Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, “On Writing On Your Own Terms”


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John Kaag, Hiking with Nietzsche 

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You lie in bed for hours staring at the ceiling, thinking how outside, all these people are living their lives while you’re just stuck here, too scared to even get up and face the world for one morning.

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Kafka said “all the love in the world is useless when there is total lack of understanding” and I think more people need to understand that

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“We feel emptiness sharply but cannot stand to listen long enough to find out what it means, what we need, what it tells us about how we live. Instead we reach for the nearest thing at hand with which to fill it up. And so we go for years, not able to sit with the silence, not able to face what we have become–and becoming increasingly something we cannot stand. And if we cannot stand ourselves–if we fear, and I think we do, that to even look at who we are would be too painful to bear–how do we live?”

—Marya Hornbacher, Waiting

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“Be wild, disobedient & daring with your creativity, take risks instead of following predictable routes; those who play it safe do not advance our culture or civilisation.”
– Bernardine Evaristo, Manifesto

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In today’s dopamine-rich ecosystem, we’ve all become primed for immediate gratification. We want to buy something, and the next day it shows up on our doorstep. We want to know something, and the next second the answer appears on our screen. Are we losing the knack of puzzling things out, or being frustrated while we search for the answer, or having to wait for the things we want?

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I despise my own hypersensitiveness, which requires so much reassurance. It is certainly abnormal to crave so much to be loved and understood.

Anaïs Nin · The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume I: 1931-1934

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Factors affecting Delayed Gratification/ Delay Discounting:

1) Ingestion of High Dopamine Goods.. which leads to Prefrontal Atrophy. Part of brain related to planning and abstract thinking.

2) People growing up in Resource poor environment primed with mortality cues.

3)Leisure time that we have today, and with it the ensuing boredom (
Leading to Compulsive over consumption)

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One patient who seemed to be doing well on antidepressants told me she no longer cried at Olympics commercials. She laughed when she talked about it, happily forfeiting the sentimental side of her personality for relief from depression and anxiety. But when she couldn’t even cry at her own mother’s funeral, the balance for her had tipped. She went off antidepressants and a short time later experienced a wider emotional amplitude, including more depression and anxiety. She decided the lows were worth it to feel human.

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The sci-fi movie Serenity (2005), directed by Joss Whedon, imagines a future world in which national leaders conduct a grand experiment: They inoculate an entire planet’s population against greed, sadness, anxiety, anger, despair in hopes of achieving a civilization of peace and harmony.

Mal, a rogue pilot, the movie’s hero, and the captain of the spaceship Serenity, travels with his crew to the planet to explore. Instead of finding Shangri-La, he finds corpses without a ready explanation for their death. An entire planet is dead in repose, lying in their beds, kicking back on their couches, slumped at their desks. Mal and his crew eventually puzzle it out: The genetic mutation deprived them of hunger for anything.

Like real-life dopamine-depleted rats who starve to death rather than shuffle a few centimeters for food, these humans died for lack of desire.

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We’ve all experienced some version of pain giving way to pleasure. Perhaps like Socrates, you’ve noticed an improved mood after a period of being ill, or felt a runner’s high after exercise, or took inexplicable pleasure in a scary movie. Just as pain is the price we pay for pleasure, so too is pleasure our reward for pain

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Dopamine’s importance to motor circuits has been reported for every animal phylum in which it has been investigated. The nematode C. elegans, a worm and one of the simplest laboratory animals, releases dopamine in response to environmental stimuli signaling the local abundance of food. Dopamine’s ancient role in physical movement relates to its role in motivation: To obtain the object of our desire, we need to go get it.

Of course today’s easy-access dopamine doesn’t require us to get off the couch. According to survey reports, the typical American today spends half their waking hours sitting, 50 percent more than fifty years ago. Data from other rich nations around the globe are comparable. When you consider that we evolved to traverse tens of kilometers daily to compete for a limited supply of food, the adverse effects of our modern sedentary lifestyle are devastating.

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A key to well-being is for us to get off the couch and move our real bodies, not our virtual ones. As I tell my patients, just walking in your neighborhood for thirty minutes a day can make a difference. That’s because the evidence is indisputable: Exercise has a more profound and sustained positive effect on mood, anxiety, cognition, energy, and sleep than any pill I can prescribe.

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But pursuing pain is harder than pursuing pleasure. It goes against our innate reflex to avoid pain and pursue pleasure. It adds to our cognitive load: We have to remember that we will feel pleasure after pain, and we’re remarkably amnestic about this sort of thing. I know I have to relearn the lessons of pain every morning as I force myself to get out of bed and go exercise.

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While truth-telling promotes human attachment, compulsive overconsumption of high-dopamine goods is the antithesis of human attachment. Consuming leads to isolation and indifference, as the drug comes to replace the reward obtained from being in relationship with others.

Experiments show that a free rat will instinctively work to free another rat trapped inside a plastic bottle. But once that free rat has been allowed to self-administer heroin, it is no longer interested in helping out the caged rat, presumably too caught up in an opioid haze to care about a fellow member of its species

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Dopamine overload impairs our ability to delay gratification.

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