I took similarly extreme measures to end my video game addiction many years ago.
I played MMOs compulsively. They basically hijacked the reward center of my brain to the point where what happened outside of the game seemed completely irrelevant to me. I didn’t even see the point of showering.
During “moments of clarity” I understood perfectly well exactly what was happening to me, how the game was specifically designed to put me in that sort of state, how fake and toxic it all was.
So during these “moments of clarity”, I would take some of my life back by deliberately sabotaging myself inside the game so I wouldn’t want to play anymore.
I destroyed all my valuable items and deleted my characters.
When I came back, I told support it was an accident and they recovered the items and characters for me...
So then I gave all my valuable items to other players, thinking support couldn’t take those back from those people, because that would be creating free duplicates.
So I told support it was an accident, and they recovered the account and created duplicates of all of my lost items.
So I did that again, this time handing all the items to someone I knew.
Support again recovered the account and created duplicates of everything, but warned that they wouldn’t be able to do this a third time because of concerns about in-game markets being disrupted by duplicates.
So I did it again.
This time they recovered the account, and some of the items, but none of the most valuable ones.
Even then, I still wanted to play.
So this time I did the same, deleted all my items, deleted my characters, and created a new email account on yahoo.
I made that yahoo account’s username and password both something complicated I would never remember. I changed my game account’s email to that yahoo account, confirmed the email change, changed my game account’s password to something long I would never remember, changed all the game account’s personal and contact information to nonsense, logged out of the yahoo account, logged out of the game account, and closed the incognito tab.
I tried, but I never figured out a way to recover that account.
So I created a new account. Several times, but always repeatedly sabotaged myself during moments of clarity. Eventually, after a few weeks, I completely lost interest in trying and could finally do other things with my life.
I’ve used this same tactic with every game since. Total gameplay hours over the last 10 years have been maybe 50 hours or so for Fallout 3, and that’s it.
I don’t play anything anymore. Life has turned out unreasonably good since then, too. Career in software exploded.
Maybe because of redirected compulsivity.
Now I’m having a similar problem with workaholism.
I guess the real-world implementation of my prior solution would be to give all my money away, burn all my bridges, and go meditate in a forest somewhere. That doesn’t seem like such a great idea, though, especially with people depending on me. I’ll have to figure out a different solution for this one..
I plan on following in Warren Buffett’s footsteps. Without his influence, I would be working the graveyard shift at a gas station right now.
End goal career-wise is to amass as much wealth as possible by giving smart and capable people a path to building new things that benefit everyone, and then direct that amassed wealth toward the betterment of humanity before I die.
I’m not sure exactly how I’ll do that.
I actually think most philanthropic organizations do more harm than good. I think an effective non-profit would probably look like a boring faceless middleman, affecting positive change by influencing capitalistic markets to serve the underserved. By serve I mean serve, not provide goods to.
I also have my own idea of what it means to better humanity. I think there are better ways to feed and shelter people than feeding and sheltering them.
Whatever I do, it’ll probably be really boring, won’t provide for any photo ops, and there’s a good chance it might even seem pointless and ineffective to most people.
I hate to admit this but I wrote 3 of these woe—and-misery letters in the late ‘90s, when I was a teenager.
One to Bill Gates, one to Bill Roper, and another to Chris Metzen.
I didn’t send them expecting a response, and didn’t even really consider that. The act of writing it down and throwing it out there just lifted my mood somehow, like throwing coins in a fountain.
I didn’t choose Bill Gates, Bill Roper and Chris Metzen because I was expecting anything from them. I chose them because they were significant to me, and connecting what I was going through to them somehow provided relief and made things feel surmountable.
Not saying that’s how a perfectly healthy brain thinks, but that’s how teenage me felt at the time.
The people writing you might be the same way?
Next time you get one of these letters, just think of yourself as the fountain they’re throwing the coins into.
Isn’t it possible to become a billionaire without anyone knowing?
What if you just get there quietly through private investment?
Not a billion, but I’ve built up a decent chunk myself and nobody seems to know or even suspect that about me. Nobody begs me for anything more than spare change, no sycophants, nobody trying to impress me. Marketing for luxury goods doesn’t even reach me.
I could easily see myself reaching a billion in a few decades just through private investment, and there must be thousands of people doing the same. I imagine there are many more who have earned millions publicly, then sold their stake and went to a billion privately.
This is tangential to the article, but James being “a frequent commenter on his blog and a huge help to other readers” was my first sign that he was not mentally well. Immediately knew things would not go well for him in this story.
People often say this as a joke, but I think it’s 100% accurate: Internet comment sections have a strong self-selection bias for the mentally unwell.
I’ll include Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, HN to some extent, etc.
Not exact numbers, but the math goes something like 100% of comments are written by 10% of readers. Of those that do bother to comment, the less utilized and less psychology stable and healthy they are, the greater their commenting volume is.
Healthy happy people simply do not spend much of their time that way.
(I’m including myself in that btw.)
The world treats these comment sections as if they represent a perfect cross-section of the general population, and the result is all the insane cultural rambling and nonsense you hear and read about in media and blogs, all the way up to Fox News and NYT. They think these insane ramblings are what represent the people and what the people want.
Then the population adjusts to some extent to match those insane ramblings, because they think that’s how other people must feel.
It’s a global feedback loop of political and cultural madness and hysteria.
That’s a very good point, in that case even 50% would probably be optimistic.
We can probably attribute this article’s novelty to the slow adoption of Python 3. In that way it’s probably a good thing that it’s such a popular topic, even if it is old news.
Came to say the same.. insertion order of dict has been here for years for 90+% of Python users (CPython implementation) and a part of the language spec also for almost as many years.
I guess it’s good to spread awareness to HN readers who apparently were unaware, but the headline is very misleading.
I played MMOs compulsively. They basically hijacked the reward center of my brain to the point where what happened outside of the game seemed completely irrelevant to me. I didn’t even see the point of showering.
During “moments of clarity” I understood perfectly well exactly what was happening to me, how the game was specifically designed to put me in that sort of state, how fake and toxic it all was.
So during these “moments of clarity”, I would take some of my life back by deliberately sabotaging myself inside the game so I wouldn’t want to play anymore.
I destroyed all my valuable items and deleted my characters.
When I came back, I told support it was an accident and they recovered the items and characters for me...
So then I gave all my valuable items to other players, thinking support couldn’t take those back from those people, because that would be creating free duplicates.
So I told support it was an accident, and they recovered the account and created duplicates of all of my lost items.
So I did that again, this time handing all the items to someone I knew.
Support again recovered the account and created duplicates of everything, but warned that they wouldn’t be able to do this a third time because of concerns about in-game markets being disrupted by duplicates.
So I did it again.
This time they recovered the account, and some of the items, but none of the most valuable ones.
Even then, I still wanted to play.
So this time I did the same, deleted all my items, deleted my characters, and created a new email account on yahoo.
I made that yahoo account’s username and password both something complicated I would never remember. I changed my game account’s email to that yahoo account, confirmed the email change, changed my game account’s password to something long I would never remember, changed all the game account’s personal and contact information to nonsense, logged out of the yahoo account, logged out of the game account, and closed the incognito tab.
I tried, but I never figured out a way to recover that account.
So I created a new account. Several times, but always repeatedly sabotaged myself during moments of clarity. Eventually, after a few weeks, I completely lost interest in trying and could finally do other things with my life.
I’ve used this same tactic with every game since. Total gameplay hours over the last 10 years have been maybe 50 hours or so for Fallout 3, and that’s it.
I don’t play anything anymore. Life has turned out unreasonably good since then, too. Career in software exploded.
Maybe because of redirected compulsivity.
Now I’m having a similar problem with workaholism.
I guess the real-world implementation of my prior solution would be to give all my money away, burn all my bridges, and go meditate in a forest somewhere. That doesn’t seem like such a great idea, though, especially with people depending on me. I’ll have to figure out a different solution for this one..