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..
What you're looking for is probably "semester". Depending on where you live, your employer can't deny you two weeks off. Then you go somewhere where you wont have access to a computer. And treat yourself well. You should do that at least once or twice a year.
You can also set "working hours" and just don't do any work outside those hours. Having a healthy work/life balance will make you even more productive at work.
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.
"Optometrist Herb Wertheim may be the greatest individual investor the world has never heard of, and he has the Fidelity statements to prove it. Leafing through printouts he has brought to a meeting, you can see hundreds of millions of dollars in stocks like Apple and Microsoft, purchased decades ago during their IPOs. An $800 million-plus position in Heico, a $1.8 billion (revenue) airplane-parts manufacturer, dates to 1992. There are dozens of other holdings, ranging from GE and Google to BP and Bank of America."
"The Microsoft shares he bought during the IPO, which have been paying dividends since 2003, are now worth more than $160 million. His 1.25 million shares of Apple, some purchased during its 1980 IPO and some when the stock was languishing at $10 in the 1990s, are worth $195 million."
The Bloomberg billionaires index does exactly this... Out private billionaires.
First off it's hard being a billionaire and people not knowing. You're going to make a splash somehow. But there's still plenty of billionaires, especially in emerging market countries, that have still to be uncovered.
>I could easily see myself reaching a billion in a few decades
So your plan to "easily" become a billionaire is to "follow Warren Buffet" and make decades worth of out-performing private investments?
Wait until you learn that markets don't go up forever, and that paper profits on out-of-touch valuations aren't cash. As they say, "everyone's a genius in a bull market".
Whats your endgoal? I was thinking the other day about fortune, wealth and becoming wealthy. I’d very much prefer to not pursue becoming wealthy and concentrate on a diferent goal. I don’t think I could change the world in a financial sense, I might as well contribute positively from a different angle that is not from a wealthy position. That’s why I am asking you what your endgoal is since you chose anonimity and not to flaunt your wealth. I suspect you don’t need any kind of validation or any other ego tickling so do you have an endgoal that you’d like to pursue through your acumulated wealth?
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.
It means enabling them to do it themselves and not make them dependent on someone's aid. Creating such an environment and opportunities, bootstrapping them so to speak.
You mean by creating an economy where everyone is paid sanely, instead of an economy geared to moving wealth from people who don't have it to people who do?
Both of those methods are accessing the public markets. Private investment means investing in non publicly traded companies. Like venture capital... For example
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.
I think there is a grain of truth to that, but it depends heavily on what you read. If you read a lot about politics and pop culture, probably. Likewise, as other people have said, the "personal development" audience likely has a lot of unstable people.
It's more accurate to say "outliers" than "insane", and some outliers are good!
i think you are completely right about this. for one thing, mania/hypomania can lead people to compulsively post, in the same way that it can make people hyper-talkative IRL. sometimes people taking stimulant drugs or having adverse reactions to other medications can end up in a similar state. to me this explains a lot of the strange behavior on the internet, in aggregate, although i make an effort not to diagnose individual people on the basis of some internet comments.
> Healthy happy people simply do not spend much of their time that way.
But what if making comments makes you happy?
While I don't disagree with the premises of what you are saying I think you are not considering that for some people saying something makes them feel good and they are perfectly mentally sane.
I could also say that 'healthy happy people do not spend their time socializing with others at parties' but we know people do that because 'it makes them happy'.
For what it's worth "mentally sane" and "healthy happy people" can be a little boring in real life, that's why lots of people like myself have decided to spend time arguing with people from the other side of the world on websites like this one or on reddit just because the subjects being argued about are interesting and there's no way you could find a person in your real life that could be interested in said subjects.
Very true. Also words vs. conversation tends to be very efficient although often lacking cues that come with voice or visually. No wasted time and much less boredom from feeling trapped.
"Healthy, happy" in this context, happy is not a momentary emotion as a response to external stimulus. This is happy in the sense of generally content and well-adjusted. One doesn't get made that way by something else, one makes oneself that way by adjusting the way they view the world. A better word would be equanimity. You can be "happy" in that sense even while going through distressing events.
That's an interesting theory, would you mind explaining why you think that's the case?
I wouldn't be surprised if there is at least a correlation - e.g. maybe those who spend a lot of time commenting online do so because they are trying to compensate for a lack of meaningful offline interactions, relationships, etc.
That said, is it so hard to imagine that someone might have both? i.e. even if there's a correlation, it seems like a bit of a stretch to suggest that a prolific internet commenter is necessarily mentally unwell. It seems very plausible to me that someone might both have a robust real life social life while simultaneously engaging in online interactions as well, no?
I'd also posit that this might depend on the forum - e.g. someone actively engaging in learning or sharing their expertise on e.g. nutrition or car repair forum may be a bit different than the median commenter on news articles linked from The Drudge Report.
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.
90% seems optimistic. I don't think that many Python projects are running the most recent version in production. From personal experience, upgrading to 3.7 was especially a pain because of packages that used "async" for variable/kwarg names.
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.
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..