So my entire life has been extreme boredom, followed by finding a book/videogame/hobby I find interesting, doing nothing but that for awhile, then never touching it again.
I’m debating maybe trying to make a rule of not doing something two days in a row. Like I just found a video game I liked and played it all day yesterday and today, and while I still wanna play I already feel its shininess wearing off.
Curious if anyone else has tried to space out their dopamine buttons and if it helped. So maybe like instead of just playing the same game tomorrow, I’ll need to try other games, or maybe try to find a new book series to hyper focus on…
Yes but in a different way… More about limiting the activity than the time doing the activity.
Basically I find things WAY more fun if I limit the amount of features in the fun thing. For example, if my favorite drink/food store has 10 options instead of 100, then I make a decision easier and enjoy it more since I don’t dwell on it. Or when Minecraft introduced infinite world generation, it became harder to play longer because the possibilities were too overwhelming. Or if someone says “let’s hang out, where do you wanna go” then it is more stressful and more pressure than “let’s hang out, choose between these 3 places”.
In these examples it’s all because of the overwhelming choices being reduced into processable pieces, which means I can stay enjoying the dopamine from doing the activity way faster.
Same here. Open world game with tons of side quests? I’m exploring every little cave & finding those Korok seeds. Add in normal life breaks & I stretched out Zelda BOTW for years, even with lots of all day playing sessions. That $70 cost of the game became next to nothing if I were to calculate some cost-per-dopamine value
The dreaded Analysis Paralysis!