i sat to play a new game i was loving yesterday and already ive burned out on it. this is the third game of its sort that i would previously have fallen for bigtime but which has proven to become physically repulsive almost within a day or two.
ninja gaiden, kingdom come deliverance 2 and silksong. all hard as nails and about mastery and progression. my previous favourite games were doom eternal (nightmare), super meatboy (104%) and celeste (100% minus golden strawberries). i lived for this kind of phasic spiking loop and couldn’t imagine life without it.
now… i prefer to sit and scrape these steels against these stones. the sound and the smell and the tactile feedback and the clearing of memory cache in my brain so that i can be more open to the world.
i think the phasic spiking activities - games in particular but also things like fighting or arguing or trying to self-promote - just don’t hold any appeal now that i’m not suck in loops of self. there is no need to complete them; i will just put them down and walk away. i need to stop buying them now ha. oh well; residual behavioural patterns; view them like an experiment.
but all these things. i enjoy washing the pots more than playing a game. i enjoy staring out of the window. just sitting and being. these are things i could not do because of ‘adhd’ (bullshit term - it was because of exaggerated learning caused by dopamine dysregulation; ie. trauma-level learning about normal mundane things)
and now they’re gone.
another one is self promotion. my wife now thinks im onto something. i honestly do believe that this is a remedy for adhd / ptsd / ocd / asd processing headaches + mental rigidity and an explanation for what is commonly termed bipolar disorder.
can you fathom how big that would be?
and my wife now thinks i am probably right and is trying to put me in touch with people. a senior well respected doctor i spoke with is introducing some senior researchers. i have emailed someone in tokyo university, but only because my wife found them.
me… i have no desire to self-promote.
and this is what someone on r/streamentry said about the buddha; that he didn’t go to teach, but people came to him. i can see why. and it’s why the arahants all just kind of… stop pushing things onto others.
when i didn’t have much of value i was forcing it down everyone’s throats. i knew that i had something of value, actually, but it was only from my own perspective. now i think i have something of value which can be genuinely researched and all i seem to do is chill out and make some knives.
but this is the phasic vs tonic dopamine thing again. the thrill of the chase and the glory of victory. i don’t really care any more. id rather be right than wrong but i know that i am right (as far as i can know with my current perceptual framework and knowledge base) and i no longer need other people to know this too.
it’d be great if they did, of course, but the only reason it would be great is because i think if we can genuinely create a treatment program around this, using exercise and pharmacology and deep brain stimulation, we can save hundreds of thousands of lives and improve millions more.
but that’s the only reason. i don’t really care for the thrill of the chase, and it sounds kind of annoying to be in the spotlight. i could do it better than before, but only because i no longer care about it. does that make sense?
i know that this space around me, in my individual sense-sphere, is all that really matters; so why would i want to fill it with clamour and lights and valuations and … well .. difficult computer games. i can see that these things only feed into themselves now, and i no longer get hooked on them. it’s like i have broken the root cause of all addiction. like a non-drinker who just doesn’t see the point in going and sitting in a pub for 12 hours any more.
but i still have the residual habits to burn through until this manifests 100%, i think. i still expect to like these games. but when i try them, once i am past the initial wow-factor, i just find them annoying. they make me less still in my stillness, and less calm in my calmness.
why would i go and sit in a pub if im not gonna drink?
i can see why the buddha would occasionally just throw up his hands and go sit in the forest for a few weeks. let his bhikkus get back to their bhikkering. ha. hey! remember the buddha said time and again he was just a man! a man who taught nothing but the way to end suffering.
well i think that suffering is phasic dopamine, gone rampant. we need a bit, sure, but we neurodivergent folks have a bit too much, don't we Sid? the endocrine system prompts movement through suffering; dopaminergic motivation feels like withdrawal when not acted on. hell; withdrawal is lowered dopamine, for the most part, so we should probably flip that and say that ‘withdrawal mimics dopaminergic motivation’, since the dopamine is the daddy.
anyway. let’s see how this all pans out. would be cool to do a phd (or pdhd as my wife keeps calling it) and then help save some lives. be that priest for the priests that i kept ranting about. maybe see if those visions is had with aripiprazole of witch-doctor dancing with a spliff in a room with an MRI and standing around with zuck and a few others while we test out the metaverse safe container work out. but that was my scaffold and i’m not attached to the idea. it was a tool to do a job, and that job was to reprogram my realworld perceptual framework.
and the job worked a treat it seems.
this blade is coming along nicely :)
/jb202512271932