"All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

Neat conceptualisation and neat graphical design of the blog. Keep up the good work!

I couldn't fully relate to the article because the finish comes across as hurried and too convenient. I went through the same process of giving up the things listed, and my life didn't suddenly become easier.

There was an awkward period where I free'd up my time from giving up the same habits and, frankly, did not know what to do with my free time.

I think the two-word analogy explained itself, and if the author had saved some energy not re-explaining it then there would be enough word count left to take the subject more seriously than the rushed ending.

This dopamine phracking reminds me of neal stephenson's "snow crash".

"[.] a counter-virus (known as the nam-shub of Enki), which, when delivered, stopped the Sumerian language from being processed by the brain and led to the development of other, less literal languages, giving birth to the Babel myth. L. Bob Rife had been collecting Sumerian artifacts and developed the drug Snow Crash to make the public vulnerable to new forms of me, which he would control."

-- wikipedia, Snow Crash

Besides the obvious examples of living our power fantasy of "finally writing Rust without knowing Rust, thanks to AI", I noticed the same exact thing in video games, and it has so many layers of bull that I could easily come up with a blog post about it.

What made it so obvious in video games is the that, while video games are already artificial, some decide to simply extract the things that give you dopamine hits and pleasure and shove them into a colorful bucket and call it a day. Yes, I'm talking about Vampire Survivors and Vampire Crawlers. We went from games that are mechanically complicated and a joy to explore and master, to games that are mechanically simple and exist just to give you dopamine hits.

And just like many comments already said, there are in many people who will opt to play that kind of games, so they do make money. But for me, a "game" isn't just mentally stimulating but also mentally engaging, either with the storytelling or with the game mechanics.

Furthermore, the mass appeal of gaming after 2000's did constrained creativity and made the games that are really expensive to make effectively same-y, so you can see that the concept that I grew up loving was reduced to the necessary parts that will make it sell, and reproduced over and over and over to the point where it's rare for me to find an AAA game that care about. However, that's because I've been playing video games since the Atari era, and I developed my taste towards a specific way, so you can make a case that I'm not like those who grew up eating the artificial flavor of strawberries and preferring it to the real thing.

A deeper dive would go into why this seems to be such a quintessentially American pursuit.

I'd speculate perhaps something to do with capitalism, and also maybe a culture made out of people coming together from other cultures was more able to throw out "baggage"(ie context) and distil pure experiences.

This feels related to Goodhart's law, but applied to pleasure and culture

I've been maintaining a log of myself, instead of dopamine franking, I call this 'seeker behavior.' Frankly, adding a name to it is helping me avoid the high and letting me enjoy things more as time goes by, try it out!

Sin-object fetishization is the act of finding something apparently concrete to blame on what is judged to be sinful behavior. This apparently Christian-origin practice is now secularized, and needs to sound scientific and objective. And since everything that we experience is mediated through the brain or neurons (gut brain) a natural candidate is “dopamine”.

The sin here is hedonic pleasure seeking. You know, in plain words, not misleadingly scientific ones which 99.5% of the word-wielders have no qualifications to meaningfully discuss.

Without this baggage, we can more easily ask why we seek pleasure to an unhealthy degree.

- Pleasure-seeking is natural but needs to be moderated

- Maybe we seek palatable food because try to compensate for a diet that is already bad and thus is missing some nutrients

- Maybe we seek for pron because we are touch-starved

- Maybe we doomscroll because we are distracting ourselves from worry; poor mental hygiene and discipline

- Maybe there is a correlation between nicotine use and stressful occupations or life situations

But with sin-object fetishiziation this gets readily collapsed to a demon, a concrete thing that lives in our brain and is seeking to destroy us. Just say no to dopamine.

This is a matter of living. Thus science—objective, widely agreed upon reality—is very much a secondary concern to most people who care about excessive pleasure seeking. (Not that this is scientific. Just borrowing and appropriation.) Our subjective experience is more important. With subjective words and reflections we can get somewhere. Even study how we ourselves act: when do we pleasure seek, when are we satisfied without it, etc.

But sin-object fetishization is more about the sin than the cure.

> I don't have any solutions.

The website is random garbage on my phone:

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