Got me there

I think that when you “poison” your brain with easy dopamine like candy, fastfood, alcohol, drugs, endless scrolling, etc you will shift the internal goalpost of when something feels good. Compared to these easy sources of “joy”, life just isn’t that interesting. The scale changes to the point that normal things cannot longer provide enough jou to be worth it.

Personally I’ve been trying to constrain myself a bit on these easy sources of “empty happiness”. Things that do give me joy without ruining my brain are, among others: running, music festivals, listening to nice music, looking back at something cool I made, making something cool, playing videogames, chilling with friends (though this usually involves alcohol). These things definitely don’t reliably provide joy, Most of the times they’re just “nice” but definitely not amazing. But every now and then I get hit with that dopamine rush and it’s all worth it.

Up until now it was my student time, though I think this depends on personal circumstances and is different for everyone. Childhood was nice, but obviously limited in terms of freedom. Teens where decent, but not 100% great. Student life was easily the best for me, I’d constantly meet like-minded people, there were so many cheap or free activities, and people constantly said shit like “you guys are our future” etc. I also loved having well defined work and goals, limited scope, and lots of depth and interesting challenges. Now that I’m working it’s usually very shallow work in terms of complexity, but with lots of communication and interdependencies. And it goes ever on because agile, no clear quartile or semester goals like university.

Now that I’m working I have the money, but I lost the easy access to like-minded people and fun activities. Organizing something with friends turned from “let’s grab a drink this afternoon” into “let’s align our agendas to find a free spot somewhere in 6 weeks”. And programming turned from “here’s a algorithm someone came up with that you can implement” to “the customer wants this button to do X, hi spend the next week implementing/testing/finding out its meant to work differently”.

I’m a bit biased though, because I’m currently burnt out. Work life was decent for a bit, it just temporarily got worse and kinda pushed me over the edge. If anyone has tips I’d love to hear them :3

Then at least it’s their own fault

Having a career. At home though, nothing :3

Okay but does that matter? I recently saw a video from Veratasium about teflon and there they mentioned that teflon is too large to be absorbed by the body, it just comes out on the other end. It’s the smaller compounds used for producing teflon that are poisoning our water, bodies, and everything else with PFAS. Companies just dumping this poison into our water supply. If this is false I’m open to learn ofc.

Wtf. How did they not at the very least build in a reasonable safe state whenever the thing gets disconnected. Something like “keep current position, disable heating” or return to flat position.

But the more pressing question is: why does a bed have an internet connection? Who does this help? And why does it NEED an internet connection? Surely a few Back-up buttons for when the service eventually goes down isn’t too much to ask? Who would buy such a thing?!

No definitely not. Like, it’s fine if you don’t care for some uncle who’s kind of a dick and who you see once a year. But if you care for no-one but yourself then something is out of the norm. Might not be something you can help, but it’s probably a good idea to run this by a professional.

Personally I’m kinda extreme in the opposite direction. I can feel intense empathy towards inanimate objects. I’ll feel sad for the slightly fucked apple at the supermarket because no-one will buy it. I struggle to watch movies with too emotional plots because I start to experience those emotions myself intensely.

Yeah that’s a bit much tbh. Personally I find the train to be way too loud usually. Other people talking, train noises, maybe a screaming baby or something. I’ll just listen to some music and stare out of the window (if it isn’t dark).

Unfortunately too little coding and too much random busywork. Updating random documents, fixing small bugs, updating versions in like 4 higher projects to make sure my new feature actually shows up in the final software. But when coding, it’s indeed quite often just adding a random new button or something with all the backend logic as well. And the testing of course.

I’m currently burnt out because we spent months on end doing preparation work, creating all kinds of UML diagrams to prepare for a big rework, only to be put on a different project and do it again. Although I was probably already on my limit before that…

It all sounds a bit negative, but when we’re in the normal flow it’s still mostly just coding and debugging, two things that I do enjoy. Spending a whole week hunting down some obscure bug that only happens in certain conditions sounds like hell to some, but to me it’s like a murder mystery and I love that shit. With complex and large corporate systems there are so many suspects for a bug, it’s a real challenge to uncover the mystery and by the time you find it you’ve learnt a lot about some random part of the application.

I tend to write Java. Many people don’t like Java, and honestly it’s also not a fancy language. It isn’t Rust, Julia, or Haskell, languages that I find very interesting. But at the end of the day I’m not sure I’d pick any of them over Java for building a large application like this. Java is boring because it’s quite well designed for large enterprise work. It keeps people from doing too many flashy things that are understood by no-one. It just works ™. It’s fast enough, has great tooling with Maven, does everything pretty well, has lots of libraries to use, and almost everyone can write it.

Yeah I also tend to play against the bots. Me and my friends have hundreds of hours against the AI at this point. Nowadays we tend to play against the Hard Barbarian AI. We usually win, but the AI can be very variable and sometimes it just turns on and destroys us. If we manage to expand aggressively in the early game, manage to contest roughly half the map (or have a good choke point), we can survive the early onslaught and out-eco the AI in the late game. Which is the most fun way of winning imo. Chill behind defences and slowly get the upper hand until we waltz over the AI with experimental units. We did ban ourselves from “cheesy” tactics like nuking the AI, target bombing their economy, or aggressively targeting our long range artillery at their economy. The AI just doesn’t seem to sufficiently defend against these and it quickly ends the game in a lame way. Unless we’re losing hard, then everything is permitted.

Same. I don’t like playing RTS games the good way. I just like building a cozy little camp and defending it, slowly exploring the map and just building whatever units I feel like building. I enjoy games like Age of Empires and Beyond All Reason because the maps tend to be quite large and random. It usually takes a while before I get overwhelmed if I’m losing I those games, and if I’m winning I can spend a lot of time just messing around without the game being over.

Games like Starcraft or Warcraft seem to be built too much for quick games where you have to be constantly moving. Expansion locations are very determined and scarce and resources run out way too fast to just turtle in my little corner.

We have no guarantees that you’re human, you could be a mosquito spreading anti-spider sentiment!

I have 2 spider homies in my bedroom. The past summer they caught a lot of bugs and now they’re just chilling. As long as they don’t enter the no-no zone they can stay. Jumping spiders are always welcome too

At the moment almost every weekend in person, though on average it’s more like every 2 weeks I think. It used to be way more but after finishing my study it became insanely hard to meet new people like myself. I also game with friends more than half of the days in the evenings tho, so that’s nice.

The main loss since finishing my study is the regularity and spontaneity of meeting with friends. It requires careful alignment of agenda’s and planning ahead for over a month to get something done. I hate planning, but the downside of making friends who are like me is that most of my friends also hate doing so. So sometimes I have to push a bit to get stuff planned. Previously we’d naturally run into eachother and just decide to grab a beer that evening or watch a movie or something.

I’d also live to make more queer friends where I’m at but every group seems to be for students or elderly or something.

I want to use it but I keep forgetting it exists. Something like this should just be accessible via button in the UI so no-one misses it

I recently got a photo printer and the experience is surprisingly similar

I’m unaware of our governments invading Africa right now, so I’ll have to inform myself there. I definitely also don’t agree with past invasions done by western countries under dubious circumstances like Iraq or the colonial times. The west definitely had its fair share of deplorabele behavior in the past (and potentially the future) and it’s alright to criticise that.

But we should also absolutely defend our borders and our democracy, as well as other sovereign states like Ukraine. Defensively Europe has been asleep, and when Ukraine was invaded we were kinda caught napping. It sucks that so much money needs to be invested in war instead of good things, but democracy is worth defending. At the same time we obviously also need to make sure that there’s still a democracy and freedom worth the protect with all those far-right idiots around. Our democracies definitely aren’t perfect, but they’re kinda the best we have.

I have friends who’ve been to Russia, and I’m also European and not American so this is way closer to home than you’d like to imagine. I understand that there are plenty of Russians who don’t want this, my friends who went there met many great people. But their country is at this moment at war with a sovereign nation for no other reason than imperialism. Ukraine didn’t choose this war, but got invaded anyway. Many innocent people have to die because of the actions of Putin and his regime. When I say Russia I mean their government, and the actions of their country as a whole. They’re taking land that doesn’t belong ot them and causing a lot of unnecessary death and destruction in the process. Should the western nations just let Ukraine fall? Let their people be subjected to a total autocracy instead of the flawed but functional democracy that they were living under?

I have this with lots of other things currently. Whenever I cannot do one of my hobbies, I will fantasize about them and come up with all kinds of ideas of what to do, but when the time comes to do them I just cannot get going and sometimes even get stressed. My brain would rather just stare at YouTube videos all day. I believe it’s our dopamine systems being completely fried due to all the easily accessible instant gratification online.

I recently read a book again for the first time in years, Dune, and I was struggling so hard in the beginning. My brain just wanted to scroll. I enjoyed the book, but nevertheless my brain wanted instant gratification and I had to resist the urge to grab my phone while reading the book. Luckily this subsided after getting a bit further.

I don’t often have this for games yet luckily. I’m currently absorbed in Hades II and no amount of brain rot can get me out of it. But it’s one of the last sacred places, and even gaming sometimes suffers this fate. There are so many gun things to do that it’s just overwhelming, whenever you do something your brain always has something else it wants to do more. Not because it actually wants it, but just because it likes the idea of it. As a kid I didn’t have all this stuff, and didn’t experience all these things, so everything I did felt special.