Lust seems to be closely related to envy, but more visceral and with more brain chemicals. Wanting what you can have, and which is good for you, is okay. Getting off to what you can’t have is likely less so.
Porn is a potentially addictive cycle of erotically pretending you have something you don’t. Its current widespread availability is a completely new innovation that we shouldn’t prima facie expect to be healthy, although it’s possible it could be shown to be so for reasonable portions of the population.
I don’t have an unbiased sample on quitting porn, as I only know the outcomes of those who have done so and succeeded, including myself. I’ve been meaning to do a survey of actual studies and potentially report it in Discussion. I can only say for myself and a lot of others that making the choice has shown the greatest productivity increase of any small life-tweak I’ve tried, an improvement far beyond just regaining the time previously spent directly on it.
The community I joined for it doesn’t strike me as the most scientifically minded, and the information often passed around there hinges on hearsay. I’d be interested in the other side of things, or rather the whole story as understood by the best research.
I’m curious how many of these concerns could be applied to fiction in general.
I do think that video gaming is likely to be a far more detrimental hobby than people realize, especially if they choose the wrong sort of game to play. My favorite style of games use a lot of the same parts of my mind as my research- and so I find that in order to be maximally productive during the week, I need to limit them to the weekends or not at all, and play games that use different parts of my mind during the week if I’m gaming during the week.
I think that there are similar troubles with reading fiction, especially if you’re like me where you find it difficult to stop reading engaging narratives, even if you dislike them. I made the mistake of getting the first four Game of Thrones books at once from Amazon, which meant I lost about 40 hours that week to reading them (almost) nonstop, even though I quickly realized the books were making me miserable and thus were quite possibly things I should not read. The more generally applicable argument is about generalizing from fictional evidence. Once you have a well-developed sense of empathy, I think you’re much better off reading non-fiction book about interacting with people than reading more fiction, for example, and there are Waste of Hope reasons to dislike escapist fiction.
Lust seems to be closely related to envy, but more visceral and with more brain chemicals. Wanting what you can have, and which is good for you, is okay. Getting off to what you can’t have is likely less so.
Porn is a potentially addictive cycle of erotically pretending you have something you don’t. Its current widespread availability is a completely new innovation that we shouldn’t prima facie expect to be healthy, although it’s possible it could be shown to be so for reasonable portions of the population.
I don’t have an unbiased sample on quitting porn, as I only know the outcomes of those who have done so and succeeded, including myself. I’ve been meaning to do a survey of actual studies and potentially report it in Discussion. I can only say for myself and a lot of others that making the choice has shown the greatest productivity increase of any small life-tweak I’ve tried, an improvement far beyond just regaining the time previously spent directly on it.
The community I joined for it doesn’t strike me as the most scientifically minded, and the information often passed around there hinges on hearsay. I’d be interested in the other side of things, or rather the whole story as understood by the best research.
I’m curious how many of these concerns could be applied to fiction in general.
I do think that video gaming is likely to be a far more detrimental hobby than people realize, especially if they choose the wrong sort of game to play. My favorite style of games use a lot of the same parts of my mind as my research- and so I find that in order to be maximally productive during the week, I need to limit them to the weekends or not at all, and play games that use different parts of my mind during the week if I’m gaming during the week.
I think that there are similar troubles with reading fiction, especially if you’re like me where you find it difficult to stop reading engaging narratives, even if you dislike them. I made the mistake of getting the first four Game of Thrones books at once from Amazon, which meant I lost about 40 hours that week to reading them (almost) nonstop, even though I quickly realized the books were making me miserable and thus were quite possibly things I should not read. The more generally applicable argument is about generalizing from fictional evidence. Once you have a well-developed sense of empathy, I think you’re much better off reading non-fiction book about interacting with people than reading more fiction, for example, and there are Waste of Hope reasons to dislike escapist fiction.