What brings me pleasure is playing strategic computer games. I was addicted to playing dota. I was playing 12-16 hours a day, which left no place for socializing, career, family, even basic self-maintenance suffered. Anything meaningful, art, self-improvement was cut. It's a disgraceful, shameful life.
The meaning of life is not the blind pursuit of pleasure. We are humans precisely because we follow higher purposes.
Except that you're talking about a game hyper-optimized to be addictive, and while I can't speak for your specific case, in general having an addiction usually involves said addiction being a coping mechanism to fill some kind of hole in someone's life, or avoiding the pain of some unresolved trauma. Which is not at all the same thing as being proof of humans inherently being lazy and needing self-help gurus to fix that.
>Except that you're talking about a game hyper-optimized to be addictive
When I stopped playing dota, civ took it's place, then reddit, then tiktok, etc.
I've resorted to hard blocking a long list of apps and websites. I've seen other people on hackernews having the exact same problem and stumbling upon the exact same stack of solutions.
My point is, it's not the one game, it's the entire internet.
>said addiction being a coping mechanism to fill some kind of hole in someone's life
I've been to several therapists, which have proven useless. I don't think there is a hole in my life, besides the fact that I'm wasting my entire life on stupid shit because I procrastinate.
If you told a king from 500 years past that in the future there is a magical "other" world inside a crystal crafted by the finest of mages where conquest, diplomacy, and economics can be practiced to perfection without risking no lives nor resources but that of time, and that this endeavor is both stupid and a complete waste of time, he'd think you're not only mad, but foolish to squander such an opportunity to learn how to govern a kingdom, and by extension, yourself.
Your mistake is not one of playing games, but of thinking there's nothing to be learned from doing so. Sid Meier's Civilization is not some slot machination to drain you of everything. It is the design of one of our era's greatest minds, in the pursuit of understanding the systems underlying our Earthly existence, and the democratization of that research to the fingertips of all.
For someone who enjoys balancing the needs of a kingdom, you've yet to learn to balance the needs of your own body.
> conquest, diplomacy, and economics can be practiced to perfection
This is a ridiculous analogy. The vast majority of video games have so little application to the real world as to be effectively useless. This is relevant in the particular case of Dota 2, which, while an incredibly interesting game, has virtually no relevance to the real world.
"Virtually" because if I say "no relevance" then pedants will quickly point out that you can learn some basic economics by looking at the skin marketplace, or something. Yeah, sure, and you can learn more about human anatomy by having sex. The ratios of learning for those things compared to doing dedicated learning (textbooks, classes, internet research, practice) are at least in the ratio of 100 to 1, if not more, for all but the tiny minority of games explicitly designed to have a significantly amount of learning potential (e.g. Kerbal Space Program).
Using your own analogy, if you told said king that using this crystal took you 100 to 1000 times longer to learn about things than the magical libraries that we also have available to us, which also only cost your own personal time, and then advocated for their use, he'd definitely think that you were crazy - and you would be.
> It is the design of one of our era's greatest minds, in the pursuit of understanding the systems underlying our Earthly existence, and the democratization of that research to the fingertips of all.
Sid Meyer is not "one of our era's greatest minds" even in the particularly narrow field of video game development.
> For someone who enjoys balancing the needs of a kingdom, you've yet to learn to balance the needs of your own body.
There is no "balancing the needs of a kingdom" going on. The Civilization games are optimized for entertainment first, and if educational value is optimized for at all, it's definitely not in the top 5. If you take someone who has put thousands of hours of Civilization into any position of authority (and no other relevant training), they'll a pathetic, miserable mess, and not able to keep up with someone who's read a just few dozen hours' worth of well-chosen history, economics, and military strategy books.
If you could learn to rule merely by playing Civ, then American anime enthusiasts would be able to learn Japanese merely by watching anime, which virtually never happens, and it's pretty well known that it's not a feasible learning strategy.
Sid Meier's Civilization is considered one of the most influential computer games in history, in addition to being a critical and commercial success, and a pedagogical boon to humanity.
The statements you make only reveal your utter ignorance to the subject at hand, as even the most cursory of web searches will squarely establish these facts.
> particularly narrow field of video game development
Video games are almost bigger than TV, movies, and radio combined. I hate to ad hominem but you're talking out of your ass.
You completely failed to respond to any of my points about anything substantive except quarreling about how great a video game Civilization is using subjective opinions.
> Sid Meier's Civilization is considered one of the most influential computer games in history
An extremely subjective list with hundreds of viable candidates for it. What does "one of" even mean here?
> a critical and commercial success
Which, alongside "one of the most influential computer games in history", are all literally completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is "does it have educational value".
> a pedagogical boon to humanity
Citation needed. I've never heard anyone call Civ anything like this, let alone anyone who is a professional educator.
> The statements you make only reveal your utter ignorance to the subject at hand, as even the most cursory of web searches will squarely establish these facts
Incredible arrogance, the old trope "look it up for yourself", and blatantly false. You know what my very first result is for searching "most inflential video games of all time" on Google is? A list of ten games[1] that doesn't have Civ at all. My next result[2] puts it at position 73. Then another list of five games[3] without it.
The very fact that you consider these subjective opinions, which are literally the opposite of facts to be "facts" proves that you have no idea what you're talking about, nor the most basic understanding of logic. (the fact that you don't know what search engine bubbling is doesn't help either)
> Video games are almost bigger than TV, movies, and radio combined.
Which is, again, completely irrelevant, because (1) you're ranking those by some consumer metric, not educational value, and (2) every one of those are entertainment fields. Which is more important: video games, or the study of physics or history itself? (this is a rhetorical question, and again, regardless of the truth of these claims, they simply do not matter to the discussion)
If you seriously think that video games are at all comparable in educational value to actual education, then you better provide some extremely convincing evidence, because it's pretty clearly false at first glance.
To sum up: aside from the small part of your comment that is objectively false, this entire thing is purely subjective opinion with absolutely no substantiation whatsoever, in addition to being utterly irrelevant to the rest of the thread. Please make points that are actually related to the subject at hand.
I know and agree that there are lessons to be learned from civ and dota. I never said it was a complete waste of time, but it is an addiction that takes over your life.
Tiktok, reddit, binging netflix, in contrast are probably directly harmful.
I will add learning teamwork, and learning incentivisation, and learning how to bend or manipulate rules. It is a great time to be alive if you have any sociopathic tendencies.
> When I stopped playing dota, civ took it's place, then reddit, then tiktok, etc
These are all still examples of things hyper-optimized to have addictive feedback loops.
> My point is, it's not the one game, it's the entire internet.
Fair point, but the author is most strongly disagreeing with the "human nature" claim of laziness, and everything you've described so far strikes me as an external influence coopting human instinct. Kind of like how cheesecake and other hyperprocessed foods coopt our instinct to really like eating fat and sugar, which from an evolutionary standpoint was a very good instinct actually for the sake of survival until extremely recently. Should morbidly obese people lose weight for the sake of their own health? Yes. Should we shame them for being obese when healthy food is hard to come by and extremely bad food is cheap and easy to find? No.
I understand how that might feel like arguing semantics when the end-result is still that you feel like it's hard to get control over your life and addictions, but the difference between blaming oneself and seeing that this is an external influence that one shouldn't hate oneself for is a very significant one.
> When I stopped playing dota, civ took it's place, then reddit, then tiktok, etc.
All of which are also hyper-optimized to be addictive.
Perhaps part of the problem is that you live in a world surrounded by things that are hyper-optimized to feed your addiction rather than bring you joy?
Not the person you asked, but I would guess the fact that "oh shit I forgot to sleep it's six o'clock in the morning" is a universal funny-because-it's-true joke made about all Civ games since forever? "One more turn syndrome"?
Honestly, on what grounds would you deny that Civ games are addictive given this common knowledge?
This is absurd. Neither of your memes provide a shred of evidence that Civ is optimized to be addictive, which is literally the point that I was contesting in my comment.
> Honestly, on what grounds would you deny that Civ games are addictive given this common knowledge?
This also clearly indicates that you didn't read my comment before replying. I was exclusively referring to the claim that Civ games were optimized to be addictive - not that they "were addictive".
You know what other things are addictive, despite having no intentional design put towards that end? Scrolling Hacker News, the New page on Reddit (yes, I know that Reddit has a surfacing algorithm, and it's irrelevant to the New page), many other video games that don't have free-to-play models or any other optimization, reading comics, and many other things.
The fact that something is addictive for some set of the population does not imply that it was designed that way.
"One more turn syndrome" was a thing for turn-based strategy games since basically forever; it's definitely not just Civ. I remember a semi-legendary story of a couple of teens living for 3 days on bread and kefir and no sleep because they couldn't stop playing X-COM (the original one, back in 1990s).
Thing is, good games are by definition interesting. If they are more interesting than anything else you can do at that moment, that's sufficient.
Can you please link to evidence that Dota 2 has been "hyper-optimized to be addictive"? Because I've never seen any indication that that's what Value is doing to it, and that is highly inconsistent with my personal experience playing the game and interacting with its community.
I suppose it's all relative. Sure, it's not slot machine or [any recent lootbox game] levels of vile tricks, but come one, it's free-to-play. Of course it's trying to keep people hooked. I also know multiple people who had to cope with Dota addictions ruining their relationships and lives (although I do happen to know quite a few game devs, being a programmer living in Malmö, so that's a skewed demographic of gamer-oriented people). At the very least there is a vulnerable segment of society that should avoid these types of games.
No, it's not relative. "This game has been optimized for the explicit purpose of "engagement"/addiction"" is a statement that can be factually known to be true or false.
> but come one, it's free-to-play. Of course it's trying to keep people hooked.
That's an appeal to emotion without a logical argument behind it. The logical argument is that the survival of free-to-play games depends on the microtransaction revenue being higher than the cost to run the game. You know what directly contributes to the cost of running the game? People using the servers. Unlike social media platforms that monetize through time spent = ad impressions, free-to-play games do not want to maximize the amount of time spent playing the game, they want to maximize the amount of cosmetics that people buy, which is very different, and is not obviously connected with playtime in any research I'm aware of.
> I also know multiple people who had to cope with Dota addictions ruining their relationships and lives
...which happened to me! But, as someone who is struggling with an HN addicition: something can be addicting without being purposefully designed to be that way - addictive traits do not imply that something was designed to be addictive.
You know what's funny? DotA involves a lot of frog-eating. A lot of it is a slog, and a lot of it is really frustrating. You hadn't decreased your frog consumption. You were just eating the wrong frogs.
It seems that now you're eating different frogs, and you're feeling happier and more fulfilled. You might even be eating less of them now, and that might be part of what's rewarding.
Yeah, it's tricky. Some places will just mix frogs into their burgers, so you've just gotta stop eating at the Chum Bucket and pay attention to what's in your mental diet.
I think addiction is it's own thing -- which is not about a lack of pleasure either.
The main thing I think is missing from the OP (which I liked very much) is discussion of the concept of meaning. (and perhaps social connection).
I think what most "frog-eaters" are missing is meaning, not pleasure. People will gladly do hard things that seem meaningful.
I think addiction is primarily about a lack of meaning (and social connection) as well -- rather than being about a surfeit of "pleasure" or lack of "discipline". It's an attempt to deal with a lack of meaning. (It is noteable to me that you point out that your 12-16 hours a day of playing, while (you claim) was "pleasurable", was not in fact "anything meaningful").
I think OP is really talking about a lack of meaning, control, and social connection in our lives. It's this same lack that is part of what leads to addiction. And in fact the solution is not "just try harder to do the things that seem meaningless and without joy, you need more discipline" -- that's the message I get from OP, and I think in fact it applies to addiction too. "Trying harder to be more disciplined" is not a great strategy for escaping addiction.
> But it takes a lot of work to be satisfied with their relationship and their pond, because they don’t get enough love to fill their hearts or enough fish to fill their bellies. So they end up reading articles about how to love things they don’t love that much and how to feel full without eating enough.
>I think OP is really talking about a lack of meaning, control, and social connection in our lives.
That is indeed a much more defensible thesis. But to do anything meaningful, you need to eat a bunch of frogs - to build a rocket, you need to call and compare suppliers, manage accounting, etc. If you avoided all of that annoying stuff, you would find yourself, years later, with very pretty blueprints and no rocket.
I'm not sure about that. Or at least I'm not sure it requires any one person to spend more than a small portion of their time doing anything that feels like eating frogs.
But mainly, I think the basic thesis is about how we diagnose our dissatisfaction. The very common way is what you seem to be suggesting: You need to get better at doing hard things, it's your fault for being lazy. How do you expect to be able to do anything worthwhile if you are so bad at doing hard things? That is the common perspective.
The OP's suggestion (tweaked a bit by me to have meaning) is that this is all wrong: If your life is mostly composed of things that are unpleasant, lacking meaning, control, and social connection, of COURSE they will be hard to get done and burn you out, and it's not your fault. The solution, if you can find a way to do it, is to increase the meaning, control, and social connection in your life -- tasks will not feel as unpleasant if in a framework of meaning, control, and social connection.
The problem is not your lack of discipline, it's that you are not getting enough meaning, control, and social connection in your life. (Granted, it's not necessarily simple what to do about this, especially when it's how our society is set up).
But I'm curious, if you feel like sharing (or if not these are just rhetorical for other readers, no problem), as to your personal anecdotal experience with the problem with computer games. (which I'd call an "addiction" from my experience, but you may or may not). How did you get out of it? Or are you out of it or still struggling? In what ways has it been about discipline and trying harder? In what ways has it been connected to meaning, control, and social connection in other parts of your life? Has the theory that your problem is with discipline and procrastination and just not trying enough been useful to solving the problem? If not, are you willing to consider a different theory/framework? What things in your life give you meaning, control, and social connection, do you feel your life is full of those? (I do not, personally, I'm having problems with the lack of those and am not sure what to do about it).
> That is indeed a much more defensible thesis. But to do anything meaningful, you need to eat a bunch of frogs - to build a rocket, you need to call and compare suppliers, manage accounting, etc. If you avoided all of that annoying stuff, you would find yourself, years later, with very pretty blueprints and no rocket.
I do think there's a certain audience that needs to hear that, specifically the do-nothing crowd or someone (like your former self perhaps) whose life is dominated by bad habits. I think the article is addressing the other side of the pendulum. There are plenty of people who are not addicted to some sort of obvious time waste, but they are addicted to self-flagellation.
Hey OP, do you have issues with time management/procrastination, organization and planning too? If so a) read up about executive disfunction, and b) ask your doctor to test you for AD(H)D. I had a very similar story and struggled with motivation for years, until I realized its a fundamental symptom of AD(H)D that isn't really well discussed.
That is a pity. I have heard prescription meds can be game-changing for some people.
If legal, I would think it's probably worth getting a doctor (ie keep going to different doctors until you find a sympathetic one) to prescribe it. Even non stimulant medications like atomoxetin can be helpful.
Maybe you've lost access to a confortable middle ground, and I'm very sorry for you, but hopefully the vast majority of humans still can find balance between exclusive pursuit of pleasure and doing things things you hate every single minute of the day.
I don't think the author is arguing that you should seek only pleasure or always avoid discomfort. The author is saying that you should notice what is pleasurable and what is causing discomfort.
Frustration is a kind of pain and pain is a signal that we should avoid a stimulus. It is frustrating to 'eat frogs'. You can force yourself to go through frustration, or you can use tools help manage those feelings. Or you can try to address the source of those feelings. Or you can choose to not engage in activities that bring up those feelings. We have words for some of these things like 'procrastination'
The point is that those feelings are real and they are not your fault. It is not a failure to feel frustrated. It is a signal. Forcing yourself to go through frustration repeatedly may strengthen that signal, laying down cognitive and emotional scar tissue.
Noticing a stimulus does not mean being fixated on it. It does not mean that you give that stimulus more power. It can feel that way at first, like noticing a tiger in the room; but the tiger has always been there.
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On another level, the article hints at the real purpose of mental/cognitive/emotional therapy. "Therapy doesn't fix anything, you have to fix yourself" is a common way to say this, but I would say "Therapy is a way to see your situation more clearly, help you develop tools to deal with your personal situation, and help you decide what to change about your personal situation". Therapy can make you feel worse in the short term, and sometimes life does just suck; but it can also help quite a lot.
I can empathize with you, having been in your exact position almost to the T. The one thing I'd caution against is being overly critical of your bad habits.
Life is this amazing playground. We can choose our own values and work towards achieving those values, often to great success if we work hard. But, at the end of the day, what's most important is that we enjoy the moments along the way, and that's hard when you have a loud inner critic shouting at you.
I have defined for myself what are the higher purposes I want to follow. It's not an issue of them existing or not, for me the issue is that I am naturally lazy and I do naturally gravitate towards random bullshit, contrary to what the OP blogpost described.
It's just about personal aesthetics. You no longer like yourself, so you went and started to change yourself to better fit your new aesthetic sense.
Obviously the sense is informed by what you perceive.
You higher could be pretty low for someone else. Like yourself in a couple of years.
It's the biggest lie of them all that some behaviors are higher than other. That's how they sell you church, work week and other frogs.
Why? Because most of us converge on the same basic idea that with cooperation, we can have generally more fun. So we invent ways to get others involved in our shit. Some of it manipulative, because ends justify the means. Well, except when you like to play on hard and limit the set of your means, because it's more fun that way.
What brings me pleasure is playing strategic computer games. I was addicted to playing dota. I was playing 12-16 hours a day, which left no place for socializing, career, family, even basic self-maintenance suffered. Anything meaningful, art, self-improvement was cut. It's a disgraceful, shameful life.
The meaning of life is not the blind pursuit of pleasure. We are humans precisely because we follow higher purposes.