YIDIRYIDIR

Your name is Cindy? How about i send dee-z nuts up your never-seen-D coochie? No? anyway where are you from?

The only real Bulk bogan i know:

I guarantee you if you are someone like me who took "cheap dopamine" for granted because it's basic stuff and everyone knows that, you'll feel disgusted after reading this post. please give this a read and don't assume you already know this. even if you do, just read it, don't fall into the same trap i fell into. This is an explanation from different lenses and frameworks, so many dots connected, enjoy. (this is formatted and re-written with AI for better articulation, but the ideas are assembled by me from lots of notes) 1. Basic neuroscience What's actually happening in your brain: First, understand what dopamine really is. It's not a "pleasure chemical", that's a simplification. Dopamine acts more like a teaching chemical. it tells your brain which actions are worth repeating. It's about anticipation, motivation, and learning, not just pleasure itself. Here's the core problem of having a habit of mindless stimulation: High stimulation over time leads to desensitization. The more novelty you consume, (think how much content you go through in just 5 minutes of doomscrolling) the more stimulation you need to feel engaged. Everything else starts to feel slow, boring, uncomfortable. That's how your baseline for focus shifts. Your brain has been calibrated to a level of stimulation that makes healthy tasks feel boring, even if they objectively aren't. What physically happens to your brain during overstimulation: When the brain is consistently exposed to excessive dopamine, through behavioral patterns like excessive internet use, it reduces the number or sensitivity of its receptors to protect itself from overstimulation. This is called dopamine receptor downregulation. The cruel irony: the constant push to generate excessive dopamine can also lead to a functional depletion of the neurotransmitter's stores. As the body struggles to keep up with demand, the tonic baseline drops significantly below normal levels. So you end up needing more stimulation to feel okay, while simultaneously having less capacity to produce dopamine naturally. You're running a deficit while constantly demanding more output. Brain imaging studies from Harvard Medical School demonstrate that individuals with high digital device usage show 15–23% reduced activity in the brain's natural reward centers, creating a state called anhedonia, where previously enjoyable activities lose their appeal because they can't compete with artificial stimulation levels. What happens to your attention specifically: The prefrontal cortex, responsible for planning, decision-making, and impulse control, ends up working overtime to suppress distractions. The more you jump between tabs, apps, and conversations, the more mental energy each switch demands. The brain starts defaulting to easier modes: autopilot, mindless scrolling, zoning out. Not because you're weak or lazy, your neural pathways are simply adapting to what you repeat the most. And here's something striking: research has shown that people with high social media usage are less able to control their demand for short-term rewards, often choosing a small immediate reward over a higher long-term gain, indicating a weakening of the prefrontal control systems. That's the attention span problem in a nutshell. It's not just that you get distracted, it's that your brain's decision-making and impulse control hardware has been gradually weakened. 2. Survival Values vs. Self-Expression Values (Inglehart & Welzel) The survival versus self-expression dimension speaks to the individual's relationship to their community and whether they prioritize security and conformity, or agency and autonomy. At the survival end of this axis, the dominant psychological posture is scarcity and threat. Life feels precarious. The future feels uncertain. Energy goes toward protecting what you have, not building something new. The shift from survival to self-expression values is driven by the experience of sustained security, when basic needs are reliably met, people gradually shift their priorities from material survival and social conformity toward self-expression, personal autonomy, and meaning. Here's the connection to instant gratification: cheap dopamine keeps you psychologically locked in survival mode even when your material conditions don't require it. When your nervous system is constantly stimulated by fast rewards, it reads the world as urgent and unpredictable. You scroll because something in you is scanning for threats and opportunities every few seconds. That's a survival-mode behavior. It mimics the mental state of scarcity. The person stuck in instant gratification is materially safe but psychologically living as if they're not. They never cross the threshold into self-expression values (curiosity, creativity, meaning, depth) because their nervous system never settles enough to access them. 3. Spiral Dynamics stages that are relevant in this context: Red: focuses on power, self-expression, and individualism. It is characterized by impulsiveness and a desire for immediate gratification. People operating here are driven by impulses and desires, tend to be self-centered, and act on desires without considering consequences. Blue: introduces delayed gratification for the first time: obedience, discipline, sacrifice now for future reward, meaning through structure and rules. Orange: is driven by achievement, self-reliance, rational strategy, and competing to win, celebrating practical individuals who use knowledge and tools to prosper. Now here's the critical insight: instant gratification is a Red-stage operating system running inside a person who has the capacity for Orange and beyond. Red is not evil or stupid, it's a developmental stage that made complete sense in its original context. A warrior living in a dangerous, unpredictable world should act on impulse and take what's available now, because tomorrow is uncertain. The problem is that social media, gaming, fast food, and entertainment have created an artificial Red environment for modern people. They simulate the rewards and urgency of a dangerous world inside the safety of a comfortable one. Developing through these value stages takes conscious effort and is often met with resistance. There's nothing in the structure of modern society that supports healthy development through these stages. Nihilism in this context is what happens when someone is capable of asking Orange and Green questions (what is my purpose, what am I building, what does any of this mean) but their brain is still running on Red fuel. The Red operating system has no answer to meaning. It only asks: what can I get right now? When you apply that question to your whole life, the answer is emptiness. 4. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs The standard reading is that you climb the pyramid linearly. But the deeper insight is this: you cannot psychologically access higher levels while a lower level feels chronically unmet, even if the threat is imaginary. Here's how instant gratification hijacks this: Fast dopamine hits create a simulation of met needs without actually meeting them. A social media notification simulates belonging. A gaming achievement simulates esteem. A food delivery simulates comfort and care. But because these are simulations rather than the real thing, they never fully satisfy. The need keeps returning, louder each time, because it was never genuinely addressed. The result is a person who is chronically stuck cycling between the bottom three levels of the pyramid, never with enough psychological stability to sustain the conditions required for esteem and self-actualization: discipline, mastery, contribution, identity. Self-actualization, which is where things like meaningful work, creativity, deep focus, and living according to your values live, requires a nervous system that is not constantly managing urgency. Instant gratification keeps the nervous system in urgency mode. You can never get enough altitude to see what you're actually capable of. Nihilism in this context is what happens when someone is temperamentally and intellectually ready for self-actualization, they can feel it calling, but structurally can't access it because the lower levels keep demanding attention. The gap between what you sense you could be and what your daily behavior actually produces is what nihilism feels like from the inside. 5. Nervous System States (Polyvagal Theory) The nervous system operates in three distinct states. The ventral vagal state supports social engagement and feelings of safety. The sympathetic state triggers fight-or-flight when danger is perceived. The dorsal vagal state causes freeze or shutdown responses during overwhelming threats. The ventral vagal system is in control when things feel safe, it supports social engagement, thought, reflection, and awareness. These functions enable moral judgments and new learning. Here's the connection: you can only do deep, meaningful, focused work from the ventral vagal state. Creativity, curiosity, sustained attention, long-term thinking. these are all ventral vagal functions. They require felt safety. Now consider what chronic instant gratification does to your nervous system: every notification, every video, every fast reward is a micro-activation of the sympathetic system. Your brain registers novelty as mild urgency, something is happening, pay attention. Over thousands of repetitions a day, this trains your nervous system to expect constant activation. When fight-or-flight remains chronically activated, it leads to anxiety, fatigue, and health problems, desensitization, lack of drive. The result: your baseline nervous system state gradually shifts away from ventral vagal safety and toward chronic low-grade sympathetic activation. You're not in full fight-or-flight, you're in a mild, persistent version of it. Restless. Scanning. Unable to settle. And here's where it gets really important: depression and loss of motivation are often dorsal vagal states. When the sympathetic system stays activated too long without resolution, the nervous system eventually collapses into the dorsal vagal, shutdown, flatness, numbness, meaninglessness. (extreme case) If left unresolved, the nervous system can get stuck in these states, between hypervigilance and shutdown. That cycling between restlessness and flatness, between craving stimulation and feeling nothing, that is a nervous system oscillating between sympathetic overdrive and dorsal vagal collapse. It's not a character flaw. It's a dysregulated autonomic nervous system doing exactly what it's designed to do under those conditions. 6. Survival Mode vs. Post-Survival Mode This is the most personal lens and in some ways the most useful one. Survival mode is not just about physical survival. It's a psychological orientation where the primary question driving all behavior is: am I safe, do I have enough, will I be okay? Everything is filtered through threat assessment. Energy is conserved. Risk is avoided. Pleasure is grabbed quickly because the future is uncertain. Post-survival mode is what becomes possible when that question is no longer dominating. The primary question shifts to: what do I want to build, who do I want to become, what is worth doing? Energy can be invested in long timelines. Discomfort can be tolerated because the future feels real and reachable. Instant gratification is survival mode behavior in a post-survival context. You are materially safe. Your basic needs are met. But your behavioral operating system is still running survival-mode code: grab the reward now, avoid the discomfort now, seek relief now. because that's what it was trained to do, and because the platforms and products around you are specifically designed to keep triggering it. The insidious part: cheap instant gratification simulates survival-mode conditions even in their absence. It keeps the psychological environment feeling urgent, scarce, and unpredictable, which keeps survival-mode behavior feeling appropriate and necessary. It's a loop that feeds itself. Breaking out of it requires something survival mode finds deeply uncomfortable: tolerating emptiness long enough for the nervous system to realize the threat isn't real. That's the withdrawal period. Your brain is running its threat-detection software and finding nothing to react to. Eventually it stops looking. And in that quiet is where post-survival psychology finally has room to emerge. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ A person trapped in instant gratification is someone who is operating from the lowest available psychological tier: survival values, Red-stage consciousness, bottom of Maslow's pyramid, sympathetic nervous system dominance, survival-mode orientation. not because they are that person, but because the conditions they've created keep pulling them back there. Nihilism, lack of motivation, flatness.... these are not character flaws. They are accurate signals from a system that is running below its actual capacity, sending you the message that something is wrong. Dopamine detox here is not self-improvement. It's returning to baseline. Living a sober life is non-negotiable if you want to self actualize.

I don't understand the question, can you explain?

Thank you, i appreciate it. In my opinion, with the forum, it is inescapable to not get that urge to check, that dopamine hit that makes you open and see what's new. the difference is with intention. the more intention you have behind entering the forum the less it falls into the category of instant gratification, the more passive you are with it the more it is just mindless scrolling through posts and replies hoping to find something and to not miss something. The insight is that it is almost inescapable in modern world. Also, how i see this subject is, it's not about delayed gratification VS instant gratification. it's about Instant gratification Vs enjoyment but no gratification at all. the distinction between Pleasure and enjoyment should be made. Pleasure in its raw form is a stimulus-response mechanism. Something happens, a chemical fires, you feel good for a moment, it fades, you want more. It is fundamentally passive, it happens to you. Pleasure is when "wanting" to do something is stronger that "liking" that thing. that's why it leaves you empty every time and end up wanting more and more. (scrolling, binge-watching, fast food...) The cycle happens like this: enormous wanting → brief, diminishing liking → no satiety → immediate return of wanting, stronger than before. The loop that never closes. that's why it leaves you feeling dirty and empty. Pleasure is always a trap. Enjoyment on the other hand though is the feeling that comes from building, creating, walking, sports, reading, research.... the healthy activities that have no pleasure to them, but still deeply enjoyed because they tap into intrinsic motivation, the kind of motivation that makes us enjoy the doing itself. You are not doing the activity to get something, the activity itself is the reward. This is flow state territory. Instant gratification, is characterized by a sharp dopamine spike followed by rapid depletion. But during deep engagement in meaningful activity the brain releases a cocktail of neurochemicals: norepinephrine, which sharpens focus; dopamine (in a healthy way), which drives motivation and pattern recognition; endorphins, which reduce pain and increase pleasure; serotonin, which stabilizes mood; and anandamide, a compound that promotes lateral thinking and reduces anxiety. Pleasure is survival-mode reward, fast, certain, requires no growth, no risk, no investment of self. Enjoyment is post-survival reward, it requires you to be regulated enough, secure enough, present enough, and developed enough to tolerate the discomfort of effort associated with it. Btw, this has been understood as two fundamentally different forms of happiness, Since Aristotle: Hedonia which is pleasure. and eudaimonia, a life well lived.

Great Work.

If you want to get rid of a bad habit, a bad trait, or trying to gain new ones, figure out how not changing is threatening your identity. not how it is slowing you down, not how it is effecting you negatively, not how much it makes you leave on the table, but how is it threatening you identity, how parts of you die without that change.

That's the only healthy outcome in that situation. either that or a dysfunctional codependent chaotic relationship. sorry to hear that.

can you be more specific, please

This guy "Muhammad Yunus" is an example of approaching a social complex problem with systems thinking, and it earned him a Nobel peace prize. He created a system of small loans for poor people without collateral, using group accountability and weekly repayments instead of legal enforcement. He redesigned lending so social pressure and access to future credit made repayment the default behavior, not punishment. He created Grameen Bank, where loans are given without collateral, but inside a tightly designed system: small groups of borrowers, weekly meetings, incremental loans, and shared accountability. Repayment isn’t enforced by legal pressure, but by social structure and continuous access to future credit. He literally architected trust based on the system's behavior. He didn’t solve poverty by giving aid, charity or blaming individuals or reality, instead he redesigned the system that was producing exclusion in the first place. Instead of treating poor people as “high-risk borrowers,” he rebuilt the lending structure around how people actually behave in real social environments. This shifts the system from punishment-based enforcement to trust-based feedback loops. It also aligns incentives: repayment becomes the easiest way to maintain access, and group dynamics reinforce stability. The result wasn’t just financial inclusion, it was a self-sustaining ecosystem where normal human behavior leads to economic progress. and repayment rates reported to be around 95–98%, which is fucking huge. I'm really impressed and inspired.

another lens: 8. Mindfulness and system's thinking Systems thinking requires a specific prerequisite: you have to be regulated enough to observe yourself without immediately becoming what you observe. That gap, between the observer and the thing being observed, is exactly what chronic overstimulation collapses. You become fused with every thought, every craving, every emotion, every self-critical story. There's no space. Just reaction.

This is hilarious ffs, how do you come up with this shit ?

another lens: 7. Emotional intelligence and regulation It explains not just what the system becomes, but why it started and why it persists and why it's a vicious cycle. While on this state of recurrent fight or flight, the sequence runs as follows, almost always unconsciously: an unpleasant emotion arises: boredom, loneliness, anxiety, shame, uncertainty, or even the mild friction of starting something difficult. → The amygdala registers it as threat. → The brain seeks the fastest available relief. → Instant gratification is found. → The emotion is suppressed. → Temporary calm follows. → The emotion returns, louder, because it was never processed and the cycle repeats. Every repetition of this cycle does two things: it confirms to the amygdala that the emotion was dangerous and that escape was the correct response, and it slightly narrows the window of tolerance, (the optimal zone in which the nervous system can feel and process emotions without becoming overwhelmed or shutting down.) Over months and years, the window narrows to the point where even mild discomfort pushes the person outside it. And the only thing that quickly restores equilibrium is the familiar relief of instant gratification. The trap completes itself: the very thing causing the narrowing is the only thing that feels like it relieves it. Nihilism, in this framework, is often unexpressed and unprocessed emotion that has been suppressed so many times it stopped showing up as feeling and started showing up as philosophy. Emotional intelligence is not sensitivity or expressiveness. It is the capacity to feel an emotion without immediately being controlled by it. This capacity lives in the prefrontal cortex, the exact region weakened by chronic overstimulation. The more a person escapes their emotions through fast stimulation, the less capacity they have to regulate those emotions the next time they arise. Low emotional intelligence and chronic instant gratification are not merely correlated, they manufacture each other.

Where is the episode, Leo? where the fuck is the episode? you promised and didn't deliver smh! My communication in this post is violent, accusatory and blame shifting because of you, if you had just posted that episode, I’d know better. it's your fault, take some accountability.

This is a basic insight but a powerful one, and can either be interpreted as good news or bad news; it's up to you: A human is a mechanical system that runs on autopilot almost all the time. and a system that is capable of observing itself and influencing itself. Programming different aspects of yourself becomes one of the most important skills when it comes to behavioral change.

Hey man, I’m gonna answer you honestly, what you wrote doesn’t sound like a curiosity about reincarnation, it sounds like you’re exhausted and feel stuck in a life where you think you’re ‘less than’ others and hate your life, I get it. Those are just beliefs and interpretations, and they're doing way more damage than any actual limitation you might have. There are people with average or even below-average intelligence who build solid, meaningful lives because they focus on what they can control instead of labeling themselves and giving up. I get it, it can feel hopeless sometimes and your feelings are valid, but what's not valid is your interpretation of it and having that attitude/mindset. About ‘going to the next life’, nobody actually knows what happens after death. At least I don't know myself, and I don't think that's the right thing to think about right now. What’s real is this life, right now. And the fact that you’re here asking this means some part of you still wants things to be different, not just over. And that part matters. With enough understanding, better perspective, and time, people can completely change the way they see themselves and their life. This is not just lame motivational talk; it’s something you can actually observe. Your current story about yourself isn’t fixed. It’s something your mind built from past experiences, and it can be updated and changed. you can interpret things differently, see what lessons you learned, see what opportunities you have. But for that to happen, you need at least a bit of openness to the idea that things can improve. Not blind positivity, just enough optimism to stop reinforcing the idea that you’re stuck forever. Also, your self-worth being tied to past failures is a trap. Past outcomes don’t define what you’re capable of becoming and who you are. you can train yourself to not believe that. Here’s what’s not real: “My IQ completely determines whether my life is worth living.” “Because I’ve failed before, I’ll always fail.” “My current situation is permanent.” “There’s no way for me to feel better or build something meaningful.” “The only way out of this feeling is to leave this life.” "I suck and I'm not worthy" Here’s what is real: You don’t fully know what you’re capable of yet. yourself worth and self-esteem are flexible things and are not tied to past or present situations. Your mind is interpreting your life in a very harsh, fixed way. and that can change. People in similar or worse situations have found ways to build lives they don’t hate. (speaking from experience) You have some level of agency, even if it’s not absolute. Change is possible, but it starts with small shifts in perspective and action. You’re not the only one who has felt like this, even if it feels like it right now. If things feel this heavy, talking to someone in real life, even just one person, can help more than trying to solve everything alone in your head.

I disagree with this idea, yes we have esteem and belonging needs, but those are different things. we can learn to stop craving social validation and make it internal. What do you think?

How do you hold an idea or map of reality firmly enough to act on it, but loosely enough to abandon it when you're wrong? I keep running into this: I'll arrive at some understanding; about people, about how things work, about myself, and I'll feel it clearly enough to say it with confidence. Then sometimes later I look back and realize I was missing something obvious, or i was wrong. The naive fix is to just "stay curious and uncertain." But that's not really a solution, it's an abdication. You can't navigate life in permanent suspension. You need maps, even imperfect ones. You need to commit to a direction or you go nowhere. So the real question isn't whether to hold convictions, but how?, how do you build maps that are solid enough to act on, but not so rigid they stop you from growing? is it just "act based on your best guess"? or something to do with intuition and insight? or is it a paradox?

so it's about a 'state'?

i just want to know does it have this paradoxical letting go ? letting go of the need to have truth .

That would be yellow stage.

the details 😂

yes. the more you meditate, the more conscious you get, the better you get at observing yourself, the better your chances are at self mastery.

yeah exactly.