Flow. Or lack thereof.

I'll probably be going into hibernation on the forum for the winter, but I did want to reply to this first.

naps wrote:

emillionth wrote:I think this has everything to do with SPD, by the way. Sexual motivation is behind a lot of things in life. And when it's absent (the inner motivation itself, I'm not talking about gratification), the rest of the motivation system falls apart.

I disagree. Plenty of people identify as asexual and they don't necessarily lack a sense of purpose or identity. If the lack of motivation that can occur with people with SPD was due to a low sex drive, wouldn't matters pertaining to sexuality be more prevalent within the diagnostic criteria?

So if this seems random at first, hear out my whole post. First off...

Pandas.






More specifically though, pandas are notorious for being extremely difficult to mate, especially in captivity. And they're just an extreme case of a widespread phenomenon, which is that even given an outwardly comfortable environment and easy access to a mate, lots of animals' sexual urges collapse in unnatural environments. Or the even weirder possibility is that sometimes even if they try, they genuinely fail to understand the... mechanics of the act.

That's one among many reasons I personally think that sexual motivation isn't as "hard-wired" as it's often assumed to be (sort of like naps is saying). At the same time, I do think that if an animal, including humans, are in a natural situation, sexual urges and any resulting offspring reinforce the sense of a natural life. That speaks to sex affecting one's motivation, like you're saying emillionth. In other words, I think both you and naps are focusing on different halves of a feedback loop.

As for what's the real cause behind it all, I still stand by what I said in this post (and now with more sexual experience):
schizoid-personality/topic179223.html#p1864478

And why would that feedback loop would break down? In the grand scheme of things, I think the best explanation might be an experiment that a certain, recently-departed poster kept bringing up. Pretty much, past a certain social density, animals go collectively and terminally insane:
http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/wh ... al-problem

I don't know if there's much of a moral to all of this, except like that poster said, if you feel that your life is unnatural in some way, there's a good chance it's not just you. The contemporary world is probably just that unnatural and genuinely crazy-making. And in the end, I guess all you can do is try to maintain some core of sensibility and healthy instincts, and jump at opportunities to carve out a healthy niche for yourself.

emillionth wrote:Look up "Deep Space Waifu" (I'm not going to link it because it's NSFW).

Haha, I haven't looked it up at all, but I can imagine from the name alone

You will be missed muaddib. See you in the spring.

muaddib wrote:And why would that feedback loop would break down? In the grand scheme of things, I think the best explanation might be an experiment that a certain, recently-departed poster kept bringing up. Pretty much, past a certain social density, animals go collectively and terminally insane:
http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/wh ... al-problem

I don't think overpopulation is the problem though. I think it's overexposure. People act like they're being watched 24 hours a day, even when they have no logical reason to believe it. Because, unlike simpler animals like mice, people live in a proxy reality that doesn't really reflect what's going on around them. So they never relax. Stress hormones and all that.

ElephantEyes wrote:You will be missed muaddib. See you in the spring.

Thanks ElephantEyes, though it's possible I wind up still posting. Sometimes I tend to post to the forum when I expect to take a break and vice versa.

emillionth wrote:

muaddib wrote:And why would that feedback loop would break down? In the grand scheme of things, I think the best explanation might be an experiment that a certain, recently-departed poster kept bringing up. Pretty much, past a certain social density, animals go collectively and terminally insane:
http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/wh ... al-problem

I don't think overpopulation is the problem though. I think it's overexposure. People act like they're being watched 24 hours a day, even when they have no logical reason to believe it. So they never relax. Stress hormones and all that.

In a sense, you're right. It's not as simple as "too many mice = crazy," but it's more about the structure of the mice's relationships. And funny enough, like you suggest, getting a break from others seems to be one of the proven ways to mitigate (but not arrest) the decline. At the same time, the mice still have to be able to actually "live" so having a niche matters too, which is why I guess "the beautiful ones" that just withdraw entirely don't survive the madness either.

A couple key lines from the article:

Mice have social roles, as do humans, and while humans might be said to be more intelligent than mice, both animals have tendencies to bizarre behavior when put under stress.

He felt it was plain that the problem was having too many individuals for meaningful social roles....

His work was later continued to find that the key issue was not merely population density, but degrees of separation and levels of interaction that caused the stress. By making it more possible for individual mice to avoid other mice, even for a limited time, the effects of the population bomb were reduced.

muaddib wrote:In a sense, you're right. It's not as simple as "too many mice = crazy," but it's more about the structure of the mice's relationships. And funny enough, like you suggest, getting a break from others seems to be one of the proven ways to mitigate (but not arrest) the decline. At the same time, the mice still have to be able to actually "live" so having a niche matters too, which is why I guess "the beautiful ones" that just withdraw entirely don't survive the madness either.

I added a sentence to my post while you were writing your response. I think those findings probably do generalize to humans too, but in a more convoluted way. I think the key difference is that our social behavior is far more reliant on abstraction than the mice's. Sometimes we're able to zone out on the train, but sometimes we're also unable to be at ease when there's no one around.

muaddib wrote:it's possible I wind up still posting. Sometimes I tend to post to the forum when I expect to take a break and vice versa.

I hope so. I frequently learn a lot from stuff you post.

Not the mouse link, though. Leave it to bored scientists to create a little mini mouse Auschwitz just for the purpose of amassing inconclusive data.

Mice have social roles, as do humans, and while humans might be said to be more intelligent than mice..

Humans smarter? Never thought of that. Did they take into account drug use within the mouse population? What about religion? Political ideology? How did they deal with all the little Harvey Weinstein mice who insisted on putting their little mouse hands on all the little lady mouse teats? Why is it that all the wealthy mice didn't claim 99% of the enclosure's space just for themselves?

Personally I believe the most significant effect from ongoing population explosion will be how it will facilitate the spread of human pathogens. There has to be something that will take us down, and we're a bit too crafty to run out of food or blow each other all up, at least for now.

naps wrote:Personally I believe the most significant effect from ongoing population explosion will be how it will facilitate the spread of human pathogens.

That's probably by far the most realistic prediction about it. I think it's a consensus among the experts and researchers and whatnot who have seriously analyzed the question. Especially with the global antibiotics crisis going tic-toc-tic-toc. It's not by chance that it's what Bill Gates has been focusing on. Otherwise there won't be enough people left to buy MS Office licences.

It reminds me of an interesting question that I heard not too long ago: It makes sense that a large portion of the native peoples of the Americas was wiped out by Old-World pathogens. But... why weren't the incoming Europeans also wiped out by New-World pathogens? The short answer is population density, of course. Because it's not just how pathogens spread, it's also how they evolve.

The flow coupled with creativity is certainly my favorite type of high. When playing music and the instrument feels like its part of you, not a seperate entity and ideas you never thought you would concieve is flowing out. Ive found i get in that state a bit easier when other aspects of my life are satisfied. I guess that would relate to anxiety, little bits in the back of the mind impeding the flow. Lately ive been trying hard to get the creativity going but its only been a trickle and im struggling to find a solid answer or solution.

Flow is so magical and so satisfying in it's magic.

This TED talk comes from an expert studying flow. It aligns with my experience of flow.

https://www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_csiksz ... #t-1119503

A potential employer asked me to explain flow in a job interview and I failed miserably lol