When you are so exhausted and/or sick that your body doesn’t listen. When you seemingly can’t do anything or have lost all “will” to do anything. When you can’t progress in any meaningful way in any area. Give up. I think I would consider myself a dopaminergic person, I set goals and those goals become more important to me than almost anything. I don’t often STOP and just look around or be thankful for everything I have. I definitely do, but definitely not as much as I should (I don’t, for example, take stock every day and thinking about it). I should. I think a lot of meditation and its benefits spring from doing (seemingly) very little and just existing and being okay with “just existing.” I see it in Oliver a lot too, he REALLY wants something and will stop at nothing. I get that he’s a kid and he doesn’t have emotional control yet, but I’m willing to bet that he’ll be (eventually) one of those people that gets SUPER into something, you know, goes really really deep and spends a lot of time on it. In computer science terms I’d say a dopaminergic person is someone that heavily “depth-first” in terms of a search strategy. Instead of looking around, testing out a ton of different things, going really broad and general, a dopaminergic person looks somewhere FAR into the future, sets a lofty goal, and then just bangs their head against the wall (metaphorically speaking), pushing and striving until they succeed or until their head hurts too much.

That’s the subject of this post. I think the “depth-first” strategy is FINE but the problem often becomes time itself. Say you like Physics. Maybe you want to be a PhD in astronomical physics (the reason for this, let’s just take as a given), or you want to study Physics your whole life. You can do this! The problem is you need to give up A LOT to get there. You might not realize you have to give up a lot, you might not realize at the time you set the goal T(0) that you might actually want those things at a later time and you might not even recognize that the you of T(0) when the goal was set is not the you for all time. At a certain point motivations and goals (and limitations) change, you might not be able to proceed. It’s a question of meaning/value (similar to other posts I’ve made) and the trick isn’t to just not set any lofty goals, but to

OOPS, have to give up (baby is awake), value judgement shifted (writing this post WAS important, but now Baby >>>>>> Dada’s thoughts)