Slowly but surely I’ve lost interest in things that have previously made me feel joy. I’m insanely addicted to my phone, and although I’ve cut out most traditional social media, it’s migrated over to things like iMessage, Hacker News, Reddit, and old fashioned forums. Porn has been a bit of a problem, but I’ve started to overcome that once I realized it was becoming a problem.

I have a group thread with friends called Drug House. Basically it’s probably close to a ~1,000 message/day stream of making fun of each other, bragging, and funny content. It’s an amazing source of entertainment. Years ago I put it on mute because notifications became out of hand incredibly fast as you can imagine. The problem is that now I just constantly open iMessage to see if there are any new messages. This isn’t good.

Yesterday I was making a song and it was fucking sick (SOOTHING is the working title in case I end up finishing it and want to look back on this). However after 45 minutes I had to share the little 32 bar loop I had with Blake, and then with Drug House. After I did that I was done and moved on to debugging some network shit and talking with Blake.

I have a hard time focusing on any one thing and my brain is just constantly being pulled in 8,000 different directions. I’m once again toying with the idea of grabbing a dumb phone and using that for my day to day stuff. I don’t know if that will even help though.

On Aug 1, I woke up and didn’t want to get out of bed.

I felt…blank. Hollowed out. I’d felt this way for months.

I couldn’t enjoy anything.

I didn’t care about work.

I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

I wasn’t necessarily depressed. Objectively life was amazing...

— Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) October 6, 2021

This thread isn’t the first time I’d heard of dopamine detoxes, but it was the first time I’d organically heard of someone actually doing it. His effects speak for themselves.

Naval said something along the lines of “The struggle of ancient man was scarcity. The struggle of modern man is abundance.” This hits the nail on the head for me. I consistently have analysis paralysis and context switching happens almost by the minute. Flow states have become rare and being able to just sit and talk with Madison are non existent.

I need to try something like this. I’m unsure of how to go about it, but I will figure it out.