Why does real life not provide the same gratification hormones?
Obviously it should make me feel much happier and accomplished to do literally anything constructive with my time, even more so when my bank account total goes up from getting paid, than to have a mediocre time getting dunked on in an online shooter, but it doesn’t work that way…
Are there any studies done on this? I know there are apps and systems that attempt to do just this, gameifying real life chores with moderate success. Why does this not work as well as one would expect? The psychology should be very interesting.
I’ve never gotten around to actually reading up on this, but I’ve always suspected it has to do with the frequency of gratification. In real life you could study for 8 hours and, while you’ll learn a lot, you don’t get that dopamine (or whatever) hit until you complete the test, succeed at the project, etc. Games, however, are constructed so that you get little rewards at regular intervals to keep you hooked, like levels, new gear, etc. Some, particularly a lot of mobile games, obviously prey on susceptible people with that loop, but even “regular” games can get pretty addictive with that sort of progression.
(I’m far from anti-gaming. It’s my main hobby. This is just my guess at how the psychology behind it works.)
Doing something constructive feels really good once you’ve finished and gotten a reward for accomplishing it. Games hijack this gratification system and instead trickle little rewards at you constantly so you always feel like you’re accomplishing something.
Games are manipulating you and making you feel happy about progress that happens inside a game that isnt even real. But it works.
Real life is designed to be debt slavery, and for you to constantly run faster to get an education, a good job and a family. My girlfriend feels she is getting enough satisfaction in life from our kid and her gardening interest. I’m not feeling that way personally, and I wish there was something more exciting to look forward to, because life can be pretty boring if you don’t feel excited about work and family.
I feel like games are a way to forget the boring real life for a while. But they are clearly manipulative.
Real life is boring because there is no feeling of any meaning to what we do. If we were living in a star trek society where you could be proud of humanity and what we are accomplishing, it would be easier to feel like we are doing good. But there is just no higher purpose to any of our current activities. So it’s boring.
Human leaders are super primitive as well, and just depressing to watch. They are the worst of people, but being advertised as leaders.
Sitting is boring, emails are boring, not owning capital is boring. Religion is not, plants are not, sunlight is not. Building things is cool when they’re yours or your friends’. Kids are fun.
I feel like some guys tend to be wired to really enjoy the grind, but you have to get regular little indications towards progress, and kinda let yourself get ‘addicted’.
The EU should fine companies for introducing new standards that break old standards. Or any shit standards like Toslink: lemmy.world/comment/10671314 . Standardization organizations shouldn’t be sleeping through all this shit.
I don’t use screw drivers enough to know what these are for. But from a programmer’s standpoint, punishing people to deviate away from standard may cause more harm than good, no?
Suppose it’s easier/cheaper/more effective to deviate a bit from standard, why should I be punished to do things a bit differently?
Think about all the micro USB, lightning cables, USB cables etc. In programming it’s different, but for this stuff it’s a waste of money and actual resources.
One issue is that it can be leveraged to maintain a monopoly. Microsoft famously made a bunch of small modifications to the HTML standard, so that web sites that wanted to work with MS Internet Explorer had to write custom versions to be compatible. But because so many people just used IE because it was bundled with Windows, those “extensions” started to become their own standard, so that then other browsers had to adopt MS’s idiosyncrasies in order to be compatible with the sites, which in turn harmed standardization itself. They even had a term for this technique: “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.” It nearly worked for them until Google pushed them out with Chrome. Microsoft tried to do the same thing again with Java until the government got involved.
It’s complicated, certainly, but there are legitimate cases where “just a little tweak” can be quite a big problem for a standard.
Nah, not necessarily. I’m 40 and meant to be doing prep study for the Cytech exam and I’ve watched a grand total of one tutorial video, but I’ve put in almost 100 hours on Euro Truck Sim 2.
That has nothing to do with age. Most people nowadays are so used to instant gratification that they struggle with stuff that only helps them in the long term, me included. Last time I tried to seriously sit down and learn I caught myself doing dishes and watering plants after not even 30mins.
If I have a bowl of rice, and one of the grains is actively trying to end my way of life, I don’t mind when someone shoots at it with an assault rifle.
First of all: rice doesn’t have that kind of agency
Second of all: shooting at a grain of rice in your bowl with an assault rifle is many times more likely to hit you than that specific grain of rice
Third, if that’s REALLY the best analogy you could think of, you should just stop the whole “communicating your thoughts to other people” thing. Evidently it’s not something you’re ever going to get the hang of.
Fourth and finally: a propos of nothing except the fact that I just listened to an episode of My Brother, My Brother, and Me, horses are overrated, and not just by the McElroy brothers.
It’s pretty wishful thinking to think Proj 2025 and all the other MAGAs are going to fade away after the orange man is gone. Did you not see De Santis’ support before Trump entered the race?
No, the person most likely to end democracy will advocate rolling back freedoms to ‘preserve’ it, or to punish the wicked people that are considered their political enemies. The most likely person won’t be a Democrat, but will almost certainly be a leftist that starts their own populist political party
Fascism has always been a right wing ideology. While leftists have made some terrible mistakes, you shouldn’t pretend they are the only or main threat to democracy.
Leftists don’t believe America can be saved, they wouldn’t “roll back freedoms,” whatever the heck that means, they would dismantle the state and build up a new one.
So, for all your haunted ideals, at the end of the day, you are no better than him. You are a narcissistic person that gets a perverse pleasure from the suffering of your perceived political enemies
Well, what if the guy that took Hitlers place was every bit as evil, but wasn’t a bumbling idiot in military matters? Worse yet, what if he gave his scientist budgets and told them to make super weapons with no real interference? The first atomic bomb could have dropped on Bristol or Leningrad, instead of Hiroshima
There was plenty of resistance to the Nazis rise to power, until the Nazis consolidated power and suppressed it. Any authoritarian leader in 1930s Germany would have done the same thing. Remember, if you’re taking out Hitler before 1931, all the factors that allowed him to rise to power are still there, like the great depression and the treaty of Versailles. Anyone becoming a dictator during that time would have done so likely by some variation of Hilters playback with much the same results
Yes, the liberals generally aligned with the fascists against the antifascist left. This consolidation of power did happen because of the material conditions in Weimar Germany, you are absolutely correct. However, that does not mean killing Hitler would have been worthless.
History does not move by Great Man Theory, we agree on this. At the same time, fighting Nazi leaders does harm the Nazi movement.
The image is very much in the postmodern style of Cindy Sherman, the text reminds me hard of Jenny Holzer and her confrontational yet enigmatic sentences.
It’s amazing.
This is a cross-post from another sub where the OP was downvoted for asking on opinions about that book. Do you mind elaborating on why would you prefer hammering nails into your eyes over reading this?
Doesnt seem big enough… Today an old lady came to me suggesting that the bad weather is caused by wars… I said what ? She explained that bombs create clouds and as such the bad weather…
It’s become a meme called “lesbian silence” or “gay silence” or something, it’s supposed to represent a moment when a gay person can’t or doesn’t want to openly talk about their sexuality, so they just kinda - stay quiet like she does.
There’s this song by Wall of Voodoo called ‘‘Far Side of Crazy’’, go listen to that a few times then come back and read the rest of the comment.
spoilerpretty cool song right?
spoilerAnyway, It’s about John Hinckley, a lot of the lyrics were lifted from a sort of manafesto he wrote, he tried to assassinate Ronald Regan, he had a lot of mental health issues, and he watched Taxi Driver, and decided to do what he titular character does in the film by assassinating a politician, it’s not clear if he understood Jodie Foster was a seperate person from the character she played in the film, but his motivation was to impress her.
Anyone who knows who Hickley was historically, as he was released recently, and there’s video of Regan doing his ‘missed me’ joke at rallies making it’s rounds ever few months, I’d say pretty much anyone with internet or reads the newspaper likely knows.
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