How do people waste away?

Indulging in things that are "easy to get a high sense of achievement": consciously or unconsciously seeking a recipe for getting a big "reward" for a small amount of effort, even if the reward is virtual. This kind of behavior raises one's "threshold of excitement", making it less and less easy to have a sense of accomplishment, thus becoming more and more dependent on the virtual sense of accomplishment, and falling into a vicious circle. Mild symptoms: indulgence in games (speeding up the passage of time in the virtual world, making "success" come faster), romance novels (masturbators can easily get what they want); severe symptoms or even criminal behavior: gambling (easy access to "money"), drug addiction (easy access to "high"), and so on.

Only receiving "low information density" information sources: only willing to receive information with low information density (such as videos and pictures that do not require too much brain power, as well as entertainment, gossip, sports news, etc. with shallow depth), unwilling to receive information with high information density that needs to be thought about before being absorbed (such as courses, knowledge frameworks, and analytical reports, etc.). Since most of the information that is truly valuable and allows for progress requires thought and digestion, if you completely isolate this part of the content, you are basically isolating the possibility of progress.

Habit of paralyzing oneself with "misplaced sense of achievement": there are two types: ① Habit of comparing what one is good at with what others are not good at, so as to get the illusion of being "better than others" (e.g., comparing academic performance with athletes, and comparing sports with schoolboys); ② Habit of taking the time others spend on doing thing A to do thing B, so as to pretend that one has done a good job on thing B (e.g., "bragging" about doing more work than others on holidays, but only in the sense of "showing off" the work done. (e.g., "bragging" about doing more work on holidays than others, but only on holidays).

Over-reliance on "established paths": At work, after getting used to the flow of something, you never think about how to improve it, you just repeat it mechanically and lie to yourself that it's fulfilling. Without improvement, there is no sense of eliminating the dregs, so more and more things need to be repeated, consuming more and more time, and in the end, it looks like a lot of things are done every day, but in fact, not only is there no progress at all, but it also squeezes out the space for progress.

Closing the channel of "reinforcement learning": in learning or receiving information, only willing to perform the simplest first step, but not willing to perform the next more complex consolidation and application process, only listen without speaking, only see without writing, only learn without practicing, but also paralyze themselves that they have learned a lot of things, but in fact, this "shallow" learning is forgotten very quickly, and sometimes it would be better not to learn.

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