Convince me to read during this weekend instead of just drinking, watching youtube, and jerking off, activities I perceive as yielding dopamine faster and in greater quantities.
Convince me to read during this weekend instead of just drinking, watching youtube, and jerking off, activities I perceive as yielding dopamine faster...
>faster
right
>in greater quantities
wrong
Drinking is shit for you in the long term. Youtube is mostly garbage but idfk what you watch. Jerking off on the other hand, try picking up some erotica.
Drinking goes better with literature than any of the activities you listed unless you are the sort who starts out by downing a pint of whiskey.
>Drinking is shit for you in the long term
sometimes it is better than the alternative.
>sometimes it is better than the alternative.
if you really can't stand to be sober, weed is a much better alternative to booze
If you really want to play those sorts of games then opiates are the best bet, as long as you avoid the junky lifestyle and street drugs of unknown quality they are surprisingly benign compared to most drugs unless you OD. Sustained pot use has a serious effect on cognitive abilities which can be permanent, main reason I quit weed, saw the effect it was having on people who I knew that had been using for years and met some old stoners. Alcohol only affects cognitive abilities when drunk and getting drunk gets hard after sustained regular use.
But it does not really matter, addiction is destructive regardless of the drug but thinking you are being smart about your addiction and picking a 'safer' drug is beyond stupid.
i only read when i drink
Reading and drinking is fun. But yeah, porn is something I struggle to avoid myself.
The more you seek that high by easy means, the less satisfying they are later. You burn out your dopamine receptors and nothing satisfies right until you reset. Use reading as a reset or a replacement; it really does make you feel better when you do something more constructive, whether it be creative work, learning, or simply observing nature. Hypocritical, I know, coming from another person who very much wants to do the same.
u can drink paper but u cant read a drink so reading wins
Exercise is one of the best things you can do to beat alcohol. I used to drink the weekday evenings and weekend evenings out of boredom.
Start exercising and once you get to where it becomes a habit you don't really want to drink any longer because it will frick up your workout. Exercise will also help with concentration
If you can find people to hang out with actually in person. Which goes back to exercise you can run and join a running club do races or something like that.
It sounds like you enjoy drinking, watching youtube, and jerkin off more than you enjoy reading, but that doesn't match the image of who you think you are and are frustrated by that. If you liked reading more, you'd do that. It's not complex. You don't like reading more any longer. Adjust your self image and stop being miserable. You're a guy who drinks and jerks off.
Literally this, why should we try to convince you to do something that you clearly don't enjoy as much as the other things you do?
I believe that these aren't the kinds of things you can convince yourself to do rationally. You need to focus on the part of your spirit that wants to read, and then just sit down and start reading. It''s the only way.
Just say 'frick it, book time', and before you can have second thoughts, put your phone in another room, get comfy, and open the book. Even if it's for only half an hour. You need to make the leap, and deliberation and reasoning are only ever delays to making that leap.
This is incredibly dumb, harmful advice. What do you think education, culture and cultivation is about, if not training people to develop more intense and meaningful capacities for pleasure?
When I got back into reading, I didn't much enjoy it either. And yet I knew it was the only thing that connected to the deeper, long-neglected parts of me that porn and games weren't reaching. The more you read, the more natural it becomes; you begin to enjoy it more and in more varied, subtle ways.
To tell people to go for the path of least resistance every time is to tell them to self-sabotage. Difficult paths end up in more interesting, more satisfying places - obviously!
God bless you anon.
Best post of the year!
Why not do both?
At the moment I am having Montepulciano d'Abruzzo with a bit of Beniamino Gigli and Jules Laforgue, plus carefully selected paragraphs of Transylvanian philosopher Costin Alamariu, and of course the occasional photographs of Brazilian volleyball players.
If you start feeling too drunk to read, just drink substantial amounts of coffee, five to ten cups, preferentially using beans that have spent some time in whisky barrels, then start reading and drinking again.
Enjoy. 😉
You're clearly curious about reading, so just do it.
dont do it. take care of yourself, noone else will (they dont care)
i used to drink much more when i was younger and now that im just a bit older (26) i just have no desire to do it anymore. makes me feel gross now. cant explain it. overnight it just suddenly became annoying and made me feel gross. im not even that old. anyone else had this?
Opposite happened to me. Drinking in any way by myself used to feel gross and shameful when I was younger, but now (aged 34) I'm very comfortable having nightcaps by myself.
>drinking
Getting drunk is way more fun when it's your reward for crushing a couple of chapters of a novel.
To feel pressured to be happy all the time, commanded to be happy, is an awful feeling that conflicts with the happiness it is trying to generate.
The same thing that pushes you toward a quick dopamine fix is the thing that makes you question here on how to read a book instead. The anguish is the same between the two, first, why would you waste time on something that feels less rewarding? Second, how are you going to succeed in life if you don't read and drink everyday? These are both fictions in your head.
Your body thinks that without those dopamine hits you're at a loss, as if you were sitting still malnourished while in front of a plate of food. But your mind knows that it is not the case, that the constant eating is a problem in itself and that you're not really malnourished, on the contrary, you correctly spot your own dopamine gluttony when you ask on how to change the habit.
But then you turn into other food and see it as medicine, or a fix just like the other ones. The pressure to do "the right thing" in your head (in this case, reading) turns what could be play into work and only makes the alternative more desirable. This locks down you in a paradox and makes you stick to the habit.
My advice is to not do anything this weekend. Don't drink, don't watch yt and don't read either. Don't exercise, don't "work on yourself", but at the same time, don't indulge in any of your common recreative activities. Do nothing or do something else entirely, something new to you, can be a place you never bothered going to this day or moving furniture around. The next weekend after that, without drinking or watching yt, get a book and read, not because of an imaginary hunger, but due to a genuine desire to taste it.
100%
Guess those people took the shrinking tablets.
bump
You may have heard stories about people "drinking themselves to death" but these stories are fictional. In the real world, this is almost impossible.
You can down an entire bottle of whiskey then go to sleep. The next day, when you awake, you will still be alive. You can do this for months on end. It is literally impossible to commit suicide this way.
Literally zero people have died this way throughout history.
what about Pessoa, Lowry or Fassbinder?
If your goal is to optimize dopamine intake (more, faster) why would you change your habits then?
I could have do pharma opioids this weekend and spend entire day feeling "nice" and watching kino (but watching kino on weed is better and i miss it a bit tbh). Then tomorrow i would feel worse because of guilty consciense and my head would hurt a bit, i would be conscious of not stepping even one step further toward whatever goal i have.
Instead of that i am sober this saturday, i read 3 hours upon awakening which is not much, but i have lot of book in Kindle and its at least few % closer finishing and getting some new insight.
And i am writing in my journal, cataloguing everything i know about story i started creating a year ago yet failed to finish - i am writing in journal starting to getting through my notes on story and i start with highlevel plan - what happens in story one chatper after another, i dont care about prose and feeling at all for now, just highlevel overview of what happens.
Then i am gonna find notebook where i wrote beginning of this story (i hope i will find it) and then i will write until i finish that story. FInishing it will give me feeling of closure (i finished a story about idea that was interesting to me, this is my story and it is real story) which will give me dopamine because i will stop feeling like a loser who never finishes things. Same with getting 100% on any book on my Kindle
A man reads to grow spiritually and be closer to god Not because of dopamin
I loved solo drinking but then I got married. I hate the fricking b***h so much its impossible. Once she suggested we should enjoy the drink together. Since then I touch glass only on social gatherings. I won't file for divorce until smthng better comes up. Being alone is the worst thing. I have lost any interest in [straight or gay] sex whatsoever.
I feel sorry for your wife. You should probably get that divorce, it will be best for both of you, don't make her suffer because you're a coward afraid of being on his own.