Thanks for the suggestion. I find personality typing in general to be fascinating, and very true and useful if the types aren’t applied too rigidly to real individual people.
I haven’t read up on the enneagram, though I have colleagues who use it a lot. Do you have a favorite enneagram book/author?
One could say that’s another typical number 4 sentence 
Nope, I just grasped some concepts/ideas out of it to apply in my daily life. I was drunk after a concert and a friend was speaking about numbers and we were gently mocking at it when she gently told me she was speaking about enneagram. I remembered it on hangover the day after and checked it. I read the different profiles (who wants to be profiled?!) just
out of curiosity and when the number 4 came out I was stocked… Someone was describing my mechanisms …and put that on line!
I read a bit about the different components of it (it goes much further than a mere profiling) and how it is a construction (it’s not an horoscope). I also happened to date a woman who was instructor in enneagram (not sure about the real english term) and she explained me more about that profile. I started somehow my little journey to know myself with that before discovering other cheatcodes
One really interesting consequence was also to learn why people act/think differently, their motivations leading to totally different behavior than mine. It led me to learn maybe more about others than myself and to not judge people (i’m far from being 100% immune yet ).
If I did have some sort of debilitating addiction it would be food but I’ve got that pretty well in check these days. If I get into a videogame and that game has a story then that will be all I do until it’s finished. But that’s only twice a year at most and I absolutely never participate in new release zeitgeist. Last year was the first time I played Half Life 2. This year was the first time I played Dead Space 2. Come Februaryish it’ll be Callisto Protocol. My console is always at least one generation behind and I never have a clue what games are coming out. I smoke that grass but it certainly doesn’t block music. It doesn’t especially help the music either, it’s just a thing I like to do.
YouTube and Netflix
Ha! Reading through this description, I totally agree.
If that material is correct, at least I’m a somewhat healthy 4; I couldn’t do my work (which is all about interaction) if I were as self-involved as the weaker levels of 4 described.
Interesting how dealing with music brings out all my most “four-ish” qualities though……
Thanks for the thoughts!
Okay, back to the addictions …
So interesting to see the complaints about losing time on YouTube… Because I can relate completely to it and, worse, it’s a fucking new thing in my life.
I used to mostly watch YT videos that I stumbled upon somewhere else, someone would send me a suggestion, or I would search for something specific, only lately (past 6+ months or so) I started to just open fucking YT without an idea of what I want to watch.
The worst part is: it’s never, EVER, satisfying, I think I started doing that because some months ago I didn’t feel like watching anything long form (2h for a movie, or 10+ episodes of a series), didn’t want to commit the time and effort, and ended up watching some 15-30 min documentaries on YT. Slowly that became watching some YT recommendations and those recs slowly became some of the most uninteresting content I found (like people talking about some stupid TIkTok trend [I haven’t ever had TikTok!]) and I would still just play it to have a dopamine hit.
Last week I noticed this behaviour making me… Sad, just sad, there was nothing I was learning from this, nothing I was getting out of it, it was just living in a mindless haze. I’ve tried since then to open a book when I feel I will open YT again, whatever book I have that I didn’t start reading yet, even if I won’t continue for more than 5-10 pages, I just grab a book and read a little.
It’s been helpful but I’m scared of how sneaky this thing popped into my life, I’ve never been a YT watcher, only used it for some tutorials, learning about music concepts, and a documentary here and there, seeing myself watching some stupid react content scared me very deeply…
CTRL + ALL: Sometimes gets you to great places
Doomscrolling Elektronauts: Sometimes gives you great ideas
Excellent and thoughtful post. Now a lot of users of YT are starting to understand all the censorship beyond the obvious reasons. They don’t want anyone having a voice on there that can actually make society better. This is a slippery slope, so I’ll stop there…as one person told me, if you think you have free speech, you just haven’t reached the end of your rope.
I’ve actually been spending more time on my artistic endeavors since there’s this constant threat of censorship EVERYWHERE I go on the surface web. The only addiction I have at the moment is 700mg of caffeine a day and that’s just fueling my creativity actually.
I hope you find some more meaningful way of spending your time than binging google tube propaganda. BTW, one way I weaned myself off of YT was listening to music instead of watching something.
Another tough aspect is that it’s impossible to sign out of YouTube but stay signed into GMail. With other sites, I can pretty easily sign out, remove the bookmark, etc. But in a moment of boredom or inactivity, my fingers just default to opening a new tab and typing in “you” and autofilling. It’s messed up; you’re not alone!
In some small defence of Youtube, my knowledge and skills are definitely richer for its existence. But yeah, you have to be careful what you click on. I’m constantly marking ‘don’t recommend channel’ on whatever rubbish is getting suggested to me.
A lot of times I open youtube I find a lot of things I want to watch but don’t feel like watching right then, so often I just spend 5 minutes scrolling and adding things to a watch later list. So then when I do want to watch something I go to that list first - more often than not I will delete from that list rather than actually watch (i.e., why did I think I was interested in that??).
Or as I refer to it, Scientology for incels.
To the topic-
What of the Way of the Artist or associated workbook did you apply here? I can see problems but harnessing them and hopping around them is harder to materially change.
@thermionic Well the action taken wasn’t just stopping my addictive behaviors cold turkey. The key action taken (which proved to be a huge mental chiropractic adjustment, freeing up the flow of my blocked energy, enthusiasm for making music, and self-confidence) was to just sit and make music with the expectation that it might be emotionally fruitful instead of the exponentially expanding expectation that it would be totally fruitless and confirm my worst fears.
See, for a long long time, I thought that my consistent avoiding setting up some gear and instead pigging out and zoning out to skyscraper engineering docs, was a sign that I’ve finally hit a point where my main passion and orienting polaris in life, had permanently dried up for good…a terrifying thought after 25 years of toil, torture, sacrifice, success, failure, and obscene levels of internal drama.
But when I relistened to The Artists Way audiobook, specifically the section on creative blocks and u-turns, I was reminded that our addictions of ALL TYPES can serve as blocks to doing what we love, but what choosing to just sit and do is scary.
So, it was the recognition of the pattern of addiction as a systematic way of avoiding that which is scary. I thought to myself “OK, if junk food and TV are so commonly used as blocks, as Julia says, maybe my nightly habit isn’t just a sign of me losing my passion and slowly becoming a 40-something unambitious slug. Maybe the passion is still there and the jumk food and TV are just a typical blocking behavior. Well, the way to find that out is to just engage in some creative play at some time and see how I feel, see if the joy returns.”
So on a Saturday morning, I cleared out a chunk of time and did a classic “slide into creativity” routine: took a walk, got a yummy coffee, walked right back into my studio, listened to some podcast to distract me from the discomfort of plugging stuff in, plugged in my Rytm and DFAM and clocked DFAM from Squid for shuffle and just recorded some funky jams to a Tascam pocket recorder.
I ended up recording EIGHT jams back to back…after 3 solid months of dryness. And boy was I having fun.
So it was true. The recent slippery slope into addictive patterns and zero creative play was just a typical, garden variety block that happens all the time, and NOT some bizarro “you’ve fundamentally lost your passion, now go back and get a full time sales job you worm”. LOL
And it was Cameron’s little vignettes (in I believe Week 10: Recovering a Sense of Self-Protection) that she described “an evening of junk food and your system clogs ‘what was I thinking about? Oh nevermind’” and then describes how to actually practice using that exact nervous energy that comes over you as you reach for your block of choice to pivot into some creative play and feel the small victory:
“I did it! I didn’t block, I used my energy as a catalyst and moved through the block. I’m actually a little bit excited.”
If you’re talking about NoFap, I can understand that you’ve got opinions about cliquey online communities where people support eachother to overcome certain habits and their associated physiological and psychological results…but I’m still standing firm in my lived experience that the times I set goals and practiced mind over matter, I felt the results were entirely worth the effort, and yeah, it did take support. If one wants to try something like that in this day and age, its more often than not going to take support.
edited post above for better tone and clarity @thermionic
My problem is less bettering yourself than the actual communities which contain some probably decent fellows and others that aren’t. It’s more a funnel, but that was more of a casual gag.
I don’t need to get into the nuances, the problem is wasting time regardless of reason.
OK, I can agree with that. The fake social world behind screens is a trap for many, many people and can funnel them into any number of scenes which can cultivate darkness while purporting to be “positive”
Right, there’s a high level of self-help but some crab buckets and I think many people get out in spite of that, but they get out early. It can subsume peoples lives and inject all sorts of wormy stuff. And yeah, as you noted I think a lot of weird shit can happen under subculture.
I credit the person who makes a change foremost, I mostly want people to be empowered by themselves and not whatever toxic patterns revolving around self help, micro-cults, giving trust and someone’s body over to a high control structure group with no training gets a little hinky.
Anyhoo, back to addictions not the people who exploit them 