achievement

when you do something notable in a game, you get an achievement.

when you do something notable, you sometimes feel a sense of achievement. dopamine. when working it’s important to maintain a good rhythm of dopamine. recurse center’s website says something like this: to keep a list of hard tasks and easy tasks. if you’ve been working too long on a hard task without making any progress and harvesting the dopamine, you need to pop open one of the easy (and ideally very satisfying) tasks. and if you’ve been hitting tons of dopamine, it’s time to grab a hard task. you should intentionally maintain dopamine equilibrium. this is something i’m very bad at currently.

i make maps of 1 million people regions because it is satisfying, and has a good dopamine structure. drawing each individual region is a well defined, quick task of about a minute, with some dopamine accessible by zooming out and looking at what you have so far. when finishing a larger region, or a country, i’m rewarded with a bigger wave. and when the whole thing is done i know i can farm the rush of posting it online for hours. it’s like a fractal, sort of. and it doesn’t require much high level planning. games have a good dopamine structure too, which is why they’re addicting. drawing these maps is like a game, to me. generally, i think conceptual labor does not have a good dopamine structure. this is why i find it hard to code.