Human capital is worth nothing after you die, though.
CronoDAS
Karma: 16,276
[Question] AI for medical care for hard-to-treat diseases?
Does the answer to “should I buy insurance” change if the interest rate that you earn on your wealth is zero or even negative?
Although I don’t quite fit the broader diagnosis, the phrase “demand avoidance” does describe how I’ve been at my low points—what I wanted most at those times in my life was to be free from obligations in general, such as the obligation to go to school, the obligation to get out of bed, the obligation to eat food, etc. - for there to be absolutely nothing that I would “have to” do if I preferred not to do it. Unfortunately, taking that impulse—to be free to do absolutely nothing, without anyone or anything influencing me otherwise—to its logical extreme would mean being dead, because, given physics, nonexistence is the only state in which that condition actually holds.
I did have an “internship” right after college for a few months and was completely miserable during it. The other problem was that one thing I valued highly was free time, and regardless of how much money and status a 40 hour a week job gives you, that’s still 40 hours a week in which your time isn’t free! There are very few jobs in which, like an Uber driver, you have absolute freedom to choose when and how much to work and the only consequence of not working for a period of time is that you don’t get paid—you can’t “lose your job” for choosing not to show up. Unfortunately, most jobs that fit that description, such as Uber driver or fiction novel writer, usually pay very poorly.
Yet another problem is that I feel like applying for jobs will be futile. Spending time submitting resumes into a metaphorical black hole and never getting any interviews or even a form letter in response, even from grocery stores, has left me in despair and even starting to think about job hunting consistently and reliably makes me start to feel incredibly depressed.
Quite possibly. I did get an ADHD diagnosis as a kid...
Yeah, except that sometimes I’m weirdly insensitive to punishments and other threats. For some reason, my brain often (mistakenly?) concludes that doing the thing that would let me avoid the punishment is impossible, and I just shut down completely instead of trying to comply.
As I once wrote before:
Guy with a gun: I’m going to shoot you if you haven’t changed the sheets on your bed by tomorrow.
Me: AAH I’M GOING TO DIE IT’S NO GOOD I MIGHT AS WELL SPEND THE DAY LYING IN BED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I’M GOING TO GET SHOT TOMORROW SOMEONE CALL THE FUNERAL HOME AND MAKE PLANS TELL MY FAMILY I LOVE THEM
Guy with a gun: You know, you could always just… change the sheets?
ME: THE THOUGHT HAS OCCURRED TO ME BUT I’M TOO UPSET RIGHT NOW ABOUT THE FACT THAT I’M GOING TO DIE TOMORROW BECAUSE THE SHEETS WEREN’T CHANGED TO ACTUALLY GO AND CHANGE THEM
Also, the “worse consequences” were often projected to happen years in the future: you need good grades to get into a good college and then get a good job, etc. The fear of being homeless years in the future when your money runs out isn’t really all that great when the “good” future you can imagine for yourself doesn’t seem very appealing either—the idea of having a full-time job horrified ten-year-old me for various reasons, and I never really managed to get over that, to the point where I never did manage to get and keep a “real” job after college. There were years I lived with the constant worry that my parents might one day decide to stop supporting me financially and kick me out of their house...
Pets often make their needs quite obvious if you “forget” to take care of them. When my dog wants something from me, he won’t leave me alone until I figure out what it is.
They can also be immediately rewarding and stay that way. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend a goldfish, but if you’re already an animal lover it’s hard to become bored with a dog or cat.
Ten-year-old me had an objection to the idea of “willpower” on principle. Obviously, “Willpower” is the process by which people get themselves to do unpleasant things. I don’t want to do unpleasant things. Therefore, having as little Willpower as possible will minimize the unpleasant things I end up doing.
Another way I’ve found myself with a lack of ability to motivate myself seems related to the post’s original thesis. Up until I finally graduated college, my typical use of “willpower”-based motivation would be to do something I’d rather not have to do (usually homework) in order to avoid consequences that were supposed to be worse than doing the unpleasant thing. Unfortunately, this led to a bad feedback loop. My brain would predict that homework would be less fun than video games, I’d do it anyway, it would indeed be less fun than video games, and the lesson my brain would learn would be “pay less attention to that voice screaming that undone homework leads to doom” instead of “good, we successfully avoided the problem of undone homework”. Eventually, doing homework became so aversive that I actually did stop caring about what might happen if I stopped doing it...
I donated $100. I’m fairly income-constrained at the moment so I’d be nervous about donating more.
That might be okay. But I reserve the right to refuse to treat any possible “mind” that does not participate in the arrow of time as though it did not exist.
A while back, I decided that any theory of cosmology that implies that I’m a Boltzmann brain is almost certainly wrong.
Something like that!
I’ve heard that, in Las Vegas, if you put yourself on the government’s “compulsive gambler” list, you can still walk into any casino, give them your money, and place a bet—the only difference being that, if you happen to win, the casino keeps your money as if you had lost.
I think it should work the other way around, making it the casino’s responsibility to avoid accepting bets from self-proclaimed problem gamblers—if you’re on the list and the casino doesn’t stop you from betting, the casino has to give you back any money you lose.
It’s also trivial to make a perpetual motion machine with Portal portals. Just have a portal in the floor that teleports you to the ceiling directly above it, then drop a ball into it. It’ll fall forever, accelerating until it hits terminal velocity (at which point all the gravitational potential energy goes to heating the air it falls through).
If you don’t want to just throw out conservation of energy, using a portal to “lift” things would have to take the same amount of energy as lifting it through normal space does.
Sometimes I remember having had the thought “this is a dream” while dreaming, but doing that doesn’t really give me any extra “conscious” control over what happens—all it does is let me “decide” to wake up.
I have yet to be able to successfully make a Google search during a dream—what I “intend” to search for is never what appears in the box I’m trying to “type” the search query into.
Jacen Solo became an evil Sith because the people in charge of the Star Wars franchise at the time thought having the brother named Anakin Solo be the one to do it would be too ridiculous. The rest is writers trying to make the decisions of a Pointy-Haired Boss make sense.
I live in New Jersey and have no job and lots of free time. How can I do this for someone without moving to the Bay Area?