Emotionally Numb: Expertise Dulls Consumer Experience (2021)

It's the fact that the games are geared towards sexed up number crunching. Anything that can't be quantified into a number is ignored by the developers.

I don't know why people like this stuff. Isn't real life already filled with number crunching?

And yet, you could have told me the exact opposite was true - that increasing knowledge and experience created increased joy in experiences like wine instead of less, and a large segment of people would have also said it was obvious.

Seems related to the reason Buddhism seeks to recreate the state of "Beginner's Mind".

I've found that the real emotional content is in going beyond your previous experience or comfort zone, regardless of skill level.

One thing I noticed after getting to the top international levels of alpine ski racing, was that listening to a novice-intermediate skier enthusiastically exclaim about a cool run or move that they had was nearly indistinguishable from the emotion and content of a fellow top racer telling of an exceptional run. The same enthusiasm, the same energy, and almost the same words, again and again.

While there were of course differences in the actual details, the common denominator was always having gone outside their comfort zone and succeeding. Of course achieving this after a decade+ of intense training requires much higher speed, energies, risks, skills, etc., but it still happens very regularly, and to some degree is what we did it for; competition is a continuous deliberate effort to push beyond your comfort zone every week.

But the article is right in that I'd have no clue how to achieve that again with wine/beer/food tasting, but then I'm no expert there...

edit: punctuation, para breaks, clarity

I feel the same way. Since the subject of this interest is alive, and endlessly diverse, the more I learn about nature, the more wonder I feel. Definitely not numb.

Maybe what needs to be a focus of this study is measuring "numbness" across different subjects of interest.

This article makes sense and explains a great deal. Learning and training trigger dopamine release. Both "learning how" and "learning that." The photography example they use (tool mastery) is a great example. Amateur photographers will regularly change their tools and subject matter to maintain the "sense of wonder." Meanwhile, wedding photographers will be bored with their professions.

We can see this with software engineers routinely trying out new languages and tools and hobby projects.