Quitter

tenpo sike pini la, mi tawa ma-tomo ni tan pali sin. mi pilin-ike tan ni: jan lawa pi+ma-ni li ike-mute. ona li weka e kasi, li weka e mani tan jan pi++pana sona, tan jan pi+pona-sijelo. mi wile-ala tawa ma-tomo ni a.

taso, tenpo li tawa la, mi kama pilin-pona tan ni: tomo-mi li lon nasin pi++kalama ala, poka ijo-pona mute. ma+kasi pona li lon. ma-kasi li jo kin e tomo-lipu pi++wile-mani ala, e tomo pi+tawa-sijelo, e tomo-esun pi+suli-mute lon poka ona. ijo-ale ni li wile e tawa-noka lili tan tomo-mi.

mi lon ma-kasi lon tenpo-mute la, mi kama-sona e soweli pi++olin jan lon ona. ken la, mi sitelen e ona, li pana e sitelen tawa sina.

tenpo-ni li ike tawa mi, taso ma-kasi li pona e mi.

Our brain is very good at wanting things, and not so much at liking them. It is simply wired like that. Evolutionarily, I guess it's more dire to have ourselves want things than to like them once we already got them. The areas of our brain that 'want' are big and interconnected; feeling deep pleasure is more difficult, as several small isolated 'hotspots' must be active at the same time.

From Liking, Wanting and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction:

Rewards are both ‘liked’ and ‘wanted’, and those two words seem almost interchangeable. However, the brain circuitry that mediates the psychological process of ‘wanting’ a particular reward is dissociable from circuitry that mediates the degree to which it is ‘liked’. Incentive salience or ‘wanting’, a form of motivation, is generated by large and robust neural systems that include mesolimbic dopamine. By comparison, ‘liking’, or the actual pleasurable impact of reward consumption, is mediated by smaller and fragile neural systems, and is not dependent on dopamine. The incentive-sensitization theory posits the essence of drug addiction to be excessive amplification specifically of psychological ‘wanting’, especially triggered by cues, without necessarily an amplification of ‘liking’.

This has been in the back of my mind for some time now. I've been coalescing and digesting this same concept as seen through the lens of productivity habit coaches, buddhist monks and Arahants, orgasm denial kink, neural network training and neuroscience papers.

I feel that having an intuitive understanding of this idea should be profoundly useful once one can get past the sadness or concern it might instill. I am still exploring it.

For now, I just feel like mentioning a silly daily life example from this week: I've been enjoying walking to the library, browsing, and picking the books I would take home as much as actually reading them.

I'm still behind this project, but I got a full-time job and have much less time for hobbies. However, I haven't really made an effort to find some time for blogging. I've been struggling with burnout.

Since my last posts I've been interested in Gregg shorthand, spanish sign language, German, meditation and heart rate variability as a tool to measure health (since my partner got me a Garmin smartwatch), among other things. I would like to write about these topics here.

I've been taking notes about these topics in Obsidian, but I don't know if my scattered notes and attention will translate well into blog posts. So I've been thinking about another site project, or subsection for this site, that would mimic the non-linear, node-link approach of Obsidian and other similar note-taking systems.

I think my writing problem calls for a two-pronged approach:

1. Reduce anxiety about writing perfectly. Stop trying to rewrite past posts because everything I write makes me cringe. Keep reflecting on why that happens.
2. Reduce the effort required for writing. Set up alternative systems for writing modularly or non-linearly instead of needing to order thoughts in paragraphs, such as templates or linked nodes. Think about other ways of sharing my experience or mood that do not require being verbal: emoji log, image and link collages, code snippets, color composition, data graphs... Use simple languages like toki pona (a 120-word constructed language).

These are not the same:

1. A 6 in the pain scale while the patient is depressed and unable to do much activity.
2. A 6 in the pain scale while the patient is not depressed and is able to carry tasks and socialize (pain may be due to these activities).

Pain medication may have helped with chronic pain even when pain scores remain the same.

A couple weeks ago, my partner and I took a train to spend some days around his hometown. One afternoon, we accidentally went around the entire skirt of a mountain, relentlessly harassed by insects (I had never seen so many). Without having planned it, we made one last effort to walk even further to see a big lake where swimming and fishing were permitted. I couldn't swim in it because I hadn't brought my swimwear.

I swim in pools regularly, a couple times a week for the past 5 years or so. I had been thinking about swimming in open waters besides the beach for some time. I unfortunately live in a city without much greenery, so I'd love to swim while sight seeing — but I don't have enough money to travel (even short distances) or buy a neoprene wetsuit at the moment.
At first, I was sad while I stared at the lake, unable to go into it. However, that night it crossed my mind for the first time that, if I was now serious about open water swimming, I would need to physically prepare myself for it first. And having something to work towards while I save money made me feel excited.

I've been back home for some days now. Today I broke a long streak of not being able to swim because of the trip and a bad cold that I've been recovering from. I was off to the gym with an objective in mind: see for how long I could swim laps without stopping nor touching the pool's floor.

I don't normally do resistance swimming. I swim for 20 to 40 minutes at a time and mostly do sprints for cardio, resting between some laps. I expected to last for around 30 minutes when not swimming for speed; but, to my surprise, I managed to swim for 1 hour and 15 minutes straight. I even felt like I could keep going, but I stopped because I was hungry for lunch already (and wrinkly as a raisin).

Being able to swim for one hour in a pool would probably amount to around 30 minutes in open water (currents and cold are very tiring) so I still have a lot of training to do and long hours to swim. Thankfully, lengthy swimming is a little less dull while listening to music or podcasts with my waterproof mp3 player, one of the best buying decisions I've made.

Today's swimming has also been stimulating for another reason. A few days ago, I had the shower thought that front crawl, backstroke, breaststroke and butterfly couldn't possibly be all existing swimming strokes. An awkward Internet search for "weird swimming strokes" revealed to me the sidestroke. It's a very energy-efficient stroke because of the long gliding it generates, and so it is used by lifeguards, the military and long-distance swimmers.
With one side upwards, the kick is done by separating the legs by the knees, one to the front and the other to the back, and then bringing them together swiftly. At the same time, the arm from the upper side pushes water towards the feet, and the other arm stretches forward for the glide before bringing the arms together for the next stroke. Here's how it looks:

(Image credit: Claraakc, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons).

I was eager to try it today, and I was surprised to find that I could already get the hang of it with both sides, with some repetition. I ended up using exclusively sidestroke in the last 20 minutes of the swim, because it was indeed less tiring and just as fast as breaststroke or backstroke.

I'll be testing my resistance further soon. I'm happy that, between my new long-distance objective and a new stroke, I could still bring some novelty into a hobby that goes all the way back to my childhood.