121–130 of 151 posts
Only a matter of time before we are expected to take drugs to be better at our jobs.
We're all on caffeine already and no one is clutching pearls over it. How is taking harder drugs any different other than in effectiveness?
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Most of your post resonates with me. Can you clarify what you mean by “actually me”?
I've come to realize that "I" am just a small part of the brain. A virtual machine running on top of the primitive host. Every single second is a struggle over the who gets control of the hardware, and most of the time the host wins. What "I" want and what the primitive host brain/OS wants are 2 completely different things. Food, shelter, reproduction. That's all it needs. Needless to say, "I" want so much more. Of c…
One commenter on HN once wrote, that meditation helps him more than the stimulants. The ten stages of meditation (https://www.consciouslifestylemag.com/wp-content/uploads/201...) depicts the mind as an elephant too. It gets distracted by the ape mind (look! shiny!) in the beginning. If you want to start meditation, get the book that has been recommended here before: Mind Illuminated by John Yates
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Caffeine wears off quickly, and seems to be good for you. I go off cold turkey once in a while, and the worst I've ever gotten is a week of mild headaches.
Caffeine forms an addiction in a few weeks, and requires increasing doses just to keep you normal . What's good for you are other parts of the coffee bean. I avoid taking caffeine with any regularity, let alone daily. This is why I can get a full kick from a cup when I need it.
Taking my last drink at the office and stopping for the rest of the day works.
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Caffeine wears off quickly, and seems to be good for you. I go off cold turkey once in a while, and the worst I've ever gotten is a week of mild headaches.
Caffeine forms an addiction in a few weeks, and requires increasing doses just to keep you normal . What's good for you are other parts of the coffee bean. I avoid taking caffeine with any regularity, let alone daily. This is why I can get a full kick from a cup when I need it.
Increasing doses only works up to a point, your brain has only so much capacity to support caffeine; anything beyond that just affects the rest of your body but does nothing to the brain.
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I've been on adderall since I was 17. I'm 32 now. Almost more of my life has been spent on it than off it. I've been productive in a variety of ways. Some examples are listed on my patreon: https://www.patreon.com/shawwn but I feel silly bragging about comparatively minor accomplishments in ML. But I know for a fact that without adderall, I wouldn't have done a damn thing. I've tried for a few months. Shrugged and we…
This sums up perfectly the issue with mental health problems. Burn-out. Depression. ADHD. Being 'old'. You cut slack for someone with a broken leg or a blind cane. But unless you've been there yourself, you don't understand what's going on in the head of someone else. So the natural thing to do is to decide "they're slacking".
In fact it is even worse because e.g. irrational behaviour of a mentally ill person often invokes a negative response. This results in stigmatisation, which is inherently counter productive.
A general mindset change is needed to address this on a larger scale. Specifically, in education there should be much more of a focus on ethics than there is now. This is hard because it can be in contrast to "profit-focused" education where e.g. the main goal of studying a field is to get a well paying job at a big company. But of course there are many factors there such as how a university is funded and can keep running.
Sadly, it doesn't look like the general population is ready for these discussions because as a human race, we cannot even get over more known/discussed problems such as racism.
Only a matter of time before we are expected to take drugs to be better at our jobs.
We're all on caffeine already and no one is clutching pearls over it. How is taking harder drugs any different other than in effectiveness?
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This might be the third or fourth time I've been asked so I'm going to write about it on my website tomorrow and share it here once I'm done. Apologies.
I'm interested too; feeling described to a T by your post. I struggled heavily with focus issues as a child / teen but it was never diagnosed far enough to try and medicate me out of it. As an adult with improved awareness of my attention issues, the prospect of pursuing a prescriptive fix that might just make me feel worse is intimidating.
I think medicine should be used as a last resort and it is not a "fix" or "solution". Dealing with my ADHD is still a daily struggle and I didn't transform into a better person by taking the medicine
What it did was to turn my experience of my life from a large overwhelming interconnected problem into small doable issues. It made me able to pick up each of the many broken aspects of my life, fix it, and move on to the next
I'm afraid of the notion, I often hear, where medicine "fixes" something. My ADHD didn't go away with the medicine, but it did make me able to take responsibility for my own life and feel confident enough in myself, that I don't want to apologize for needing a different environment to be productive
The good thing about methylphenidate is that it works quickly (20 minutes or so after taking it), so you know pretty quickly if it's a good fit. It wears off after 4-8 hours depending on the formulation, so if you feel worse it'll only be for a short period
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I use stimulants to cope with my ADHD. The problem is that without it my mind - a bright one - goes absolutely blank. It actively refuses to cooperate unless what I want to do is extremely interesting. Without the stimulants I feel like a train cart being taken to a different direction by the rail tracks, pushed or pulled against its will by the train. I was unable to go clean my teeth, eat, or clean my flat; and I d…
Yeah, at the core we're still just animals. Our consciousness just runs inside the brain and tries its best to control the hardware/wetware. Some are more successful at it than others. Personally, I want a refund heh
When I was a child and teen I was a hyperactive, unstimulated, bored, D- student. Ritalin drastically changed that and I was getting A's and teachers described me as a whole different person. I would too: it made me antisocial and jittery and basically robbed me of my humanity. Since then I've found drug-free strategies to manage my intellectual/social Jekyll and Hyde. The idea of performance enhancing drugs making t…
should we tell em about coffee?
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We're all on caffeine already and no one is clutching pearls over it. How is taking harder drugs any different other than in effectiveness?
Its a question of where the line is drawn. Some, or many perhaps, would prefer a world where they aren't forced to alter their brain chemistry to the degree that a powerful pharmaceutical does. Caffeine, while substantial, does not have this same degree of power, whether positive or negative. There are reasons why one is a controlled substance and the other freely available OTC.
