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The ability to access a dopamine drip feed at any moment instantly kills any motivation to seek long-term pursuits, especially when thereβs a learning curve involved.
I canβt even start new games these days because the thought of spending time being bad at something seems so awful compared to just watching someone else.
Thereβs a good smbc about this but I canβt find it.
Social media all the way.
Spotify. I remember trawling through Sony music stores and Limewire trying to find new music, and when I did, that album would be on repeat for a week.
Now it's so easy to just find whatever, I've lost all passion for it.
I have to respectfully disagree.
Spotify's radio and suggestion algorithm are top fucking notch. In fact.... I listen to so much more fascinating, obscure, weird shit now because i can easily take any song i like, and make a radio station out of it and proceed to work all day while liking / saving / artist following anything that pulls my mind away from work and into the jam.
I have found so much more music passively through Spotify than i ever could actively through p2p, or could ever afford through a brick and mortar music shop. Not to mention never again having to experience the crushing disappointment of buying a twenty dollar album of fifteen tracks of which maybe two were good.
I'm living in the golden age of indie music. And no one will ever be able to convince me that it was better before.
I wish Spotify radios worked that well for me. They always seem to just recommend the same songs I've been listening to lately.
I definitely had that for a while. One thing that can help is going into your settings/preferences and clearing your Spotify cache. I believe the recommendations are at least partially based on data stored there, so clearing it can start a fresher record.
I definitely had that phase, I have a ton of playlists on Spotify with music from almost every genre (except country and western obviously).
Maybe I lost my passion for a different reason, Idk
That.... Kinda makes me sad. I hope you get that passion back.
I think I just did. I went out to see Eagles of Deathmetal and a local punk band opened for them. They were fucking excellent.
https://growndownz.bandcamp.com/album/dochdwy-road
I'm buying tickets to see them again in November!
Have you thought about stopping? I donβt use spotify, and I buy almost everything I listen to on bandcamp.com (with a few amazon outliers not available there, and one outlier who does not like digital distribution and requires me to order the CD via mail :D). I only listen to full albums, repeated all the time for a while until I only return to it once in a while. That also has the effect of more money going towards the band.
Yeah, I have bought a few albums, maybe 10 off bandcamp. I think that's really the way to go.
I should try again, I miss the feeling of having something special.
Itβs not for me, but some people really enjoy holding something in their hands, so give a thought about buying vinyl or CDs as well, many on BC do offer that. Another idea would be to force yourself to only play albums on spotify ;)
I don't even have a CD drive anymore! I got rid of my record player before I was even 20.
Maybe I'll try to find something good on Bandcamp.
Hah, I didnβt have one either (for that one artist, I always ripped the CDs when I visited my parents :D), but actually had to buy one again recently, because I wanted to rewatch a TV show with my wife (ReGenesis, 2004, far ahead of its time biolab thriller/scifi, includes predicting things like Covid :D Gets a bit unhinged towards the end) that had no streaming (outside of free US ad supported potato quality), digital buying, lending or anything available, so I ended up ordering the DVD box from ebay and buying an external DVD drive to rip all the episodes. Then I also had to use OCR to extract the subtitles, and use Whisper AI to create new subtitles for the second season, which didnβt have any. That was a whole thing :D
I'm going to have to look into this. Canadia makes some great sci fi
Itβs far more grounded than normal scifi, though. Or, said differently, very hard scifi with barely anything made up.
I too am transitioning. Have cancelled my membership to many platforms Netflix, Spotify etc. And now i want to just buy one thing and soak it in and remember each of that when I'm old.
Effortlessness doesn't leave any print on your memory of whatever you achieve, nor does it give you that feeling of fulfillment when u get that thing yourself after doing much more effort than just tapping spotify.
I agree π―. There's just too much to take in today. Year ago, when we used to talk about how we don't have so many resources in our access and we need more, what we really meant was that yes I need more things but not more stuff, i need more of this thing where I'm enjoying an album for weeks i need more of it. I want to go get a new album myself. I want to be able to access everything... But not that i want to feel FOMO when i see people going from one thing to another. I didn't want to see this becoming a cool thing to just know too many things, buy too many things, have access to too many things. When did that become a competition and when did i become a boomer if i didn't participate in that race of destroying my brain and my psychology which affects my life eventually.
When you feel overwhelmed and overstimulated, and donβt know what to do. Do nothing. Take a walk and just enjoy being you.
Realizing things aren't getting better, global warming is going to get significantly worse, and that we're probably far too late to dismantle capitalism. All my hope lies on the baby boomers finally dying out, they've ruined so much of our lives and refuse to let their positions of power go.
Hey, we did stop acid rain and the hole in the ozone. So there were some wins.
Curious to where you find actual good news cuz I never heard of this! I need some hope man, even if it's pretty heavy coping
Capitalism and neo-colonism has really been there for some decades and has significantly damaged the societal structure controlled by selfish and inhuman being and portraying itself as a liberal and democratic tool. The horrors it has brought are now irreversible even if the social psychology and consciousness understands it because those people can never think of letting anyone reverse that.
It reminds me of a Simpsons episode where they are taking riches and celebs to the other planet while poor and unpopular are stranded on the earth getting blasted and in nuclear waste in the atmosphere.
When they have basically snatched every opportunity and power from you of redefining and rethinking of a more flexible and humane society, by giving u hope that they'll do it themselves and will fix everything. And now there's no way out when they've betrayed us and the humanity for their personal and short pleasure.
The gain and then subsequent slashing of human rights based on fascist beliefs and lack of representation (and possibly over representation by fringe groups that capture the news cycle). Across the world, populism and fascism is gaining in popularity - again. It felt like we'd gotten past this point for a minute.
I believe it's not that fascism as it objectively is has increased since the last decade, but it sure has been put on a global headline with the media and globalisation. And i think there hasn't been real increament in the fascistic element but decline... But the politics has basically used it for their agenda manking and then making it mainstream more than it should've been.
I dunno what the research says on this, but I bet everyone being like 20% plastic by weight from all the microplastics in the environment hasn't helped π
Most people mentioned social media here, but I think it's the software that adjusts and auto-personalizes the content according to the live user's interactions. Good software was never meant to have that. Good software is meant to have good UX and UI, but not auto-tailoring to user's needs.
I follow the principles of 'if I need to change the design, I do it myself'. The best practice would be the special options where I could customize my software, like 'Customize Firefox'. Some IDEs also have a field to play around. No A/B testing to individual groups, no personalized feeds, ability to disable or adjust the settings.
Minor one is that it's just really hard to get some damn rest. We're so caught up in everything that I think very many of us have never actually done nothing in a very long time outside of sleep
Didn't think of this. Thank you for this perspective too. π
*gestures wildly at everything*
The good news is that you're largely just experiencing a bias effect. We all tend to think the time of our childhood was better than the modern day. I was born in the 90s, and they were much better than the 00s in my opinion.
The same people who commodify your existence today were doing it in the 00s.
Technology has absolutely made this experience more invasive, but people have always wanted to use you to their own end.
For those who don't want to click: Capitalist realism is countered by ~~nihilism~~ Edit: absurdism.
Not Nihilism, but Absurdism. Thanks for taking the time though.
Thank you, you're right. I just heard the opening line, "It begins with nihilism", and my memory isn't winning any awards.
Camus really did break the code for later philosophers and overthinkers...
Tho it didn't need to go for existentialism or absurdism here.
No I'm not experiencing nothing. Omg. I was just studying this matter better. I'm all good with what i am and am doing great. Thanks for the comment tho. I'm sure it'll help people. π