Canadian Software Developer
Caleb Thomas F
Karma: 7
My girlfriend and I have been doing this as well. Having come from an evangelical Christian background, it still feels right to have a collective ritual that occurs before eating. I’ve been exploring the intentional creation of ritual as a memetic tool for making things happen that don’t organically occur but are net beneficial. It seems to me there should be many more cases like this, rituals we would benefit from adopting even if we don’t have cultural or religious reasons behind them.
I think the difference between the two types of power, seems to be Intrinsic (Wizard) vs Extrinsic (King). The two are interrelated in that having one can confer the other if one wishes, but for the mortal human, the best path forward (i.e. the path I like the most and believe should be the path to the most combined W+K power for the highest proportion of people) seems to be seeking deep levels of wizard power and pursuing it in all areas.
Side proposal: I occasionally get bursts of ingenuity, ideas and a desire to make them happen at night, like two or three times a year. I will now be calling them Wizarding Hours. If anyone has suggestions on how to make these moments of inspiration and seemingly endless idea generation happen more often, please share.
C F’s Shortform
Frequency of Physical interaction with a media as a contributor to its addictive potential.
It seems to me that a contributor to the addictive nature of some things, short form content in particular could be related to the fact that you just have to freaking touch your screen every seven seconds and can’t take your eyes away or you might end up watching some piece of content that is at the very least uninteresting. The reason YouTube, is less addictive by a few degrees could be that you aren’t by the very modality of the content, required to touch it and remain engaged.
I think this is qualitatively a different, and complimentary to, explanation compared to the dopamine drip concepts. And that there is possibly an inverse correlation between level of required interaction with a type of content and its addictive quality. Although, if this were true one would expect books to be on the more addictive end of the spectrum.
Perhaps this has already been discussed or explored, but I just figured I’d share something that I’ve been thinking about. Also, I’m new here so feedback/criticism would be welcomed, and direction on whether this is an appropriate “quick take” would be great as well.
“The entire universe and everything in it was created yesterday” or last Thursday, or whatever, is something I think of often. My greatest fear as a teenager was that I’m being “Truman showed” or that everyone around me was just pretending to like me. It feels like there’s some thread connecting these things to your story.