Your idle loop
Waiting in line at the grocery store, sitting in an Uber, pooping - in these invisible times, we execute our idle loop. We spend a lot of time in our idle loop, and it can either increase our energy or drain it. By being aware of and then modifying how we spend our idle loop we can improve our lives one poop at a time.
Why: Parasitic energy drain or regenerative braking
The first responder: boredom
With nothing to do, we experience the often phantom, mental pain of boredom. To use an AI analogy, think of “not boredom” as the reward function in a reinforcement learning system. The “design intent” of the reward function is to ensure we’re doing something productive (avoid doing nothing), and that we’re growing (avoid monotonous tasks). However, just like ML models can do reward hacking by focusing on hacking the reward function, vs achieving the desired result, so can our brains.
When we aren’t proactive, we hack boredom via distracting parasitic loops. Parasitic loops take no energy, and are even occasionally satisfying, and they’re a double whammy negative. They:
- prevent us from working on our positive regenerative loops.
- Erode our pursuit of happiness, by blocking our inner peace, passion, and compassion.
This is very similar to the often phantom, physical pain of hunger. If we aren’t proactive, we’ll resolve it with junk food which has the physical double whammy.
- Junk food prevents us from eating healthy food
- Junk food erodes our health and diet.
Regenerative loops
- Positive thinking
- Reading something nurturing:
- self-help books, but they can be too charging up,
- good content - the Very Short Introductions series has been superb.
- Gratefulness thinking
- Habits
Parasitic energy drains
- Doom scrolling - news, Twitter, social media
- Interestingly, this has been pushed more to video
- Ruminating - I don’t do this nearly as much as I did.
- TikTok / Reels / YouTube Shorts
- Rant, this is so addictive, I put too much energy into this
- Oddly my common categories are
- ‘strength training videos’ - 2024
- Checking e-mail or notifications
- Not a problem unless I’m chasing work