imperfections of the medium still kinda hid the imperfections of the artist.

(Okay this turned into quite a ramble but I hope there’s something useful in there :3 )