It’s definitely terrible and to be avoided if at all possible, but it is kind of fun. We can and do get back a small part of that feeling with roller coasters and action movies and fighting sports.
MixedNuts
Karma: 7,215
That sounds like fun, from a LaVeyan-ish perspective. Fighting and killing are more exciting than singing Kumbaya. Does she just not like raw meat?
It’s pretty obvious why you wouldn’t want to go into details, but this seems rather too vague to be of use. Should I think of plans in case I need to find a student in Hogwarts, to fight a troll, to convince a student to disobey McGonagall? Should I do a headcount every time I walk into a room and try to guess where missing people are and what will happen if someone announces there’s a troll in the castle? Should I sign up to Defense classes and duelling clubs and the Armies so I’ll get training in thinking and acting under pressure? Should I think of possible ways Hermione could end up dead or hurt or in Azkaban and ways I can prevent that? Should I imagine those outcomes in excruciating detail so that I won’t be too shocked if they happen? Once Hermione gets eaten by the troll, how do I use the replays and alternate versions in my head to become better?
Does it actually help? My usual reactions are “Ha, yeah, I totally do that. Silly human foibles eh?”, “Screw you, anonymous proverb author, just because you don’t mention what makes this a least-bad option doesn’t make it worse”, or “Yeah, that’s the problem. Do you have a solution?”.
Not a known side effect of that one, but that’s certainly a possibility. I’m trying to go off it, so I’ll see.
It’s not project-specific. It’s not repulsive so much as slippery—I happily begin working, but constantly lose focus. I was diagnosed with depression over a year ago, but I’m on meds and it’s pretty much gone, and I don’t have trouble focusing on things that don’t require much insight.
I assume this means close to, if slightly below, the level of the average pro
No, just very haphazard. I know how to do many things, but I don’t know how to do many other, often easier, things, and I seem to have become oddly unable to learn. Of course nobody wants a CSS whiz who never learnt HTML5.
I’m not completely stupid. I used to be a decent programmer. I’m now a halfway-decent programmer. I’m unable to make any progress, and my ability to hold a job of any kind is dubious. What am I doing wrong?
I’m in Saint-Etienne. I can make it to Lyon, but as I’m completely broke, if there are few people and nobody particularly minds taking the train, I’d rather have the meetup in Saint-Etienne.
No. High oxytocin is present whether you orgasm or not, as we just established. I expect this to help productivity. I also expect that orgasm would
Hurt productivity, because “so sleepy and satisfied, why do anything?” (from low dopamine, possibly from high prolactin)
Help productivity, because “feeling so relaxed, doing things that normally make me so anxious and icky is so easy right now” (from high prolactin; sex without orgasm (high-oxytocin, low-prolactin) does provide some pleasant feelings but not this specific effect)
Help productivity overall, relative to sex without orgasm
Thanks!
Moving back from the biological basis to the introspective level, I’d expect the high-prolactin afterglow state to reduce anxiety enough to compensate for decreased motivation. (This might be related to whether one gets wired up or sleepy after sex, which has surprisingly large individual variation.) Easy enough to set up a randomised trial.
I find this confusing. Ambiguity is paralysing (though in what circumstances the freeze response isn’t stupid, I have no idea), but it’s hard to see what response other than “RUN” this would cause. It’s not like having to find words that’ll placate a hostile human, or reinvent first aid on the fly.
Do you have a source on oxytocin and sex with vs without orgasm? My understanding was that sex increased oxytocin secretion pretty much the same whether you orgasmed or not.
If depression was hibernation-like you’d expect oversleeping and undereating. Melancholic depression causes insomnia and undereating, atypical depression causes oversleeping and overeating.
“If you are too different, you’re probably going to break up” is not so groundbreaking that it’s worth three minutes of your readers’ lives.
The naive application of that is to go around thinking “I shouldn’t be thinking about ‘should’ all the time! I should stop doing that! I’m not thinking like I should!”.
Yeah, that was pretty much the only thing I could think of. But given that people do not in fact have randomly assigned soulmates who are a much better match than anyone else, holding out for your soulmate is not a possible policy.
Another thing that would qualify is meeting everyone in the world (in reasonable age brackets and filtering by gender if appropriate, and maybe some amount of filtering on culture and interests still counts as not settling) to determine the best possible match, not because you can only be happy with them but because you refuse to settle for the infinitesimally inferior second-best match. But it’s very unlikely that you’ll be your first choice’s first choice, forcing at least one of you to settle for an inferior match or remain single.
Gratuitous bragging: my calculations suggest that there are about ten thousand people in the world I’d be more or less as happy with as with my boyfriend. (It’s not that lucky, I meet an incredibly skewed sample.) I have on average two more chances of finding another good match if we break up, and I’m not unhappy about this prospect, which makes “settling” a strange descriptor.
I’d go vegetarian for pay. I don’t eat much meat, but I do enjoy it a lot and am reluctant to stop. If you’re interested, let’s discuss price by PM—I won’t reveal my estimate of the cost but it is in the 100 USD/year − 1000 USD/year range. I could also go vegan but price will depend on how conscientious you want me to be about it.
Edit: Offer now withdrawn
Sounds like your problems could cancel out. If you decline intercourse but “fool around” a lot, they’re unlikely to be too unhappy about it.
What’s the downside of lust?