I chose to give up fiction for Rationalist Lent (before reading the comments and before seeing this exchange).
I’ve been observing my fiction (particularly sci-fi) habits for the past year or so, and have tried to reduce/improve them, including making it a major focus both times I attended a CFAR workshop. This has been only marginally successful. The behavior feels addictive in both the sense that I lose sleep or forget other important things due to it, and in the sense that it’s hard to stop.
When I investigate the desire to read scifi, it seems to be connected to desires around intellectual exploration, a sense of wonder/excitement, and some sort of displaced social desire around “camaraderie in service of large-scale goals”. This makes me think it’s a pica, and that I would be better served by using that energy to get more of those things in the real world.
Oh, and an important piece of evidence I forgot to include:
I have a close friend who has a strong “romantic fanfic” habit, and based on observation and conversation it’s extremely clear to me that this is a pica/coping mechanism for them, to imperfectly replace real emotional intimacy/social safety/etc.
The similarity between their behaviors around fanfic and my behaviors around scifi are too strong for me to ignore, so that updates me in the direction of thinking it’s important to uncover what’s going on here.
This was me for quite a few years. I’ve noticed that in times when I’m really depressed I’ll read fanfic until I pass out from exhaustion at 4am, but when I feel happy and emotionally fulfilled (e.g. the past few months) my fanfic habit completely disappears and I feel no desire to read it even when I get notifications for it. Strangely, this wasn’t something I easily identified as pica at our CFAR workshop.
Why do you think we should be more worried about reading fiction? Associated addictiveness, time consumption, escapism?
I chose to give up fiction for Rationalist Lent (before reading the comments and before seeing this exchange).
I’ve been observing my fiction (particularly sci-fi) habits for the past year or so, and have tried to reduce/improve them, including making it a major focus both times I attended a CFAR workshop. This has been only marginally successful. The behavior feels addictive in both the sense that I lose sleep or forget other important things due to it, and in the sense that it’s hard to stop.
When I investigate the desire to read scifi, it seems to be connected to desires around intellectual exploration, a sense of wonder/excitement, and some sort of displaced social desire around “camaraderie in service of large-scale goals”. This makes me think it’s a pica, and that I would be better served by using that energy to get more of those things in the real world.
So, all of the above, at least in my case.
Oh, and an important piece of evidence I forgot to include:
I have a close friend who has a strong “romantic fanfic” habit, and based on observation and conversation it’s extremely clear to me that this is a pica/coping mechanism for them, to imperfectly replace real emotional intimacy/social safety/etc.
The similarity between their behaviors around fanfic and my behaviors around scifi are too strong for me to ignore, so that updates me in the direction of thinking it’s important to uncover what’s going on here.
This was me for quite a few years. I’ve noticed that in times when I’m really depressed I’ll read fanfic until I pass out from exhaustion at 4am, but when I feel happy and emotionally fulfilled (e.g. the past few months) my fanfic habit completely disappears and I feel no desire to read it even when I get notifications for it. Strangely, this wasn’t something I easily identified as pica at our CFAR workshop.
Yeah, I have a friend like that too.
I replied to Kaj above.