61–70 of 148 posts
Pretty sure I’d be happier if I didn’t have to work for a living.
I recommend doing a hardcore survival course. You’ll come back knowing 1. you don’t need a job (you do need an occupation…) and 2. why you appreciate modern life, while at the same time why modern life is a bit sad, taking us away from our true habitat.
Anna Lembke’s “Dopamine Nation” has a lot of interesting takes on the subject. One takeaway I got is that dopamine seeks a balance. Opting for pleasure seeking often ends up getting experienced as pain. An example of that is drug tolerance. Oddly, the reverse is also true: seeking pain can often lead to an experience of pleasure. The invigorated feeling after a cold shower, or how hard exercise leads to highs. She is…
Any interviews or talks you can recommend where she covers the important points of her work?
Pretty sure I’d be happier if I didn’t have to work for a living.
I really like to work and the area I've chosen. What makes it annoying is that I have to work on what upper management thinks is important at any given time. They want me to design a high level software architecture now but I want to code. Next week they want me to code but I want to design. It very rarely aligns. If ever. That annoys me and probably causes management a great deal of anxiety when I go off path. It fe…
OMG, for a moment there i thought you were reading my mind! I've struggled professionally the last few years on this very topic. The only partial solution that i can think of - so far only as an experiment - is to minimize my cost of living, start to slowly partially retire, and move towards being a contract coder - either for corporate gigs or as a sub-contractor for other dev contractors. I figure being a coder (and likely lower level coder, not being like an engineering manager or anything like that anymore), might also allow me the freedom to work remotely, meaning that i can travel a slight bit more. And working in this fashion might give me the freedom to move onto another project/contract if/when i get bored of a particular project and/or client. Its an experiment to be sure...but frankly, that's the only thing that i can think of that might help me. I hope this helps! Happy to discuss more if you have private feedback. (My email is in my profile.)
EDIT: I failed to add that one element that is somewhat holding me back from fully diving into this mode of working right now is (what i feel is) one of the biggest hurdles to entrepreneurial freedom in America: being able to reasonably afford good, solid healthcare. (This is not meant to be political, just adding it in as another cost of living....and for myself, its not a trivial cost.)
The ultimate hack is weaning yourself off the pull of the hedonic treadmill itself. And the best way I’ve found for that is to optimize for meaning. Of course, meaning is a difficult goal that is individual and prone to change. However, it is also a lot more robust than the desires generated by the treadmill. Another way to think about it is learning to practice being content where you are (however imperfect) and sin…
Anna Lembke’s “Dopamine Nation” has a lot of interesting takes on the subject. One takeaway I got is that dopamine seeks a balance. Opting for pleasure seeking often ends up getting experienced as pain. An example of that is drug tolerance. Oddly, the reverse is also true: seeking pain can often lead to an experience of pleasure. The invigorated feeling after a cold shower, or how hard exercise leads to highs. She is…
I've tried a bunch of different exercise methods. Gone running, swimming, weightlifting etc and I've never experienced anything close to a high afterward. I'll be tired, sometimes I'll feel proud of breaking a personal record but there's never any physical positive sensation or euphoria to me that would resemble the "runners high" that people often refer to. I think I'd exercise much more consistently if there were any biological feedback mechanism to make me want to rather than doing it the way I do, like it's a chore.
The closest thing I can compare would get the transformation of anxiety into excitement from getting a piercing but even that's super short lasting, maybe five to fifteen minutes of shaky internal excitement followed by a quick regression to baseline.
I think you can simplify this. Consider your wants and needs. Most of us get stuck in our wants. We want to get a promotion, we want a nice car, we want a perfect family vacation. But do we need any of those? Not necessarily. We get stuck on the treadmill by not knowing the difference of our wants and needs. When you realize you don’t need the things you want, you focus more on the things you need. Introspection in m…
Anna Lembke’s “Dopamine Nation” has a lot of interesting takes on the subject. One takeaway I got is that dopamine seeks a balance. Opting for pleasure seeking often ends up getting experienced as pain. An example of that is drug tolerance. Oddly, the reverse is also true: seeking pain can often lead to an experience of pleasure. The invigorated feeling after a cold shower, or how hard exercise leads to highs. She is…
Are exercise highs real? Do all people experience them or is it a genetic niche? I've tried a bunch of different exercise methods. Gone running, swimming, weightlifting etc and I've never experienced anything close to a high afterward. I'll be tired, sometimes I'll feel proud of breaking a personal record but there's never any physical positive sensation or euphoria to me that would resemble the "runners high" that p…
They're real, but (probably, usually) not literal. Exercise just leaves me feeling good, all over. If you've had the feeling, you'll know what I mean.
Some people don't seem to get it at all. And some probably do experience a literal high; if the dial can be dialed all the way down, I'm sure it can go to 11 as well. It's unfortunate if you're in the first group, of course.
I don't get it very strongly myself, but I compensate by making the exercise itself enjoyable. Swimming is boring. Spend a few hours hiking across a mountain ridge -- that's anything but boring. Still tiring, but the views are worth it, and it's a great place for lunch.
Anna Lembke’s “Dopamine Nation” has a lot of interesting takes on the subject. One takeaway I got is that dopamine seeks a balance. Opting for pleasure seeking often ends up getting experienced as pain. An example of that is drug tolerance. Oddly, the reverse is also true: seeking pain can often lead to an experience of pleasure. The invigorated feeling after a cold shower, or how hard exercise leads to highs. She is…
Are exercise highs real? Do all people experience them or is it a genetic niche? I've tried a bunch of different exercise methods. Gone running, swimming, weightlifting etc and I've never experienced anything close to a high afterward. I'll be tired, sometimes I'll feel proud of breaking a personal record but there's never any physical positive sensation or euphoria to me that would resemble the "runners high" that p…
I had to build the endurance to go over 6 miles without stopping to experience my first runner's high.
I had to last a whole half in a basketball league to experience being in the zone.
It took me a couple years to even get the feeling, but now that I've experienced it, I can't stop doing it. I think there's a personalized threshold for everyone, but for me, it was pushing myself quite far beyond my limits.
Anna Lembke’s “Dopamine Nation” has a lot of interesting takes on the subject. One takeaway I got is that dopamine seeks a balance. Opting for pleasure seeking often ends up getting experienced as pain. An example of that is drug tolerance. Oddly, the reverse is also true: seeking pain can often lead to an experience of pleasure. The invigorated feeling after a cold shower, or how hard exercise leads to highs. She is…
Are exercise highs real? Do all people experience them or is it a genetic niche? I've tried a bunch of different exercise methods. Gone running, swimming, weightlifting etc and I've never experienced anything close to a high afterward. I'll be tired, sometimes I'll feel proud of breaking a personal record but there's never any physical positive sensation or euphoria to me that would resemble the "runners high" that p…