The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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I think it's full of shit.
Unless you've overdosed on dopaminergic drugs (why'd you steal grandma's Parkinsons meds, the opioids look very different, oh wait she's detoxing from dopamine far more effectively than you can), then it's not an excess of dopamine that's causing you issues.
Even hand-waving that away and coming to the problem of super-stimuli in general, just because something is a super-stimulus does not necessarily mean that that's a bad thing.
Movies are super stimulus compared to live actors. Nobody particularly cares to blow up Hollywood on those grounds alone.
Reading a book is superstimulus compared to staring at a campfire and gossiping, and books weren't part of the ancestral environment. Anatomically modern humans 100k or even 10k years back out weren't cracking open tomes of literary fiction.
I have ADHD, so I have no need for excuses of modern superstimuli to account for my attention deficit, it was obvious from birth. And yet I read voraciously then, because it was more appealing than everything else, and I still do, even if my tastes have evolved and become far more niche. I'd read even more if there was more content that aligned to my particular interests.
McDonald's may be lowbrow, but it's an observed fact from its popularity that it's more appealing to most people than caviar is (and caviar's reputation as fancy is recent, it used to be peasant food and even served for free as an appetizer to coax you into ordering a drink in some parts of Russia), and while Japan has McDonald's, they don't have an obesity epidemic. Since we don't know why that's the case, we can hand out ozempic to Westerners and let them eat delicious food at cheap prices without killing themselves
Even something as genteel as coffee was once the source of enormous controversy:
https://www.ncausa.org/about-coffee/history-of-coffee#
I'm pretty sure the current Pope has a cellphone.
Sounds an awful lot like boredom to me. And I'm intimately aware of what that feels like, and would not for a moment trade the fruits of modernity for it. While boredom hasn't been cured, it's more bearable than it ever has been. If I need human company, I can keep my phone away, and I have ADHD, what's their excuse?
You're arguing aesthetics more than anything else. There's no reason to prefer black coffee over coffee with sugar barring personal taste and diabetes, humans like sugar. Some of us also like to be contrarian hipsters. I drink my coffee any way it's served, because I don't care.
It's a problem when one lives two completely different lives depending on if one is hooked or not, and especially when one of those lives is objectively better than the other by most personal and societal metrics.
And why shouldn't it be considered bad if people cannot choose to adhere to an aesthetic solely because their will is attenuated? I'm no puritan, but something isn't working here for a lot of people.
That's why I took pains to clarify that superstimuli are not necessarily bad, it's that the ones that people get into a hubbub about that are being selected for being bad for you in some way.
Modern music is superstimuli, fucking Mozart is superstimuli. Food with spices added is superstimuli. The main consideration is that this form of enjoyment far outstrips anything in the ancestral environment, not that its bad for you. We just call them out more when they are. If it could make a caveman or medieval peasant fall to their knees, it counts.
Just because you like an aesthetic doesn't mean the universe is obligated to make it easy. I'd love to be ripped, I don't blame smartphones for not being there.
If you think smartphones are a distraction or you prefer hiking over Netflix, then find out a way to minimize smartphone use. They are not so utterly overpowering that you have no other choice, not in the way someone can turn you into a heroin addict against your will.
We do have solutions for willpower, I happen to fall outside the normal range for it/executive function to the point it's a detriment in my life, so I get to take ADHD meds. Ozempic, if it wasn't amazing enough already, has evidence suggesting it solves the issue of addiction in many cases, such as food addiction, gambling and even alcoholism (!!)
What you are not going to achieve anything with is "dopamine detox", which besides being a frankly retarded name, doesn't seem to provide any longterm relief to its adherents. The majority who try it end up back on the phone after a few days. Try something else, and the problem isn't that big of a deal in the first place for most.
I don't share what seem to be your firm beliefs here. I think the jury, so to speak, is still out on the effects of smartphones on attention spans or the brain generally. I think it's going to take a longer time than we've had to know. No matter how thrilling and convenient they become.
I was filling out the ACX survey the other day and I ticked the boxes to indicate "I didn't have the internet growing up." I was in my mid-thirties when I got my first smartphone. I have read your views elsewhere that the good old days weren't so good, and perhaps from the perspective of current comfort that has a certain ring of truth ("They had no refrigeration or antibiotics or even sanitation, etc etc") but I also believe you personally are rather an extremist when it comes to modernism (I use that word idiosyncratically {my phone is telling me that is not a word} to mean something like futurism and a love for technology). I could be reading you wrong, of course. (That's probably a pun.)
I sometimes long for the idle days of youth, not so much for me because I have memories. But that my boys don't have this. Ranging up and down pecan groves with the shells crackling under my sneakers, just wandering in the woods looking for arrowheads or sitting still up in a tree hoping to see wildlife. I'm sure this sounds maudlin (it does even to me as I type it) but my teenagers might well never have these experiences of stillness and just observing the world. Of course you may counter "What's stopping them?" and you'd be right on the surface, but I often ask them on weekends if they'd like to go for a walk with me (we live in a very walkable, pretty interesting area near a massive forested park) but the tune of their electronics (YouTube, whatever's on Prime, their PS5) is inevitably far more attractive. Just teens being teens? I'm sure that's part of it; that certainly must be part of it. And of course old man's gonna old man.
I feel the same about drugs like Ozempic in that their long-term effects are not yet known. One always pays the piper eventually, at least in my experience.
Neither did I. My parents were luddites about things like giving their kids phones or internet access, I was probably past 16 when I first got a decent smartphone and a broadband connection. It's too long ago for me to resent them for it, but it was a stupid decision then and remains that way.
So I certainly am not so young that I don't remember a time when television and books were your best bet for entertainment, I happen to remember being rather dissatisfied with that state of affairs, and even more when it was artificially prolonged. I certainly didn't enjoy nature much at that time, but maybe it's all the mosquitoes that sour me on them.
As you correctly state, I think modernity is the best things have ever been, though I can happily acknowledge that people can have different tastes and there are certainly normal people who still pine for the uh, pines, and love being outdoors and on the trail. It just isn't my cup of caffeinated beverage. The majority of people do have that option, like your kids, and find other things more attractive. I understand that can be painful for you, given how dear that experience is to your own heart.
This kind of belief always confuses me. Many people seem to have an adversarial relationship with the universe, as if there's some ironclad law of Equivalent Exchange, and that because a simple pill has had so many positive benefits, there must be a catch somewhere, maybe it causes brain tumors fifty years down the line or something.
Thankfully, that isn't how things work. Semaglutide/Ozempic was known to be safe when it was first approved for diabetes a good while back. Then said diabetics began to lose an incredible amount of weight. Some drugs for diabetes cause weight loss, but not nearly as much, some even cause weight gain. This was so surprising they looked into it further and then were so blown away they decided to apply to the FDA for another trial to treat just obesity alone.
And then, after it was approved for that purpose, doctors noticed it was suddenly curing alcoholism and gambling addictions. It's basically an anti-superstimulus drug to a degree.
It is also extremely safe, the only negative consequence of note is occasional constipation in some people, and loss of muscle with the fat, which is a common issue for any treatment that causes rapid weight loss, be it gastric bypass surgery or fasting. The benefits still outweigh the risk enormously.
Your suspicion is highly unwarranted, all the more because other people with the same kind of suspicion have done their best to find something horribly wrong with it and failed to turn anything up.
The universe is apathetic, not evil. We can occasionally find ourselves a good thing, ozempic seems to be one of them.
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From experience, more accurately. I've done this myself, I was stuck with a shelf full of Dickens for 2 weeks without internet. The mental effects are real, even for someone who ticks the "ADHD" boxes.
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